There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to explain your pain to the person who caused it, or who watched it happen and did nothing. You explain again. You find new words, softer openings, better timing. You hope that if you could just say it the right way, this time they would finally get it. And slowly, that hope becomes the whole relationship.
Why they never understood, and why you stayed
Here is the part that took me a long time to say plainly. Some people benefit from not understanding you. If they truly understood how their behavior landed on you, they would have to change it, and changing it would cost them something. Not understanding, conveniently, costs them nothing. So your explanations keep getting received in good moments and forgotten by morning, not because you explained badly, but because understanding was never in their interest.
And still you stayed, and for understandable reasons. You stayed because you remembered who they were when they were trying. The early version of them felt real to you, and it kept feeling real long after the current version had stopped showing up for it. Staying for someone's past potential is one of the most common and most painful reasons people give for staying at all. You are not in a relationship with who they are. You are in a relationship with who they were, or who they might become if they ever tried again, and you are the only one holding up that version.
The shrinking
Somewhere in the middle of all this explaining, people begin to shrink. They take up less space. They ask for less. They pre-soften every complaint and lower their needs until the asks are so small that ignoring them requires no effort at all. If you have done this, I want to be clear about what it was. You did not shrink because you were weak. You did it because you had come to believe that if you took up less space, the relationship would not break.
That belief deserves a closer look, because it says something good about you. A person who tries to preserve a relationship by disappearing believes in the relationship. They value it. The tragedy is that they are usually the only one carrying that value, and the smaller they get, the less there is of them left to hold it.
You were never too much
The sentence in the video that people seem to carry out of it is this one. You were never too much. You were just asking the wrong person. Read that again if you need to, because the difference between those two explanations shapes everything that comes after. One of them sends you back to explaining yourself more carefully, more gently, with better word choice. The other frees you to find someone for whom your needs are simply normal, and who does not experience your honest feelings as an attack.
If any of this felt personal, it is because you are not alone in it. Recognizing that a relationship survives on your shrinking is painful, and it is also the beginning of the exit. You do not have to explain your way out the way you explained your way in. You are allowed to let go of a person you cared for, and to stop auditioning for the role of someone worth understanding.
Watch The Pain of Explaining Yourself to Someone Who Doesn't Care
I made this short for the people who have been told they are too sensitive, too intense, or too much by someone who never once looked at their own side of the table. Watch it late at night or on a walk, and let it ask the question instead of answering it for you. If you have been searching for one-sided relationship advice, or trying to understand why staying for someone's potential never quite works, this one is for you.
For a longer look at how we lose ourselves in the wrong relationships and begin to find ourselves again, The REAL Matrix Reloaded audiobook goes into that ground in depth.
