“Making it work” vs “Letting it go”

About 4 years ago I started to recognize my desire to “make it work” in relationships as a red flag and a signal to let go. At the time I wrote to myself, “The heart can persuade the mind to work with it, work around it, accommodate, tolerate, get along. The mind can persuade itself. But the gut is steadfast. The gut always knows when something isn’t right.”

My gut knew that revelatory relationship was not healthy for me. That said, even after having that awareness I kept trying for months to “make” the relationship work because I didn’t know how to let go when “the whole world was born with my hands in hers.” Ultimately the only way to let go was to stop holding her hands, literally and figuratively.

The grief I experienced was as old as I was, older actually. The grief was clearly not just about the loss of that relationship, but about intensities in my early life attachments in my lineage — the very intensities that inspired me to feel my world born in the hands of an unavailable person and to try so hard to “make it work” and hold onto that *love*.

That old “make it work” pattern seems to have broken for me when I finally let go and grieved.

In one new relationship last year my heart said for a while, “Oh, we *love* her! Surely we can work with this unavailablity, right??” but my mind was a solid “no” with my gut, “That isn’t love, dear. Love is presence. Love is ease.”

I no longer try to “make it work” in relationships. I have significantly fewer relationships, but the ones I have are healthy and feel joyful and peaceful rather than intoxicating.

That particular relational container had huge purpose in my life. At times, I used to want to talk about all of this with her, and I wanted her to know how deeply important that relationship was to me. But she didn’t have the capacity to be present for that kind of conversation, and that was the crux of the matter.