Here is what I know:

Love is not enough. Love is never enough.

Love is not enough to make a relationship work. It’s just not.

And I know, I know: the romantics out there would say to me: What in the world are you talking about? Love can only be enough.

But…..this is what I know: Love is just not enough.

I know this at a visceral, core-of-my-being. 

Love is not enough. 

You cannot love someone into living into their potential. You cannot love someone into actually trying. You cannot love someone into helping them to become a functional human being.

Love is just not enough. At all. 

I’ve written at length about one core traumatic relationship, and another I write about hardly at all.

Why?

Because it is that painful.

Because that is the reason I know love is never enough.

If love were enough, I would not spend my days these days knowing there is a high likelihood that someday, there is a very high likelihood that someone I loved once upon a time will end up in a pauper’s unmarked grave, with no one to claim a body. There will be no obituary; there will be no one who was once close to him to know he is gone. 

I have spent thirty-one years mourning this person in slow-motion. I was fifteen years old when he old me that he was self-destructive; about his chosen method of ending things; and the only thing keeping him from acting on his urge was the idea of me standing over his coffin, crying. 

Love is not enough.

Fifteen year old me did not know that when people are self-destructive you don’t just listen; you actively seek assistance for that person. 

I will not stand over that person’s coffin someday because I will not be notified.

I worry a very realistic worry that no one will be notified. There may be no one to notify. 

And yet, I’ve already done the mourning: I’ve mourned in real-time, in slow-motion, for thirty-one years now. 

I’ve done the crying over his coffin, before it ever happens.

Thirty-one years is a long time to feel responsible for someone else’s life.

I was fifteen years old. Fifteen.

I couldn’t drive by myself yet. 

Love is not enough. 

It should have struck me as odd when he chose to not go to school when he graduated. I was prepared to break up; I remember the morning I told him it was okay if we saw other people; shortly after he graduated.

He didn’t go to school. He didn’t go to work.

It was nearly a full year before he told me he was waiting on me to graduate so we could go to school together.

Looking back, my response should have been, “You might have wanted to talk to me about that.” 

I wish he had talked to me about that idea before he made that sort of decision. 

It accomplished his aim; it’s how I ended up at Georgia State because he refused to entertain any other school ideas than the Art Institute of Atlanta. 

I engineered my entire college choice around a guy. There was no choice. I applied nowhere else. I had options; I had no idea. 

Love is not enough. If it were, then some level of appealing to his sense of ambition might have worked when both myself and his family attempted to convince him to avail himself of the tuition-free attendance that was available to him through his mother’s employment, to Emory. 

I didn’t really realize I was in danger yet.

I should have realized I was in danger.

There were no hints of being afraid of him at all until I decided I wanted to be able to see other people.

That happened the first week of classes my Freshman year.

I went out for pizza with someone else and I remember being terrified to tell him. 

There were hints, little warning signs I didn’t know to see at the time.

For instance, we started dating in late January of my first year of high school and for Valentine’s Day that year, despite the fact that we were barely saying two words to each other on the phone yet, he showed up to school with a giant gift bag full of gifts for Valetine’s Day: love-bombing. 

Sometime around Christmas the next year we skipped a Christmas party and I knew my parents were out at their own Christmas party, so I showed him where we lived. 

A few weeks later a rose was left on my car. 

It was a full three years after my graduation before the gravity of the danger I was in showed in full-force: he was prepared to use lethal force on anyone who encroached on me, his possession. And a week later, he proved that he was willing to use my own fears against me, to compel me into staying by force when he felt me finally slipping through his fingers forever.

I firmly believe I would not be alive today had I stayed beyond that Spring of 2001. 

The terror remains; the knowledge of his likely present circumstance is of little daily comfort. I have had two nightmares in the last week about this individual coming to hurt me. The knowledge that he likely doesn’t have the will or the means to come to my home are of little comfort. 

I wake up in the night and exclaim, breathless, “JARED!” before I think about it, before I am awake even, to reach over to find my 2026 safe space exactly where he has been for the past twenty-one years. Jared, without fail, either reaches over for me or says, “I’m here,” without exhaustion for the repetition that doesn’t disappear year after year, seemingly decade after decade. He knows my ghost; he has met him face-to-face. Jared is unafraid. 

And still, I am unsure which terror is stronger: the idea that this individual will potentially end up in a mass pauper’s grave someday, or the idea that he may show up to cause me or my family harm. Both are true: I am afraid of him, and I am afraid for him.

And whatever the trauma-bond, I still say there was love.

And, that is how I know: Love is never enough.