26/05/2026
Who has more experience in relationships?
How many relationships?
How many lovers?
How many years?
How many heartbreaks survived?
As though intimacy can be measured through accumulation. As though the heart becomes wiser merely through repetition.
Lately, I keep encountering this peculiar habit of comparison. Those who have loved many people claiming greater experience because they have encountered more personalities, more conflict, more variation. Others, who have loved only a few, claiming a different kind of understanding - depth, patience, commitment, intimacy that had time to mature beyond performance.
Perhaps both are right.
Perhaps neither are.
A person may move through twenty relationships and never learn how to communicate honestly, tolerate vulnerability, or remain present once desire loses its theatrical glow. Another may experience only one or two profound loves and emerge altered entirely by the unbearable requirement to truly see another human being.
Experience, then, becomes difficult to measure by number alone.
Some people repeat the same emotional pattern with different faces. Others stay long enough inside one connection to witness the difficult seasons of love - after idealisation, after projection, after fantasy.
There is a difference between encountering love and enduring it.
Modern culture often mistakes romantic exposure for emotional wisdom.
We admire those who appear fluent in attraction: socially effortless, emotionally elusive, capable of beginning intimacy with ease. Yet beginnings are the most performative part of love. Almost anyone can sustain chemistry for a season.
The deeper question is whether one can remain present once illusion dissolves.
Because relationships eventually leave the realm of seduction and enter something far less glamorous: misunderstanding, routine, fear, silence, disappointment, repair.
This is where relational maturity begins to reveal itself.
Not in intensity, but in consistency. Not in being desired repeatedly, but in learning how to care and continually refuel desire. How to speak without cruelty. How to leave without destruction. How to remain without abandoning oneself. How to be tender. How to forgive.
And perhaps this is why quantity alone tells us so little.
Some people have many relationships because they are searching. Others because they are fleeing, restless within permanence itself.
Others remain in only a handful of loyal relationships because they are truly capable of extraordinary depth - or at least open to it. Depth requires effort. Responsibility. Forgiveness. Constant self-awareness. Nobody said it would be easy. And perhaps, out of all the difficult things in life, this is among the most rewarding.
Others, however, remain simply because familiarity protects them from vulnerability. Comfort can preserve a relationship just as easily as love can. Sometimes even social acceptance can preserve relationships long after growth has stopped.
Duration alone does not sanctify love any more than variety guarantees wisdom.
Shouldn’t love simply enlarge you? Isn’t this what it is about?
Does it matter how many times you’ve loved or how deeply?
Did love enlarge you?
Did heartbreak make you more honest? Did intimacy deepen your understanding of another consciousness, or only sharpen your instinct for self-protection?
Did you learn accountability? Did you learn reflection? Tenderness? Consistency?
There are people who become highly experienced in attraction yet remain strangers to intimacy. They know how to generate longing, but not safety; pursuit, but not presence.
And there are others who, after only a handful of profound connections, develop an almost spiritual understanding of human fragility because they stayed long enough to witness what remains after beauty fades and projection collapses. Or perhaps they learn nothing.
Perhaps relationships teach us less about other people than about ourselves.
Love is a mirror of unusual cruelty and unusual grace. It exposes the hidden architecture of the self: our fear of abandonment, our hunger for recognition, our inability to communicate, our longing to be understood without language.
Perhaps to be fully seen and still loved is one of the deepest forms of acceptance we can experience.
And perhaps this is why certain heartbreaks alter a person more than entire decades of casual romance. Not because suffering is noble, but because genuine intimacy leaves evidence behind. It changes your internal landscape.
And survival itself teaches something too.
Some heartbreaks leave scars that harden people into distance. Others become strange forms of divine metamorphosis - painful, yes, but transformative. The difference often lies in what we do afterwards. Whether pain deepens our self-awareness or merely strengthens our defences.
Because love is not merely something we feel. It is something we practice.
I learned the most inside a relationship that lasted over two decades. Not because longevity itself is virtuous, but because duration has a way of confronting you with yourself.
If you allow it, long-term intimacy slowly strips away performance, ego, fantasy and avoidance.
Some wounds are not healed before love, but through the difficult intimacy of it.
And perhaps the one who emerges from intimacy with greater self-awareness, greater honesty, and a greater capacity to care… is the most experienced.
That does not mean staying inside abuse, manipulation, cruelty, or the erosion of one's dignity. Love should not require the abandonment of your safety, your self-worth, or your humanity.
But outside of harm, people sometimes leave too quickly - forever reaching for idealised versions of love while avoiding the vulnerability real intimacy demands.
Love is not aesthetic spirituality.
It is lived responsibility.
And sometimes it asks us to stay.
Not perfection.
But two imperfect people repeatedly choosing growth over avoidance.
There is something profoundly vulnerable about allowing yourself to be truly seen by another person -
In your best smile and your deepest tears.
In your calmness and your hurricane.
In your confidence and your bad hair days.
That is extraordinary.
Not because long-term relationships are automatically happy. They are not. Happiness itself requires effort. But duration teaches you this truth in ways short-lived romance often cannot.
Years accumulate through effort. Effort accumulates meaningful years.
Consistency. Safety. Consideration. Empathy. A genuine desire to make another human being happy - not because you own them, not because you wish to reshape them, but because you wish to grow alongside them.
To recognise that another person may expand your understanding of yourself, just as you expand theirs.
Perhaps that is what relational longevity truly is.
A quiet commitment of -
“I will not give up on you.”
“I will continue growing with you.”
“I will keep stepping toward a better version of myself beside you.”
“I will continue looking after my physical self as an act of self-respect.”
“I will continue to evolve spiritually, both in solitude and in your presence.”
Not all at once.
Just a little more each day.
Do not look for perfection.
Look for progress.
Not only in them.
But within yourself too.
Perhaps we spend too much time trying to intellectualise love. Diagnosing every attachment, categorising every wound, analysing every human interaction until intimacy itself begins to feel procedural rather than instinctive.
Yes, trauma exists.
Patterns exist.
Defence mechanisms exist.
But sometimes human beings also simply need courage. The courage to confront themselves honestly without becoming confused by self-analysis. The courage to improve without turning self-awareness into self-absorption.
Modern dating often feels saturated with rules, performances, emotional strategies, avoidance disguised as independence, detachment mistaken for strength.
And somewhere within all of this, people forget how to simply be.
To be comfortable in solitude.
Comfortable in silence.
Comfortable in their own skin.
So instead of evolving alongside another human being, we suffocate each other with fear, projection, expectation, and unresolved wounds we are terrified to truly face.
Some become avoidant. Others defensive after too many disappointments disguised as connection. Over time, vulnerability itself begins to feel dangerous.
Slowly, we corner ourselves into emotional dead-ends.
But perhaps the deeper challenge of love has always been this:
Can we overcome ourselves enough to truly love another person?
And can we allow ourselves to be loved in return?
So perhaps we should stop living as though something better is always waiting just beyond the horizon, while unknowingly abandoning the very opportunities for love standing quietly in front of us.
Not every connection is replaceable.
Not every difficulty is a sign to leave.
And not every imperfect moment means something better exists elsewhere.
Intimacy is not built by one person alone. It takes two to tango.
And perhaps real love begins the moment two imperfect people stop searching for the next best thing long enough to truly see one another.
Don't listen to me. I'm just another imperfect human being. Look within.
