A Minute of Silence

This is what we were told: set boundaries. Do not tolerate what does not serve you. If it doesn’t add value, it is not worth it. If something does not fill you up, walk away. And so we did. We left.

We became experts at leaving and illiterate at staying. We learned to fill our own cup, but never learned to fill anyone else’s. We mastered the art of closing cycles but not the art of opening spaces to truly understand another person. We gave ourselves grace when we messed up but rarely extended the same grace when someone else did. We became fluent in self-understanding but clumsy in the language of understanding another.

We grew tired of small annoyances, of uncomfortable arguments, of tense silences. We chose the immediacy of goodbye over the patience of building.

We want relationships without cracks, without shadows, without effort. But love is not that.

Love requires effort. Love is staying. Love is learning to see the other person at their worst and still choosing them. Love is repairing instead of discarding. Love is understanding that it will not always be easy but that it can still be worth it.

Today we know a lot about self-love, and that is a good thing, but we know very little about shared love. We repeat to ourselves that we want to be loved well, but do we know how to love well? Do we know how to hold on when a relationship trembles, or is it easier to leave before the fight even begins?

We do not know how to fight, so we leave. We do not know how to sit in the discomfort of vulnerability, so we run. We prefer superficial conversations over uncomfortable intimate ones. We cut ties, we ghost, we mute, we block. We pretend things do not bother us when they do, and in the pretending we lose the art of true communication.

When did we forget that love is not a feeling but a verb? Love is a choice, an action, a daily decision to show up for someone through both the highs and the lows. Yet it is easier to leave, and so we have become a generation that craves intimacy and connection but runs at the first poke of trouble.

We jump ship, only to discover the next boat is full of pirates. We set camp alone on an island, telling ourselves we are safe, and communicate with each other only through our phones. Endless strings of half-hearted messages replace the long nights of talking until we understand. We mistake emojis for presence, quick replies for closeness, but what happened to the art of deep communication? What happened to saying the uncomfortable truth out loud, without filters, without screens, without hiding?

Maybe love has not died. Maybe we killed it. With our endless hurry. With our obsession with being busy. With our need to protect the ego at all costs. With our fear of discomfort, of conflict, of effort.

A minute of silence. Or better yet, a minute of truth. Do we actually want to love, or only to be loved?

This post was born after reading a reflection by Juan Frendsa. I owe the seed of these words to him, though the expansion is mine.