“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

We got into an argument that night.

I can’t remember where it started, but I do remember retreating to the balcony. I tend to flee the scene the moment a room gets too hot for my mind and body to handle.

I sat out there in the muggy night air, humming and hawing over whatever irreconcilable difference was keeping us from meeting in the middle. After awhile I pulled out my phone and sent him a message along the lines of, It’s really unfortunate the night has to end like this. It was probably a little less graceful than that, but at any rate, it was enough to draw him off the couch.

He opened the screen door and sat down in the rocking chair opposite mine.

We traded a few choice words. Claim, rebuttal. Frustration building like a slow burn until we hit a momentary, silent pause.

I used my breath to take in the summer air.

He used his to deliver a line that hit me like a brick wall.

He looked at me stoically, entirely unbothered by my defenses and said:

“Why is it so hard for you to believe there could be someone out there who wants to love you long enough to understand you?”

To this day, that is the best question anyone has ever asked me.

Reason being, it is one that existed in my head for a long time after without a neat answer.

I sat there paralyzed and a little awestruck. I knew I had two choices: throw up the white flag and surrender to his offer, or walk the plank, jump ship right off his balcony and never look back.

My instinct has always been to take the escape route.

It took me years to realize where that wiring came from, how my relationship with my father laid the blueprint for how I expected to be loved. When conditional love is what you grow up on, you learn early that affection is something you have to earn, perform for, or constantly defend. In adulthood, that translates into an inherent distrust of anything steady.

When you’ve spent years operating in survival mode, convincing yourself that you have to earn every good thing that comes your way—surrender feels like a trap. Panic becomes a protective mechanism. We get skittish when love feels too quiet or too steady, convinced that if something feels this good, the rug must be seconds away from being yanked out beneath us.

He knew that about me. He knew I was capable of loving fiercely, but that I was equally capable of disappearing inside the noise of my own fear and habitual defenses.

When he asked me that question, I knew he wasn’t asking for a debate. He was asking me to lay down my weapons.

And so, I didn’t flee.

I stayed put in the chair because I knew he was right. And not only that, but I was so profoundly undone by what he was implying that I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands.

That’s what you’re trying to do? I thought to myself.

You want to love me long enough to know me inside out, and then keep loving me anyway?

I melted.

When you spend years believing that love has to be earned through endurance, and that safety is something you had to build alone behind high walls, sitting across from someone who simply wants to make you see otherwise is terrifying, divine, and the only doorway to a deeper kind of love.

That night, I learned that one of the greatest favors you can do for yourself in this life is simply to let yourself be seen.

Of course, that’s easier said than done when the trauma responses and the unanswerable questions get in the way. But there are moments when it’s best to stop fighting the current.

Find the quiet and settle down inside it.

Because when it comes to another person’s love, sometimes all that’s left to do is surrender.