We’re All Scared and Unsure and Desperately Hopeful
Or, love won’t heal every gaping wound life carves into us
When I was nine years old, I used to think love was simple. Like, once you found it, you’d never again wonder who would pick you first on the cricket team. Love would be your teammate, your designated sharer-of-snacks, the only person who would sit with you at lunch even when your tiffin box leaked dal everywhere.
Love felt like this person who didn’t laugh when you messed up your English elocution in front of the whole class. It was neat, uncomplicated, and profoundly unrealistic.
Fast-forward twenty-something-odd years later, I’ve come to a new conclusion: Love, as it turns out, is mostly not simple. It is unruly, complicated, and entirely unfair—like doing taxes or reading Terms of Agreement and actually understanding them.
We’ve been trained to romanticise rescue. Movies dutifully tell us that we are half people, waiting patiently for our other half, someone who will miraculously fit our broken bits like a puzzle piece, completing us at last. (Hell, the Sanskrit word for wife is ardhangini, which literally means “half of the body”.)
But here’s the thing nobody tells you about puzzles—they’re not alive. And people, I have learned repeatedly, stubbornly insist upon being alive and raw and unruly. They bring their own jagged edges, their own unsolved puzzles.
You mash two incomplete sets together, and instead of glorious resolution, you end up with a tangled mess of cardboard and irritation.
The truth is not glamorous, but it’s incredibly freeing: You don’t complete me, because despite the misleading propaganda perpetuated in Jerry Maguire, we are not actually incomplete. Our partners are not our designated therapists, our rehab facilities, or the glue that holds our emotional IKEA furniture together.
This misdiagnosis—that love exists to rescue or repair—is precisely the reason so many of us ends up feeling betrayed when our partners inevitably reveal their mortal imperfections.
It’s tempting to see love as a hiding place, when maybe it’s meant to be a vantage point—a place from which we see ourselves more clearly. And I’ll confess, I’ve lived out entire chapters of my life curled into relationships where hiding felt safer than emerging.
Maybe we’re allowed some hiding; maybe the bravest step begins nestled in blankets of fear, uncertainty, and carefully concealed wounds. And sometimes, in the gentlest hands of kindness and understanding, we begin not as answers, but as beginnings—uncertain, unfinished, still becoming.
The danger isn’t in being scared or broken. The danger is remaining there, mistaking brokenness for romance and wounds for intimacy.
We all want to be seen. Not in the polished-filter way we carefully curate on Instagram but rather in the profoundly undignified way we wake up in the morning—hair sticking out in ten different directions and fears tumbling out like loose change from old jeans pockets.
Yet, while we desperately hope to be loved without explanation, it seldom occurs to us that perhaps our job, too, is learning to see our partners wholly—mess, flaws, contradictions, and all.
We ask to be held but forget the equal responsibility of doing the holding.
Years ago, I remember I was talking to a stranger online. She was nursing a fresh heartbreak. At one point, she asked, “Why does love always end up hurting more than it heals?” I didn’t have an answer, but I typed back something like, “Maybe love doesn’t break us—it just shows us where we were already broken.” (I was fresh from a heartbreak myself and feeling a little poetic.)
I still dunno why love hurts more than it heals. But, here’s what I do know: Love won’t heal every gaping wound life carves into us. But it can often place a gentle mirror right up against our lives, nudging us to confront what we glimpse in our reflection.
Love is less a Band-Aid and more a flashlight—illuminating hidden truths, half-healed hurts, and long-forgotten memories we’ve buried beneath bravado.
It’s as terrifying as it is beautiful. Because love, honest love, insists we do something uncomfortable: it asks we do the work ourselves. Journal—badly. Sit with our fear—awkwardly. Reflect, forgive, try again.
Not because your therapist said so or because it looks charmingly tragic on your Insta profile. But because when we fail to heal, we too often end up wounding those who never hurt us in the first place.
Still, I flinch a little when people chant, “self-love before all else.” Because, honestly, self-love is hard. It’s not a milestone you reach—it’s a winding, never-ending thing. The truth is messier, but thankfully kinder: You don’t need to have everything figured out. You don’t need to be perfectly healed or emotionally flawless to be loved.
In other words, you don’t have to be fluent in self-love to be spoken to in love’s language. Just… don’t hand someone your bleeding wounds wrapped in pretty ribbon and call it romance or demand they mop you up and call that intimacy.
At the end of the day, we’re all scared and unsure and desperately hopeful, trying to navigate love’s unpredictable geography. Sometimes we land softly; other times we crash spectacularly. All we can do is embrace the uncertainty, accept the messiness, and remember this: being human means you’re allowed imperfection, sadness, and confusion, without sacrificing the hope that someday, somehow, someone will choose to sit beside you at lunch—even if your dal spills everywhere.
I went wandering through Sri Lanka in March—chasing nothing in particular. I came back sun-touched and slightly undone, with half-thoughts scribbled in margins and a silence that didn’t press, just lingered. The kind that hums beneath noise, that gently hands you back your own voice. Somewhere between the winding roads and wordless moments, I began answering questions I never meant to ask. These posts are me listening closer. Tugging at the threads. Watching what frays, and what stays.