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“If I love you enough, I’ll let you go.” ~ Burke

Sometimes, we do not really love people. We love the idea of them. We love who they could become, or who we want them to be.

On today’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, a character said something that stood out to me. Lemme first give a little background story.

Cristina is crazy, the kind of self driven, ambitious woman who doesn’t want marriage. But then she falls in love with another surgeon, Burke. He’s equally ambitious and driven, but he also wants marriage and all that stuff.

Because Cristina loves Burke, she is willing to walk down that aisle, even though marriage isn’t really what she wants. And we are often told that love requires us to give up parts of ourselves. That we have to be flexible, bend, compromise, open ourselves up to new ideas. And maybe that’s true, maybe the marriage would have worked, maybe it would have been a disaster.

But just before she walked down the aisle, Burke came to a realisation. Nah, she could walk down that aisle, but she wouldn’t really want to. She would be doing it to make him happy, not because it was what she wanted.

And that hit me.

We often glamourise the art of chipping away at our own spirit to make room for someone else. And it’s not pretty, because that’s how we lose ourselves, little by little. It slips away so quietly that one day, we look in the mirror and cannot recognise the person staring back at us.

Dearest reader, I said all of that to say this: we should love people, not what they could be, not what we want them to be, but who they are presently.

Love can inspire growth, yes. It can make us more willing to compromise, to try new things and to see life differently. But there is a difference between growing with someone and becoming someone else just to keep them.

And perhaps sometimes, loving someone means accepting that who they are is not who you want to spend your life with, not because they are bad, not because they need fixing, not because either of you failed at love.

It's you simply realising that loving them and being right for them are two different things.

And sometimes, if I love you enough, I’ll let you go.

@favvy_Okwans🖤.