The Big Sad

On breakups and worthiness; sisters and best friends

There was a boy… a very strange enchanted boy…and while we spoke of many things, fools and kings, this he said to me: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”. (Nature Boy from The King Cole Trio in 1961)

I love, love, love that song. It stirs something in my soul. It makes me achey and hopeful and sad. Why is loving and having it returned so hard to find?

Shawn Colvin says it like this: “ All of my whole world and all the things in it are hard to find…Everything changed in a matter of minutes and nothing was saved in time.”

Ingrid Michaelson says, “ We are so fragile and our cracking bones make noise and we are just breakable boys and girls”.

Deep sigh. I broke up with my boyfriend of three years just before Christmas.

And underneath the anger and relief and logistics, one question keeps tapping at my ribs like a bird in a cage:

Why am I not worth the effort?

Why is my little family not worth the work?

I know the answer is that we are worth it. I am worth it.

But this is the third time I’ve loved someone who liked me better as a possibility than as a life. And I can’t stop wondering if I’m the common denominator—not because I’m unlovable, but because I keep hoping harder than I’m willing to require.

Boundaries feel mean to me.

They feel like abandonment.

They feel like becoming my parental units, or my worst fear, or the villain in someone else’s story.

So I stay too long.

I explain too gently.

I believe effort is something love will eventually grow.

It doesn’t.

My capacity to hope in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is astounding.

Y’all. Astounding.

Maybe it’s a good thing, all that hope- but right now it feels like blindness and stupidity.

And yet.

I see how my sister dropped everything and came halfway across the country just to hug me and let me cry. I’m worth that kind of upheaval for her, and not because we are family but because our love for each other is the kind that’s willing to quite literally go the distance.

I see how I’ve been living at my best friend’s house while waiting for my ex to move out. She never once called it an inconvenience. She just kept putting a plate on the table for me. Letting me cry in the guest room. Letting me be quiet. Letting me be human.

She even helped my ex move out, because she loves me enough to want me safe in my own home.

So maybe the question isn’t why am I not worth the effort?

Maybe the truth is that I am surrounded by people who prove I am.

And maybe what I’m learning—slowly, painfully, stubbornly—is that love returned isn’t something you beg for.

It’s something you recognize.

It’s someone who meets you in the middle.
It’s someone who picks up their half of the life you’re building.
It’s effort.

It’s strange that in the face of all this evidence of love—my sister’s long drive, my friend’s open door—I have less hope than ever of finding it in a romantic way.
Less hope of that simple promise from Nature Boy—to love and be loved in return.

Not because it isn’t real.
But because I finally understand how rare it is.

Because I’m finally unwilling to pretend it’s there when it isn’t.

And this might not be hopelessness at all. It might be clarity.

I am rich in love where it matters, and my heartache is held—seen and witnessed—by the people I’ve chosen and who have chosen me.
That is no small grace. I am loved in return.

It means I am done mistaking potential for partnership.
Done negotiating for effort.
Done pretending crumbs are a meal.

The next love I keep will meet me halfway—or not at all.