A note before we begin: This post was written with the help of Claude Sonnet as a writing partner. Not because I couldn’t find the words, but because sometimes the most precious and painful things we carry need extra help processing and organizing. AI can be a remarkable tool for helping us find language for experiences we’ve struggled to name — especially when we are not yet ready to say certain things out loud to another person. I have found real value in it for exactly that reason. But AI is not a therapist. It is not a trauma-informed coach. It cannot hold you, track your nervous system, or walk with you through the places that need a human witness. Please use it as a starting point, not a destination. The healing that changed my life happened in relationship — real, embodied, human relationship. If this post stirs something in you, let that stirring lead you toward a safe person, not just a screen.

I still remember the moment at the end of Some Kind of Wonderful when Keith hands Watts those diamond earrings — the ones he had originally bought to impress Amanda. Watts was his best friend. The one who had always been there — showing up, staying, seeing him clearly even when he couldn’t see himself. The whole movie he had been chasing someone dazzling. Someone who made his heart race. And the whole time, the person who truly loved him was already there.

I remember watching that and feeling something catch deep in my chest. That’s it. That’s what I want. Someone who sees me like he saw her.

What I didn’t understand then — what took me years and a lot of hard lessons to learn — is that I already had people like Watts in my life. I just didn’t know how to let them nourish me. I was too busy chasing fireworks. Because that was what I had learned to do long before I ever watched that movie. I grew up in a home where my emotional needs weren’t met, where survival meant scanning for danger and reaching for whatever offered relief. Stillness felt unsafe. Chaos felt familiar. And so I carried that template into every relationship I ever had — without knowing I was carrying anything at all.

We Were Taught the Wrong Love Story

From the time we are old enough to watch movies and absorb songs, we are handed a story: romantic love is the answer. It is the thing that will complete you, save you, make you feel worthy. Jelly Roll sings about needing that one person to save him from the parts of himself he is ashamed of. Every romantic comedy builds toward that one moment when someone finally sees you and chooses you, and the music swells, and everything broken gets fixed. At least in Hollywood it does.

I believed it more than most. I came into the world already asking the question that would follow me for decades: Do I belong? Am I enough? Being adopted plants that question early, before you have words for it. It lives in the body long before the mind can name it. So when the culture handed me a story that said romantic love was the answer — that the right person choosing you would finally prove your worth — I didn’t just believe it. I built my life around it.

And when I was hurting — when I was desperate to feel worthy of love and belonging — I went looking for it in the place the stories told me to look. In the attention of someone whose approval felt like it could heal something empty inside me. Someone in a position of authority. If he saw value in me, surely that meant I had value.

I had no idea what was actually happening. That’s the thing about these patterns — they live so far below the surface. I wasn’t consciously thinking I need this person to tell me I’m worthy. I just felt pulled. I felt like I needed the relationship to survive. And when you feel that desperate, it genuinely feels like love.

But it wasn’t. It was hunger wearing love’s clothes.

What I didn’t understand at the time is that I had essentially gone offline. Not emotionally — I was flooded with emotion. But the part of my brain responsible for clear thinking, for recognizing patterns, for asking is this actually good for me? had gone quiet. When we are in survival mode, when an old wound is being touched, the nervous system takes over. It is not a character flaw. It is biology. The part of me that desperately needed to feel worthy of love and belonging was so much older and so much louder than the part that could evaluate what was actually happening. I was not making a rational choice. I was responding to something primal — the need to matter, to be chosen, to finally be enough. And the shame that came with it only drove me deeper underground. Shame thrives in secrecy. It tells you that what is happening is evidence of who you are rather than a signal of what you need. So I stayed. And I went further offline. And I didn’t find my way back until healthy relationships began to do what that one never could — tell me the truth about my own worth without asking for anything in return.

When the Church Became Part of the Story

There is something else I want to name, because for many women I know— and for me — the church was deeply woven into this story. And it is complicated, because there were genuine gifts there. Real relationships. Moments of authentic community that I am still grateful for. But there was also something else operating beneath the surface.

Fear-based religion is extraordinarily effective at creating emotional dependency. When you are told regularly that you are sinful, that your instincts cannot be trusted, that your worth is conditional on belief and behavior — and then offered the relief of grace and belonging in the same breath — the emotional experience can feel transcendent. The highs are real. The sense of being known by something larger than yourself is real. But when that same framework imposes shame for normal human needs, it doesn’t teach you emotional health. It teaches you to distrust yourself.

I was never taught how to identify what I needed, how to receive care, how to recognize manipulation. I was taught to be grateful for whatever I was given and to question my own perceptions when they conflicted with authority. That is not spiritual formation. That is emotional malnourishment dressed in the language of holiness.

And yet — I want to be honest — it was also within that world that some of the most nourishing relationships of my life existed. People who genuinely loved me well despite the system they operated in. Healing is rarely a clean story of all bad and all good. It is more often both, tangled together, asking us to hold complexity with grace.

Cake Every Day Makes You Sick

Here’s something I’ve come to understand about nourishing relationships. Imagine your body needs real food — vegetables, protein, whole grains, water. The things that actually sustain you. But cake and cookies taste better. They light up your senses in ways that steamed vegetables simply don’t. And if you’re starving, you’ll reach for whatever stops the ache fastest.

Intensity in relationships works the same way. The dramatic connection, the person whose approval sends you soaring or crashing, the relationship with high stakes and electric tension — that feels like love because it is so consuming. It takes up all the space. It drowns out everything else.

But you cannot build a healthy life on cake. Over time, it makes you sick. It depletes you even as it temporarily satisfies. And the worst part? While you’re filling up on sugar, you’re not leaving room for the food that would actually nourish you.

The friendships. The person who has been there for thirty years. The one who shows up on a Tuesday with no agenda. The relationship where you can be completely yourself and nothing is at stake.

Those quiet, loyal, present people — we walk right past them looking for the fireworks.

Fireworks Are Supposed to Be Rare

We love fireworks because we don’t see them every day. If they went off every night outside your window, you would stop noticing them within a week. They would become noise. The reason they take your breath away is precisely because they are rare.

We have confused intensity for depth. We have mistaken a racing heart for love, when often it is just our nervous system responding to uncertainty, to longing, to the particular ache of wanting someone’s approval. That ache is not a sign you have found the right relationship. It is often a sign you have found a familiar one.

Real nourishment is quieter. It doesn’t always make your heart race. In the beginning it can even feel like something is missing — because you’ve calibrated to chaos and calm feels boring. That’s not a sign to walk away. That’s a sign to stay long enough to let it work.

The Warning Signs I Couldn’t See

When I look back, there were things I wish someone had named for me. Signs I was in a toxic rather than a nourishing relationship.

I needed this person’s validation to feel okay about myself. The thought of losing the relationship sent me into panic, not sadness — panic, the kind that lives in your body and feels like survival. I was keeping secrets from people I loved. I felt ashamed, but the shame made me hold on tighter rather than let go. I was shrinking in other areas of my life without noticing. The relationship was quietly asking me to become smaller — to see less clearly, to want less, to need only what it could provide.

And the religious framework around it kept telling me my feelings were sin rather than symptoms. That my desperation was moral failure rather than an unmet need. If someone had told me the truth — that this wasn’t about sin but about a starving part of me reaching for something she had never received — it would have changed everything.

How do I know? Because when I was close to losing everything, my therapist finally did tell me — and I walked away for good. If writing this here, alongside an AI writing partner, can help even one person see it sooner, then it is worth every word.

What Woke Me Up

It wasn’t one moment. It was accumulation. Slowly realizing how much energy the relationship was consuming — energy I couldn’t give to the people who actually loved me well. Noticing the conflict inside me: one part still that little girl who believed she needed someone powerful to tell her she was worth something, and another part — the woman I had become — who knew better and wanted more.

What finally broke it open was watching this person try to harm the healthy relationships I had built. The good things I had worked so hard to grow despite everything. And something in me said: no.

I also started talking. Carefully, slowly, to people who were safe. And when I heard others name the same desperation I had carried in secret — on podcasts, in honest conversations — something in me exhaled for the first time in years. The secrets had been making me sick. Telling the truth, to the right people, began to be medicine.

And here is what I noticed: the more I let myself be genuinely nourished by healthy friendships, the less I needed the toxic one. Not because I white-knuckled my way out of it. But because I was no longer starving.

What Genuine Nourishment Actually Feels Like

I want to tell you what it feels like in your body when a relationship is actually feeding you. Not because I want to romanticize friendship — but because I think many of us have never paused long enough to notice.

It feels like taking up space without apologizing for it. It feels like having a voice and trusting that your voice matters. It feels like you could walk away — not because you want to, but because you know that your sense of self doesn’t depend on staying.

It feels stable. Quiet. Good.

It doesn’t always feel like fireworks. But it feels like home. And unlike fireworks, home is something you can actually live in.

My cousin has been one of those relationships for me. Loyal. Consistently present. Authentic in a way that costs something. What he has given me is not the racing heart of desperate wanting — it is the deep, unhurried sense that I am known and I belong. That kind of love doesn’t make headlines. Nobody writes pop songs about it. But it has done more for my healing than any dramatic, consuming relationship ever did.

Friendship Is Not the Consolation Prize

We have been sold the idea that friendship is what you have while you’re waiting for real love to arrive. That it is the warm-up act, not the main event.

I want to gently, firmly push back on that.

Friendship — real friendship, the kind built on loyalty and presence and the willingness to know each other without an agenda — is one of the most profound and underrated forms of love available to us. It is often better designed for genuine nourishment than romantic partnership. There is less enmeshment.  Less survival anxiety tangled through it. Partners who are friends are the best of both worlds with more room to be separate people who freely choose each other.

And the research on human wellbeing backs this up: the quality of our close relationships is one of the strongest predictors of health and happiness we have. Not whether those relationships are romantic. Just whether they are real.

Before You Keep Scrolling

If this post has landed somewhere tender, I want to invite you to sit with a few questions. Not to judge yourself. Not to diagnose your relationships. Just to get curious — the way you might with a good friend who asks the question nobody else thought to ask.

When you imagine losing your most consuming relationship, what do you feel first — sadness, or panic? Sadness is grief. Panic is a signal worth paying attention to.
Are there people in your life you have been walking past — loyal, present, quietly consistent — while you chased something that felt more urgent?
What is the relationship actually giving you? And is there a younger part of you who has been waiting a long time to receive it?
Where in your life are you keeping secrets that are making you sick?
When did you last feel genuinely nourished — not just temporarily full — by a relationship? What was different about it?
You don’t have to answer these out loud. You don’t even have to answer them today. But let yourself answer them honestly, when you’re ready.

What I Want For You

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself somewhere in these words — the hunger, the desperate reaching, the confusion between intensity and love — I want you to know that what you are experiencing is not a character flaw. It is not sin. It is a nervous system trying to get what it needs the only way it knows how.

And I want you to know that it is possible to learn a different way.

Start by noticing who is already in your life. The people who show up on ordinary days. The ones who have been there quietly, consistently, without drama. Let yourself actually receive what they are offering. Slowly. Intentionally. The way you might eat a good meal instead of inhaling fast food — tasting it, letting it settle, noticing how it feels.

You don’t have to have fireworks every day to have a beautiful life.

Sometimes the most profound love story is the one that has been unfolding quietly beside you all along — in the people who stayed.

Lori is a certified trauma recovery practitioner and founder of A Liminal Space Coaching. She does this work because she has lived it — and because she knows what it means to finally find people who tell you the truth without using it against you. She writes about healing, authenticity, and the quiet revolution of deciding you are worth nourishing. If something here resonated with you, she’d love to hear from you at loriwilliamsliminalspace@gmail.com