The question I asked when considering if ego love was enough

I loved how it felt.

It was my first relationship after a long-term partnership that both built me and broke me. I knew how I wanted it to feel. In the areas of drought, his water restored and quenched. His actions quelled deep doubt.

It was good. He was kind. I wanted to take what I wanted and ignore the rest.

But life and love don’t work like that.

Eventually, the action of ignoring something tends to magnify it, no matter how hard or how often you push it away. Thoughts zoom in super close until there’s nothing else to take in but the thing or things you’re trying to avoid or tell yourself don’t matter.

I know my insides too well now to knowingly lie to myself or willingly deny parts of me anymore. I’ve taken the other option too many times and something has unlocked in me that wouldn’t allow it even if I wanted to. No matter how I will it to hush or shrug the thoughts off a thousand times, something in me whispers… “It’s all of you or nothing” or more cuttingly, “This is what you left the love of a lifetime for?”

What (else) are you subscribing to?

This was the question I asked myself when I knew I couldn’t rely on my ego not to intervene and twist the answer into its own pleasing truth.

When your ego turns a blind eye and says yes to all the good bits, what do your values say?

What would your mirrors say? The ones closest to you, who always reflect who you truly are.

To me, love has different meanings, expectations and priorities these days. Rosey, goggle-eyed stuff has passed, and truly, one of my questions is: do I want to deal with this person’s life admin? Because choosing to say yes every day, also means saying yes to the life admin of the every day; of the big days, the unexpected days and the one day of what they might leave behind.

Taking my head out of the clouds, I asked: what else—the person aside—am I subscribing to? The many facets of their lifestyle and how I’ll spend many of my days, based on how I’ve seen them spend many of theirs. Their people. Do I like their people? What do their mirrors reflect and say about them? In saying yes to that person, what else am I saying yes to? And for every yes I say to them, am I having to say no to something in myself? Something that feels too important.

I added it all up and ego love—all the stuff that felt great and had been so longed for—came at too high a price. One I was unwilling to pay.

So I unsubscribed.

I don’t mean it to sound callous or so easy (because it wasn’t). But the head knowledge aligned with peace in my body in a way that ego math or heart math might have skewed the calculation.

No matter if I wanted to hear it or not, the answer was clear. Ego love, while fulfilling in the shallow, short-term, was not enough. I walked away with some lovely experiences, new memories, a lesson and more knowing. And that is enough.