Am I Enough or Am I Too Much? Two Questions, the Same Shame

Do you constantly fear being too much and not enough for the people you love? Learn where these fears come from, how they shape relationships, and how to stop abandoning yourself when they appear.

Summary:

Feeling too much and not enough describes two related forms of shame that can shape how people experience themselves in relationships. The fear of being “too much” says that your needs, emotions, desires, or personality will overwhelm others and cause them to reject you, while the fear of being “not enough” says that you must become better, more desirable, or more valuable to remain worthy of love. Both can lead people to withdraw, people-please, overperform, attack, hide their needs, or abandon parts of themselves in an attempt to preserve connection. Learning to recognize these patterns, experience the emotions underneath them, communicate vulnerably, and remain present with yourself and others can create healthier, more secure relationships.

The fight is never about the tea.

Early in my previous marriage, many years ago, I used to listen to a show called Relationship Theory by Tom and Lisa Bilyeu. In one episode, they described how their biggest argument started over a simple cup of tea on the morning of their first getaway in years. It escalated so severely on the freeway that Tom turned the car around to go home.

Tom felt that Lisa drinking her tea was a deliberate act of disrespect and spite, as if she were defying him while knowing how stressed and rushed he felt.

Lisa just wanted to enjoy her tea and share a nice, relaxed moment together on a gifted vacation. From her perspective, his reaction seemed completely irrational.

The argument wasn’t actually about the tea. Tom was carrying immense internal pressure from his promise to make Lisa wealthy and felt like a failure because of their financial struggles. Taking time off felt to him like a waste of money and a betrayal of his responsibilities as a provider.

After hours of yelling, they realized they were arguing about surface symptoms rather than the root problem. They learned that emotions often stem from unexpressed insecurities, misperceptions of intent, and a failure to step into a partner’s frame of reference.

Most arguments are never really about the words, the tone, or the content. They’re about the wounds underneath—energetic and emotional signatures created long before this person was ever in front of you.

The argument triggers an experience in your nervous system that spirals down into a deep, old piece of shame that quietly whispers one of two questions: Am I too much for you? or Am I enough for you?

Am I Too Much?

You know the moment when anxiety strikes. You’re telling your partner about something that matters to you. Maybe you’re upset about something that happened at work, excited about an idea you can’t stop thinking about, or trying to explain why something they did hurt.

At first, they’re listening. Then you notice it. The sigh. The glance at their phone. The way their answers get shorter. Maybe they say, “Can we talk about this later?” Maybe they don’t say anything at all.

And suddenly, you’re no longer thinking about the thing you wanted to talk about. You’re thinking about yourself.

Am I talking too much? Am I making this a bigger deal than it is? Why can’t I just let things go? Do they get tired of having to deal with me?

So you start wrapping it up. You skip the part you actually wanted them to understand. You tell them, “It’s fine. Never mind.” Maybe you even make a joke to lighten the mood.

But it isn’t fine.

Because underneath the disappointment of not feeling heard is a much older fear: that being fully yourself comes with a cost. That people can handle you—but only in smaller doses.

So you learn to edit yourself before anyone else has to ask.

You become less emotional. Less enthusiastic. Less demanding. Less honest about what hurts. You become easier to be with while quietly becoming harder and harder to find.

And somewhere underneath all that editing is the same question: Am I actually too much for my partner? Or have I simply learned to interpret someone else’s limits as evidence that there is something wrong with me?

Am I Enough?

Here’s what happens on the flip side. Your partner is having a hard day. They are quieter than usual, a little distant, maybe disappointed about something that has nothing to do with you.

But you feel it immediately.

Something in you starts searching for the problem. Did I do something? Are they unhappy with me? Have I been distracted lately? Am I giving them enough attention? Enough affection? Enough sex? Am I being a good enough partner?

Before they have even asked for anything, you are already trying to fix it.

You become more attentive. More affectionate. You offer solutions. You ask what they need. You start mentally rearranging tomorrow so you can make more room for them. Maybe you try to make them laugh. Maybe you initiate sex. Maybe you start listing all the ways you could be doing better.

Because somewhere along the way, their unhappiness became evidence of your inadequacy.

And even when they tell you, “This isn’t about you,” some part of you does not quite believe them.

That part has been keeping score for a long time.

How much you contribute. How attractive you are. How successful you are. How good you are in bed. How emotionally available you are. How useful you are. How much easier, happier, or better you can make someone else’s life.

There is always another category in which you could improve. Another weakness to correct. Another version of yourself who might finally deserve to relax.

So you keep performing. You keep proving. You keep trying to become the person no one could possibly regret choosing.

And somewhere underneath all that effort is the question you rarely let yourself ask: What if I am already enough for the person I love—and I have simply never learned how to believe it without constantly proving it?

Two questions. The same emotional wound.

“Too much” says, I need to become smaller so you won’t leave. “Not enough” says, I need to become more so you won’t leave.

Both ultimately turn the relationship into a constant project of self-modification rooted in shame.

Both are driven by the same fears: rejection, the loss of love, and abandonment.

Shame Created by Attachment Wounds

Imagine for a moment a couple flying on an airplane with their child. The child begins to cry out and reach for the parents. The parents look around, worried about the disruption their child is causing everyone else on the plane. The child notices that the parents are looking elsewhere and worries that its cry for help will go unmet, so it gets louder. The parents turn to the child and tell it to quiet down. And it quickly learns its first lesson: My emotions are too much.

It cries more until it finally gives up and goes quiet. The parents are relieved, but the child learns its second lesson: My emotions do not matter.

As the child grows older, they will be repeatedly handed versions of these same lessons by parents who are physically present but emotionally absent. The father who provided financially but never once asked how you felt. The mother who loved you fiercely but was so anxious that you learned to manage her emotions instead of your own. The household where conflict meant silence for days. The family where expressing sadness was met with “Stop crying” or “You are fine.”

The child learns lessons like:

• “When I need comfort, it will not come.”
• “If I show my real feelings, I will be punished.”
• “Love is available, but only when I perform.”

Eventually, that child learns to adapt: shutting down, people-pleasing, becoming hyper-independent, raging to be heard, or remaining hypervigilant. The adaptation becomes necessary for survival: Change myself, or my needs won’t be met and I won’t be safe.

Then that child walks into adulthood, running the same systems and carrying armor against wounds created by emotional neglect and misattunement.

Attachment theory has understood this dynamic for decades. If our caregivers were inconsistent, unavailable, or abusive, we may develop insecure attachment. One-third of Americans experience some form of attachment disturbance—often without even realizing it.

The behaviors we learn as children become internalized patterns that shape our adult relationships. If we learn maladaptive responses, we’re likely to repeat them. Insecurity in childhood often becomes insecurity in love, friendship, or even work dynamics.

If you learned My emotions are too much, you may develop an anxious attachment pattern. You may seek constant reassurance that you are not overwhelming your partner. You may monitor their mood for signs that you have been “too much.” You may apologize for having needs. And paradoxically, the anxiety itself can create the very intensity you fear.

If you learned My emotions do not matter, you may develop an avoidant attachment pattern. You may pride yourself on independence. You may feel uncomfortable when a partner expresses needs. You may experience closeness as a threat to your autonomy. Not because you are cold, but because you learned that the safest way to handle emotions is alone.

The problem with the labels given by attachment theory is that they don’t necessarily describe the core feeling underneath. We don’t experience ourselves merely as “anxious” or “avoidant.” Deeper down is the shame carried by stories like I’m too much or I’m not enough. We feel as though there is something fundamentally wrong with us, and our experiences reinforce that belief.

Both patterns can be logical responses to unresolved childhood neglect. Both can cause immense pain in adult relationships. And both can be healed—but not through willpower alone.

What Happens When the Shame Spiral Hits

The reactions you have when you feel the shame of being too much or not enough are not character flaws. They are adaptation strategies your nervous system, in its intelligence, learned to use to protect you when you were a child.

For most of us, we tend to rely on one of four strategies to protect ourselves:

• Withdrawal
• Avoidance
• Attacking the Other
• Attacking Yourself

Withdrawal

The shame feels heavy, and the feeling of having your needs go unmet—or of disappointing your partner—is too much to bear. So you turn inward.

If you feel you’re being too much, you’ll try to limit yourself. You’ll stop the flow of emotions being expressed to the other person. You won’t voice your needs, your hurt, or anything else that could be perceived as a burden. Shutting down feels safer than being abandoned.

If you feel you’re not enough, you’ll turn away to quietly contemplate. Their words feel like criticism, so why even try at all? It feels safer to pull away than to feel like your efforts, your emotions, and your needs mean nothing.

The problem with this strategy is that withdrawing from your partner prevents them from knowing how you really feel. They may interpret your withdrawal as a sign that you don’t care, leaving them feeling rejected, alone, and abandoned in the relationship—which could, in turn, trigger their own feelings of being too much or not enough.

The cycle continues.

Avoidance

In this strategy, your go-to phrase is always, “I’m fine.” But everything is most certainly not fine. The shame—the conversation, the rejection, the possibility of not being heard—is scary, so you avoid it at all costs.

If you feel you’re being too much, you’ll avoid speaking up. You’ll drop hints or expect your partner to read your mind. If they don’t, you’ll stuff your feelings down or say and do things passive-aggressively to signal that something isn’t okay.

If you feel you’re not enough, you’ll avoid actually hearing your partner. You know something doesn’t feel right in the relationship, but you avoid bringing it up. Because if you do, it could confirm the stories you’re already telling yourself about your inadequacy—even if the issue has nothing to do with you.

The problem with avoidance is that too much gets left unsaid. Little things turn into big ones. Resentment builds and slowly erodes your relationship. Your partner quietly becomes the enemy.

Attacking the Other

Cue the defenses. In this strategy, you take the knife of shame out of yourself and point it back at the other person.

If you feel you’re being too much, you bring up the list of things they do that annoy you or that you “put up with” and “deal with”—a hollow illusion of supposedly accepting them. Instead, you’re trying to shift that feeling of being too much onto them.

If you feel you’re not enough, you bring out the scoreboard, tallying up all the things you do for them. You minimize their hurt while trying to explain yourself and build a case that you are, in fact, enough.

The problem with this strategy is that it invalidates their hurt and emotions while simultaneously invalidating your own pain. No one feels heard or understood, and each person keeps attacking the other. Further pain ensues.

Attacking Yourself

Here comes the self-modification. You think to yourself, Clearly, something is wrong with me if I keep feeling this way. I must change.

If you feel you’re too much, you self-edit. You make yourself smaller. More palatable. You hold back emotional expression. You don’t ask for things. And deep down, you wish you weren’t the way you are so you wouldn’t feel like such a burden.

If you feel you’re not enough, you fix. You try to make yourself bigger. Faster. Stronger. Smarter. Better. You perform and quickly check for signs of validation—a hollow stand-in for love—to evaluate whether you’re finally enough. But you’re tired. You don’t think you have anything left to give. And deep down, you feel that no matter how hard you try, your effort—and ultimately, you—do not matter.

Both versions are simply asking to be loved and accepted for who you are.

I believe this strategy is the most challenging because it touches your self-concept so deeply. It often confuses two very different things: the ability to change, grow, and become more skillful at achieving a desired outcome, and the fundamental understanding that every human being can be loved irrespective of their abilities, personality, or qualities.

My Own Shame

I wish I could relay this information from an outside perspective. But I only write from places I have explored myself. I only teach that which I know, and I know these patterns intimately because I have felt them too. I can’t say with certainty that every person experiences this, but I suspect many do because I observe it all the time—in clients, relationships, and even society at large. Given that these feelings are two sides of the same coin, I imagine many people feel both at different points, but probably have a favorite their mind tends to lean toward.

Having grown up with an emotionally unstable mother who worked a lot to raise a child on her own, an absent father, no siblings, and little additional caretaker support, I was often left to my own devices. The first strategy I learned to rely on was withdrawing into my mind. I became intimately acquainted with my own thoughts and came to feel safe in contemplation—which is probably why I’m able to contemplate the ideas you find in my articles so deeply.

The problem emerged in my former marriage, when I bottled things up, stuffed them down, and rarely expressed my needs or emotions. It’s not that they weren’t there. I just didn’t know how to express them in a way that allowed me to feel heard and understood.

It wasn’t until I began dealing with my mother’s own trauma coming to the surface, while also studying trauma myself, that I realized the toll emotional neglect can take. Childhood emotional neglect is not necessarily something that happened to you. It is something that did not happen. The comfort that was not offered. The curiosity about your inner world that was never expressed. The emotional attunement that was absent.

This can be devastating, and it is often invisible. You cannot necessarily point to a specific event. You cannot say, “On this date, this thing happened.” (Although I certainly had some big “events” too.) You just know that something was missing. And because nothing “happened,” you often feel like you have no right to struggle.

So off I went to address my own mental health through therapy and to learn how to communicate with greater emotional intelligence, supported by a loving ex-wife whom I’ll forever be grateful to for stumbling alongside me as we learned how to feel love.

The first major time I remember feeling too much was around my sexuality. If you’ve read my book, you’ll know the story of the first time I did something “dominant” in the bedroom. I pinned my ex-wife to the bed by her wrists while she playfully said “no” and squirmed, all while laughing and enjoying what was happening. Yet I felt like a complete monster because I enjoyed it.

So I reached for another strategy—avoidance. I shoved that part of myself deep down and told myself I would never do it again. But, of course, you can never truly repress your sexuality. It always finds a way back out.

Eventually, desires around non-monogamy bubbled up too. By this point, I’d spent enough years expressing myself in a weekly men’s group that I had the tools to bring those desires up with her. We had a discussion about opening the marriage, but she was strongly monogamous, so I dropped the pursuit and avoided the feelings associated with it. This, combined with diverging values and life paths, eventually contributed to our divorce—but not the end of our friendship. We still deeply respect and care for each other, wish the best for one another, and check in from time to time.

In both instances, I wished for nothing more than to not have those desires. Life would be so much easier—that I would be so much easier—if they simply did not exist. Limit. Edit. Shove it in a box and forget about it.

Of course, that doesn’t make for a very fulfilling relationship.

My personal favorite flavor of shame, though, is feeling not enough. It’s a pattern learned long ago: Attention is received when you perform exceptionally well. Otherwise, they leave or they are unhappy. Either way, you failed.

That is a child connecting dots without fully understanding the circumstances or context in which they exist.

A high achiever is born.

Of course, logical understanding does not stop the somatic experience in the nervous system when the emotional wound gets touched. So instead, I’d reach for the last strategy—attacking the self—and work on developing myself even more.

Fix yourself. Do more. Be a better partner.

What’s challenging about this strategy is that the world will reward you handsomely for it. You will earn both internal and external validation. You will accumulate evidence that you can actually build things in this world—competence, skills, degrees, careers, relationships, communities, adventures, businesses, experiences, status, success.

But a sliver of validation, no matter its source, pales in comparison to the totality of love. You’re sitting in the realm of hungry ghosts, consuming endlessly but never truly filling the void of not enough.

I share this only so you can recognize that whatever admiration you hold toward me—whatever you perceive in the things I have achieved or the person you think I am—you can do and be those things too while still feeling “too much” or “not enough.” And those perceptions have more to say about what you value or desire than they do about me.

But most importantly, you don’t have to do or be any of those things in order to be loved.

Underneath every self-help version of this problem sits a lie: that you have to fix yourself alone first and then deliver the finished, worthy version of yourself to the relationship. Do the shadow work. Repair your self-esteem. And only then, once you are certified, are you eligible for love.

That is backward.

Sovereignty does not necessarily come before safety. It grows out of it. We are not solitary, sovereign nodes drifting through space. Human beings are relational creatures. Our nervous systems can settle in the presence of another regulated human being. That is part of our wiring, and fighting that wiring can make us miserable.

You do not become worthy and then get loved. You rest inside a bond safe enough that your body can begin to stop bracing, and out of that ground, a felt sense of worthiness slowly, quietly becomes available. Being enough is not merely a personal achievement. It can also be a relational emergence.

Which means the practice is not simply to convince yourself you are enough—or to build up a résumé of achievements, traits, qualities, or other markers as evidence. The practice is to let yourself be met in the exact place where you feel you are not enough and stay there long enough for something inside you to update.

Side note: If you’ve ever thought, “Am I the only one struggling with this?” — you’re not. The Red Room is a private community where kinky people ask real questions, share real experiences, and grow without shame or posturing. Step inside here.

How to Address Your Shame

One of the things I wish more people understood is that trauma does not live only in the story. It also lives in the nervous system. You may have done years of therapy or self-work. You may know your parents were emotionally unavailable. You may understand your attachment style. You may intellectually know you are valuable. And yet your nervous system can still hijack you the moment your partner raises their voice or goes quiet.

Healing unresolved childhood trauma in the context of a relationship requires working with the body, not just the mind. It requires noticing where you feel the activation—the chest tightening, the stomach dropping, the throat closing. It requires learning to stay present in your body during moments of perceived threat rather than defaulting to old escape routes.

And critically, some of this healing can happen with your partner, not just alone. Because the wound was relational. It happened between you and another person, and healing can be relational too. Something can shift in the nervous system when the person who triggers an old wound is also willing and able to help repair it. That is a corrective emotional experience in action.

So let’s look at some practices that can help.

Learning to Be With Intense Emotions

Learning to sit with intense emotions—especially those triggered or amplified by shame—can help you recognize that emotions can be experienced as energy and sensation. They do not require a story to justify their existence.

Here’s a practice that can help.

Intense Emotions Practice

1. To the best of your ability, separate the thoughts and stories you’re assigning to the emotion from the emotional energy itself.
2. Invite the emotional energy closer, paying attention to the sensations it creates in your body.
3. Feel the raw energy of the emotion, whatever it may be—joy, excitement, anger, fear, desire, frustration, or something else entirely.
4. Allow the emotion to pulse, move, and surge through your body however it wants to express itself. Avoid both clinging to the feeling and pushing it away.
5. Neither fully identify with the emotion nor deny it. Instead, find the middle ground where the emotion can move through you without becoming trapped.
6. If you notice yourself grasping onto the emotion, identifying with it, or feeling as though it’s stuck somewhere in your body, there may be a story, belief, or interpretation attached to it. See if you can temporarily set that story aside and return your attention to the sensation itself.
7. When you feel the emotion has been fully experienced, gently ground yourself in the present moment by performing a mental scan of your body. Notice your breathing, your posture, your points of contact with the environment, and any lingering sensations.

The goal is not to get rid of the emotion.

The goal is to give it space to move through you rather than immediately resisting, suppressing, or constructing a story around it. If you’ve ever watched an animal become highly aroused or agitated and then shake its body as it settles, you’ve seen a physical transition from a heightened state back toward a calmer one.

Many emotions can persist or intensify when we resist them, suppress them, or become entangled in the stories surrounding them. When given space to be felt without immediately acting on them, emotions can sometimes shift more quickly than we expect.

Learning to do this can itself feel unsafe, which is why I recommend starting with lower-intensity emotions—something small that annoyed you, for example—or working with a therapist trained in somatic modalities.

I strongly recommend gaining some proficiency in sitting with difficult emotions before trying to disclose them to others. Doing so can help you recognize and tolerate the sensations in your body without letting them prevent you from saying what may feel extremely difficult to say.

Naming the Shame Out Loud

I’ve only ever found one reliable way to deal with shame of this kind: being vulnerable with the very person I’m convinced is already leaving.

Rather than withdraw, avoid, attack, or perform around it, you name the shame out loud.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable and terrifying. Your body is going to experience intense sensations. That is the whole point. Naming the too muchness and not-enoughness out loud to the very person you are afraid will confirm it runs against every strategy your body has ever built to protect you. And it is the only thing I have ever seen actually begin to rewrite the file.

You do not say, “You make me feel like I’m not enough” or “You make me feel like I’m too much.” That is criticism dressed up as confession.

You say, “I’m convinced I’m failing you.”

You say, “I’m convinced I’m a burden.”

You say, “I’m afraid you’re going to leave.”

Or, “Everything in my body wants to run because of this fear, and I’m trying not to do that.”

Those are real. Those kinds of sentences allow the wound to be witnessed without handing your partner the job of fixing it.

The truth is, these fears are often catastrophized or exaggerated—and may be unlikely to play out the way you imagine.

If you do have the conversation, you may discover:

• What you expected wasn’t accurate.
• Your partner didn’t react the way you feared.
• You misunderstood them more than you realized.
• These conversations can actually bring you closer.

The more you practice naming the shame and experience being met safely, the more familiar the process can become—and the more skilled and confident you can become at having these conversations.

Here is how it works. When you risk exposing your raw attachment longing—not your anger, not your criticism, not your withdrawal, but the vulnerable, terrified younger part underneath all of that—and your partner meets you with the comfort and acceptance you lacked as a child, you create a new relational experience.

Think of it as creating a new computer file that begins to compete with the old one. The old file said, “When I show my need, I will be rejected.” The new file says, “When I showed my need, I was met with compassion.”

As experiences like this are repeated, your expectations and responses can begin to change. The old pattern may not simply disappear, but your brain can learn that another outcome is possible. That capacity to change in response to experience is part of neuroplasticity.

And this is why healing does not have to happen only through self-work, a book, or individual insight. When the wound was created through relationships, relationships can also become a powerful place for healing.

Ultimately, what you’re practicing is emotional vulnerability: the intentional, honest expression of your true feelings and inner state—especially difficult or painful ones—without knowing how another person will respond.

And you don’t have to start by revealing the darkest depths of your shame right off the bat. Instead, start with small doses.

When I started exploring my sexual desires more, I began going to munches and events in the BDSM community. The beauty of these gatherings is that you get to practice disclosing desires you previously thought were too much and then have other people say, “Hell yeah!”

Then you hear them express some seemingly wild desire while surrounded by dozens of other people who are genuine, upstanding citizens, and you begin to think, Huh. If all these wonderful people are into this stuff, and I don’t think they’re bad, maybe I’m not either.

I also used to wear a small leather bracelet on first dates that had “Be Honest” inscribed on it. It was a small reminder to myself not to hide or shy away from expressing parts of myself—what I truly wanted and what my intentions were. Instead, I wanted to be direct—to make myself vulnerable to rejection.

As you move through relationships, you’ll practice asserting yourself and having difficult conversations. Some people assume assertiveness means raising a sword or shield and imposing their will upon others.

It doesn’t.

Assertiveness is being able to honestly express your needs, desires, boundaries, and limits while also being able to hear a no—or walk away when something isn’t a good fit. And that can feel incredibly vulnerable when what you’re really saying is, “I want this, and I’m afraid you’ll leave if I do.”

Related: Hinting, hoping, and holding back is exhausting. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start communicating with confidence, the Assertive Desires Masterclass gives you clear frameworks for expressing desires, boundaries, and limits—without awkwardness or fear. Get instant access here.

But some of the deepest healing can happen when you are sitting at the bottom of I’m disappointing you. I’m not enough. Or I’m a burden. I’m too much.

And you tell them.

And they don’t turn away.

The thing you were so afraid for them to see, they look at—and love.

This is the real work. Not just learning to compromise, though that matters. Not just improving your communication, though that helps. The deeper work is reaching the place where the younger part of me can receive the love it never had, and the younger part of you can receive the love it never had.

It’s not easy. It requires courage from both partners. It requires a willingness to be uncomfortable, to sit with feelings you have spent a lifetime avoiding, and to let someone see the parts of you that you decided long ago were unacceptable.

Repeated experiences of being vulnerable and being met, over and over, can gradually teach the nervous system something it has struggled to believe:

This time, it may be safe.

Your Ultimate Fear Realized: Let Them Go

That’s right.

Let your greatest fear become reality…and discover that you’re okay.

Whether you’re practicing sitting with intense emotions or revealing your shame, you are creating experiences that give you direct evidence that you can make it through to the other side. That you will be okay.

Sometimes life happens. Sometimes people leave for reasons that have nothing to do with you. As a child, you may make the mistake of assuming that’s your fault. When it happens as an adult, you might still do the same thing if you don’t understand the full context.

And most of the time, you won’t get to.

This is probably one of the most important practices of them all. Every time I let a partner go, for whatever reason, I remind myself that I am okay. I was okay before they came into my life. I was okay while they were in it. I will be okay when they are gone.

The more you practice this, the more you realize just how beautiful letting someone go can be. Often, you both grow, find other wonderful people to share your lives with, and may even remain companions in some capacity.

There’s a Buddhist concept known as non-attachment, which might be better understood as letting go. If you grasp a flower too tightly, you damage the very thing whose beauty you’re trying to preserve. Instead, you let the flower be. You appreciate its beauty for what it is while recognizing that, like everything else, it will one day change.

Relationships are much the same. If you grasp at your partner and try to control or lock them down, you can suffocate the very qualities that make them who they are. You suffocate what makes them beautiful. You suffocate what you love.

Instead, let your partner be. Appreciate them for who they are while recognizing that they may one day change, choose a different path, or leave the relationship.

That’s okay.

You’ll be okay.

Separating Love From Relationships

One of the biggest misunderstandings I see people make—and one I made for a long time—is conflating access, attachment, and being in a relationship of any kind with being loved.

They are not the same thing.

Relationships are agreements between people to fulfill some set of needs together in ways that cannot be accomplished alone.

And people—the individuals who exist within those relationships—have real limits. In fact, part of what makes one person distinct from another is their particular constellation of limits.

That means being in a relationship with someone will also come with limits on time, attention, energy, emotional labor, resources, physical presence, sexual access, intimacy, trust, commitment, responsibility, and priority.

In some cases, you will be too much to be in a relationship with someone.

My sexuality, for example, may be too much for someone whose limits exclude what I want to explore. If I choose to be in that relationship, I may also be choosing to limit parts of myself in order to do so, with the understanding that what I gain through the relationship is worth more to me than what I sacrifice.

On the other hand, people also have needs. In some cases, you won’t be enough to fulfill those needs.

This is where personal development can become helpful. If being in a relationship with that person is important to you, you may choose to develop yourself in ways that make you more capable of meeting their needs and expectations—provided doing so is also consistent with who you want to become.

For example, if I desire to be in a relationship with a submissive, then I need to develop the skills and traits that make me an attractive and capable Dominant. If someone desires to be in a relationship with me as a Dominant, they will need to possess or develop the skills and traits I find attractive in a submissive.

Relationships—whether romantic partnerships, friendships, relationships between neighbors, or relationships among community members—are built through negotiation, compromise, and agreement as we try to meet one another’s needs within the limits of our capabilities. Relationships require some form of reciprocity.

Otherwise, why be in the relationship at all?

Well, love, of course!

This is where things go wrong: when you begin to believe that you have to be in a relationship with someone in order to give or receive love.

But love isn’t something another person earns simply by occupying a particular role in your life. It’s something you can choose to orient toward another human being freely.

Love is the recognition that another being has value, accompanied by goodwill toward their existence and flourishing. A relationship is the decision to invest your finite resources in building something with them.

Love can be abundant. Relationships cannot be limitless.

By love, I mean emotions and actions such as compassion, goodwill, kindness, appreciation, gratitude, forgiveness, recognition of another’s humanity, and wishing someone well. These are different from the finite resources required to sustain a relationship:

• Love vs. attention: I can care about you without continually directing my attention toward you.
• Love vs. time: I can wish you well without spending my limited hours with you.
• Love vs. access: I can love you and still say, “You cannot be part of my life.”
• Love vs. trust: I can hold compassion for you without believing you are safe or reliable.
• Love vs. intimacy: I can recognize and value your humanity without revealing myself to you.
• Love vs. responsibility: I can care about your suffering without making myself responsible for fixing it.
• Love vs. partnership: I can love many people while choosing to build a life with very few.

You can potentially extend compassion toward everyone. You cannot listen deeply to everyone. You can wish everyone joy. You cannot help everyone achieve it. You can want someone’s suffering to end while simultaneously deciding that they should have no access to you.

It’s entirely okay, healthy, and necessary to have expectations and boundaries around who gets to be in a relationship with you. But someone not meeting those expectations does not make them bad or unworthy of love. It may simply mean they cannot be in a relationship with you.

You can love them from afar.

This can apply even to people you hate. You might be furious with someone and still not want them to suffer unnecessarily. You might despise what someone has done and still recognize their humanity. You might want justice for their actions without wanting cruelty inflicted upon them.

Love says, “Your existence matters.”

A relationship says, “I choose to invest part of my life in you.”

The latter requires discernment, boundaries, and choice.

And saying, “Your existence matters,” can make all the difference. When, as a small child, you experienced having an emotion or a need and the other person left or wasn’t there for you, the story you may have told yourself was that you were too much or not enough to be loved.

That you did not matter.

So how might it feel for you—and for everyone else—to be repeatedly reminded that your existence matters?

Separating love from relationship makes your love freer. You no longer have to withdraw your love in order to justify withdrawing your access. You can give someone the gift of letting them know they matter without having to remain in a relationship with them.

Love does not require you to give everyone access to your life.

And sometimes, letting someone know that they matter could mean everything to the person receiving it.

Stop Answering Shame’s Questions

When you are relating to another person and that old shame gets triggered, your nervous system will want an answer immediately.

Am I too much?

Am I not enough?

And then it will reach for whatever strategy once kept you safe. Withdraw. Avoid. Attack them. Attack yourself. Become smaller. Become better. Become anything other than the person sitting there, terrified that they might not be loved.

But there is another option.

Feel it.

Notice the tightening in your chest, the drop in your stomach, the urge to run, fix, defend, or disappear. Let yourself experience what is happening underneath the story. And then, when you can, tell the person in front of you what is actually there.

I’m afraid I’m too much for you.

I’m afraid I’m disappointing you.

I’m afraid you’re going to leave.

That is where something different becomes possible. Not because the other person will always give you the response you want. Not because every relationship will survive your honesty. But because you are no longer abandoning yourself before they ever get the chance to meet you.

And you can practice offering that same gift in return.

Remind the people you love that their existence matters. Offer compassion without demanding perfection. Let them know they are worthy of care even when they disappoint you, even when they cannot meet every need you have, and even when the relationship itself cannot continue. Love does not require limitless access, limitless sacrifice, or the absence of boundaries. It asks us to recognize the humanity and inherent value of the person on the other side.

And that includes you.

You do not have to become smaller to deserve love.

You do not have to become more impressive to deserve love.

You can grow. You can change. You can become more skillful, more capable, and more valuable as a partner. You can discover that you are incompatible with someone. You can be rejected. You can have needs another person cannot meet and fail to meet needs that matter deeply to them.

None of those things answers the question of whether you are worthy of love.

The work was never about finally proving that you are not too much or that you are enough.

It is learning to be vulnerable enough to actually allow yourself to be loved.