It happened again, didn't it.
You wanted to stay. When it got hard, when it got real, you dug in, ready to fight for the thing you'd built. And they left like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like you were a tab they closed.
Here's what nobody will tell you: it wasn't about you. You're living in a world that trained them to do exactly that.
We swipe now. There's always a next profile, a next DM, a next “better” sitting one thumb-stroke away. And when better is always one motion away, the person in front of you stops being a person and becomes a placeholder—something you keep until the upgrade arrives. We've started using people the way we use things.
And we don't even use things well anymore. Something breaks, we don't fix it. We throw it out and order the new one by Friday. No one repairs, we just replace. And that instinct didn't stay in our shopping carts. It bled into our beds, our friendships, our families.
So we've gotten lazy with loyalty. We've lost the meaning on what love was even meant to be.
Because love was never supposed to be the absence of other options. Love is choosing someone in the presence of every other option. It's the “better” profile showing up in your feed and you not even opening it, because what you have isn't a placeholder, it's the thing. It's choosing them again on a disaster of a day when nothing is romantic and they're not at their best and leaving would genuinely be easier. You choose anyway. Then you do it again tomorrow.
It's sitting in the hard conversation that has no clean ending and neither of you running for the door, because the door isn't an option. You're not going anywhere until you find the way through together. That's the part the swipe-world will never sell you, because there's no product in it.
And it's the thing almost no one gets to have: being known completely. Being seen down to the most terrible parts of yourself and chosen anyway, on purpose, every day.
That's the love you've carried into every relationship. You're the one who stays. The one who fixes. The one who fights for the people you love long after it stopped being easy, long after a smarter person would've cut their losses. You just kept handing something rare to people who'd been taught everything was disposable.
So no—staying was never the weakness. And one day you're going to find the person who stays and fights to keep you, for once in your damn life. That's when you'll know every time it didn't work out with someone else was all worth it.