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

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

We got into a heated argument that night.

I don’t remember what it was about.

I do remember walking out of the living room and onto the balcony.

I sat there alone for a while before eventually sending texting him from the other side of the screen door.

Whatever I said was enough to get him off the couch.

He came outside, shut the screen door behind him, and sat in the rocker opposite mine.

We went back and forth for a while until eventually, we both went quiet.

I used the pause to catch my breath.

He used it to ask me a question.

“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?”

Pause.

To this day, I think it’s the best question anyone has ever asked me.

Mostly because all these years later, I still don’t have a perfect answer.

I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for answers. Questioning why. Wondering how. Asking what comes next and getting frustrated when clarity remains out of reach.

But there was something about the order of his words that night that got me.

Love you long enough to understand you.

Not understand you enough to love you.

It’s like somewhere along I started thinking that being understood was somehow a prerequisite for being loved. That someone would need to make sense of all of me first—the sensitivity, the stubbornness, the tendency to retreat when things became difficult—and then decide whether I was worth the trouble.

I’ve always been very good at identifying my own shortcomings. Less practiced at believing someone could see the same person I saw and arrive at a different conclusion.

Criticism rarely had to convince me.

Love did.

For some reason I just assumed that as soon as someone loved me long enough, that would be where the road ended.

I grew up with a complex understanding of love, particularly because of my relationship with my dad.

When it came to his love, it was oftentimes conditional. Something that could be there one day and gone the next.

I carried some of that uncertainty into the relationships that came later.

So when something felt particularly good, I didn’t always settle into it.

I waited.

For the condition. For the catch. For whatever might indicate I misunderstood the arrangement.

I wasn’t only afraid of being misunderstood.

I was afraid of being understood and left anyway.

That night, he was asking me to consider an alternative possibility.

Maybe someone would want to know the difficult parts and stay long enough to understand where they came from.

Maybe I didn’t have to make myself completely comprehendible before I could be loved.

Our relationship was never simple, and neither were we.

There a lot of parts of that one I would never choose again, and there were other parts I’ll always be grateful for.

That night on the balcony was one of the latter.

Because whatever else was true about us, he knew something about me that I didn’t yet understand about myself.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be loved.

I just had a really hard time trusting love when it arrived.

A criticism delivered at the wrong time could take up residence in my head for years.

Affection was easier to question.

He wasn’t asking me to become easier to love.

He wasn’t even asking me to understand why he loved me.

He was asking me to believe that he did.

There is a difference.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times since.

I know now that loving someone and being good for someone are not necessarily the same thing.

That love can be sincere without being sustainable.

And that sometimes the people who teach us the most about love also teach us what it cannot fix.

I learned all of those things with him.

Over the course of our time together, he taught me a about love, loss, family, forgiveness, marriage, divorce, adulthood, resilience, and the complicated ways people try to belong to one another.

I think we have a tendency to make cleaner stories out of relationships once they’re over.

Someone was good for us or bad for us. The relationship was healthy or toxic. Staying was right or leaving was.

Real relationships are rarely that cooperative.

Sometimes someone who isn’t right for you and still leaves you with something worth carrying forward.

Sometimes a memory can remain beautiful even when you would never choose the relationship again.

That night on the balcony is one of those memories for me.

And I’m still glad I stayed long enough to experience it.