u/Brave-Audience-7561

So, what made you realise, “This person isn’t just someone I like. I genuinely love them”

Not just attached.

Not lonely.

Not obsessed.

Not emotionally dependent.

Not merely attracted to them.

I mean genuinely in love. What does it actually feel like for you?

Is it a sense of emotional safety?

Is it peace?

Is it excitement?

Is it wanting a future together?

Is it missing them constantly?

Is it a desire to understand them deeply?

Is it choosing them even after the honeymoon phase fades?

I’m curious because I think many people confuse love with intensity, validation, chemistry, comfort, or attachment. Sometimes the loudest feelings aren’t necessarily love at all.

Modern relationships have started feeling less like human connections and more like compatibility auditions. People are reduced to checklists: height, income, career, emotional style, texting habits, attachment style, hobbies, political views, aesthetics, social status, and dating history. If you don’t perfectly fit someone’s imagined template, you’re filtered out before they even get to know you as a person.

Standards and personal preferences are important, but somewhere along the way, many people stopped looking for connection and started looking for a perfectly customised human experience with zero inconvenience, discomfort, compromise, or flaws. Now everything is either labelled a green flag or a red flag.

Real relationships were never built on flawless compatibility alone. A lot of them were built on patience, understanding, shared values, timing, effort, emotional maturity, and two imperfect people deciding to grow together instead of endlessly searching for someone who checks every single box.

I’m not saying this out of hate, but not everyone is emotionally fit to be a parent, and society rarely talks honestly about that. I’ve seen and heard so many cases where parents provided all the basic needs like food, shelter, education, and medical care, yet still failed to provide a healthy emotional environment at home. And that impacts children far more deeply than people realise.

The way parents treat each other shapes a child’s understanding of love, safety, conflict, and relationships. Constant tension, disrespect, emotional instability, controlling behaviour, or making children feel emotionally responsible for their parents can affect them long into adulthood.

So many children grew up around abusive parents, alcoholism, emotional neglect, constant fighting, manipulation, or parents who never learned how to regulate their own emotions. Many of them lost their childhoods simply trying to survive the environment in which they were raised.

And yet society often dismisses that pain with:

• “But they provided for you”
• “They’re still your parents”
• “They did their best”

Providing basic needs is important, but emotional safety matters too. A child should not have to spend their adult life healing from the environment they grew up in.

And honestly, one of the most selfish reasons to have children is simply to guarantee someone will take care of you when you’re old. Children are human beings, not emotional support systems or retirement plans.

Not everyone shows up the way you do.

One thing I realised while trying to get myself back together was how little people actually make time for you, even when you were there for them during their worst moments. I listened to people vent for hours, stayed awake comforting them during breakdowns, and made space for their emotions whenever they needed it.

But when I started struggling and needed someone to simply be there for me, most people just weren’t. At first, I took it personally. Then I thought maybe it was my fault too. Maybe I never clearly said I needed support. Maybe people assumed I was okay because I was always the calm one.

Because honestly, how will people truly know what you’re carrying if you keep everything within yourself? People can notice something is “off,” but they can’t always understand the depth of your pain unless you let them in a little. So I tested that thought. I opened up more, reached out first, and stopped pretending I was completely fine. And honestly, the answer was still the same: no.

That’s when I understood something important: people don’t always return effort in the same magnitude as you give it, and it’s not always personal. People treat you based on their own emotional ability, awareness, and capacity. Some people only know how to receive support. Some care, but don’t know how to show up emotionally. And some are simply too consumed by their own lives.

But somewhere in that process, I also found my one true friend and lost all the fake ones. That realisation hurt for a while, but it also taught me why boundaries matter — not to become cold or unavailable, just to stop becoming emotionally overavailable to people who were never meeting you halfway.

Not everyone shows up the way you do.

One thing I realised while trying to get myself back together was how little people actually make time for you, even when you were there for them during their worst moments. I listened to people vent for hours, stayed awake comforting them during breakdowns, and made space for their emotions whenever they needed it.

But when I started struggling and needed someone to simply be there for me, most people just weren’t.

At first, I took it personally. Then I thought maybe it was my fault too. Maybe I never clearly said I needed support. Maybe people assumed I was okay because I was always the calm one.

Because honestly, how will people truly know what you’re carrying if you keep everything within yourself? People can notice something is “off,” but they can’t always understand the depth of your pain unless you let them in a little.

So I tested that thought. I opened up more, reached out first, and stopped pretending I was completely fine. And honestly, the answer was still the same: no.

That’s when I understood something important: people don’t always return effort in the same magnitude as you give it, and it’s not always personal. People treat you based on their own emotional ability, awareness, and capacity. Some people only know how to receive support. Some care, but don’t know how to show up emotionally. And some are simply too consumed by their own lives.

But somewhere in that process, I also found my one true friend and lost all the fake ones.

That realisation hurt for a while, but it also taught me why boundaries matter — not to become cold or unavailable, just to stop becoming emotionally overavailable to people who were never meeting you halfway.

This is my first post. I may not know how to “Reddit,” but I definitely know what I’m talking about.

Last year, I went through something that changed me permanently. The kind of thing people either never experience or don’t experience until much later in life.

I’m a 29-year-old woman, an only child, and currently supporting my parents. In 2025, my dad suffered an aneurysm. Before that, in 2016, he had already survived a brain haemorrhage.

The worst part is that I lived through the same trauma twice, almost a decade apart, and both times I felt completely alone.

The medical part was terrifying, yes. But what changed me more was realising how people react when life becomes inconveniently real.

This time, I dealt with the doctors, hospitals, panic, decisions, and uncertainty mostly alone. So-called extended family members never showed up. Not once. No hospital visits. No support. Nothing.

The second time around, some friends told me they were “busy” or that they “didn’t know what to say.”

And maybe that’s true. Maybe they genuinely didn’t know what to say.

But when someone you love is fighting for their life, silence becomes louder than words. You start noticing who checks in, who disappears quietly, who gets uncomfortable with pain, and who only exists during the easier phases of your life.

When you go through real shit, you lose the noise. You stop caring about appearances, shallow relationships, and empty words. And somewhere in the middle of survival, exhaustion, hospital corridors, and silence, you discover strengths in yourself you never even knew existed.

Not because you wanted to become strong.

Because life gave you no other option.

I don’t think I’m the same person I was before all of this. In some ways, that’s a good thing. In other ways, I think I lost a certain innocence about people.

But maybe that’s part of becoming an adult. Realising that love is shown through actions, not words. That loyalty is rare. Life can change overnight while the rest of the world keeps moving as if nothing happened.

I think everyone has a canon event.

This was mine.

And not in a bitter way.

Just a more observant one.