Love and Impossible Relationships

Let me summarise my life in a nutshell, at least when it comes to relationships. I grew up with little attention to my needs, and barely any support in navigating life or emotions. In my adult relationships, I learned that I don’t matter. My feelings aren’t valid — at best they’re overlooked, at worst, they're treated as wrong.
And to this day, I still find myself wondering: is it them, or is it me?

I’m also raising two wonderful children on my own. That experience has been a teacher in itself — revealing just how much I missed out on growing up. Trust. Connection. A holding embrace. Protection from what I wasn’t ready to face alone. It’s also made clear how hard it is to balance our ideals of parenting with our own unmet needs. We put ourselves under immense pressure to raise our children ‘right’, hoping to spare them the pain we had to endure. But the more time passes, the more I realise parenting is never a straight line. It’s a constant clash — between their personalities, mine and external events — and I’m always searching for the least harmful way to respond, while still honouring my own emotions.

But that’s just my part of the story. There are many others in my children’s lives — people who have the space and opportunity to leave marks, to shape them. But they don’t.
Our families would probably say it’s because I keep the children away from them. And maybe that’s partly true. Though it wasn’t a conscious decision, and certainly not a spiteful one. But what they’ll never fully grasp is that it’s mostly because they hurt us — through absence, through indifference. By turning away when things got difficult.

I used to explain our problems to my ex with a little performance: one hand pulling back an invisible rug, the other swishing the issues right where the rug had been, then letting that first hand drop — like saying, There, problem shoved under the carpet, job done. This is the standard I’m used to when it comes to myself, building a life, having children, and facing my children’s struggles. That distance was created because we needed family — and there was none. Just like when I was growing up.

And to create distance as a response for emotional neglect, that’s what I really want to talk about.

I often wonder if the kind of people I attract — or have around me — are simply a reflection of my upbringing. If, because I grew up in an emotionally immature household, I’ve continued to draw in the same emotionally stunted patterns, now wearing different faces.
Or is it more than that? Is this emotional immaturity just the norm — the emotional baseline of our society?

I’ve come to believe it is the latter. That dysfunction, in many ways, is the fertile ground from which rare emotional growth emerges. In fact, I think that emotionally mature people carry the scars of deep struggle — it’s their wounds that have made them wise. I am certainly living proof — someone who once moved through life unaware, acting without regard for other people’s feelings, blind to the scars I was leaving behind.

But even with this understanding, I still wrestle with the question: how do we respond to emotionally immature people who hurt us?
Is distance the right approach?
For ourselves? For our children?

Why am I even asking this? We live in a world fractured in countless ways. We’re separated by opinion (cancel culture), by identity (genders, neurotypes, lifestyle, diagnoses). We’ve created bubbles so tight that we barely hear one another anymore. And on top of that, we’re building trauma divides within our most foundational relationships — our families — who are already split by those very identities and ideals.

What happens to our children in the middle of this?

Well, I for one reckon they grow up untethered. Disconnected. Spiritually unanchored in a society that offers them very little to belong to. Maybe that was already true in my generation. It certainly felt that way to me. Family didn’t offer safety. School felt like a breeding ground for competition and humiliation. Grandparents tried to buy love, not be love.

So while I do worry about this widening gap — the disconnection my children and I experience — I also can’t bring myself to move closer to our families.
Not because they’re abusive or intentionally harmful. They’re not.
But because they’re profoundly absent. Unconcerned. Not tuned into the needs of a mother, or of children — especially not my special needs child.
They’re not a support network. They’re present, yes — with gifts, with polite gestures. Sometimes even with a bit of connection. But mostly, they are indifferent. Narrow in their perspective. And that’s what’s hurt us the most. And it stuns me every time that, when asked, my children say they don’t want to move back to where we were. That’s how little impact those people have had on their lives.

Some might say this still count as love. That showing up with gifts or small gestures means they care.

Yet, here’s the question I can’t stop asking:
Is love really passive?
…Is love absent? Is it silent? Can breadcrumbs ever be love?
Is love ignorant of our needs?
Can we truly call it love if it’s not shown, certainly not shown consistently?

If love is replaced with money and things instead of care and concern, what remains of it?

A wise therapist once told me: “Love has to come across.”
That sentence has stayed with me ever since. Because it says something simple and profound: if love doesn’t reach you, it is not love. This is where the silent trauma lies that many people hold in them: to believe that anything but presence and concern, attention and care can be love.

And if love on those terms is the basic rule for the heart — what does it say about the many people in our lives who do not speak love’s language at all?