The Grief of the Love Gap
The ache
Recently, I found myself sitting with a familiar ache — one I've seen mirrored in countless conversations with clients in the therapy room, and felt quietly (or sometimes loudly) in my own heart.
In sitting with this ache, both in myself and alongside others, I've been uncovering a truth:
In every relationship, there is space — a gap between how we long for our partner (or friend, or family member) to show up, and how they actually do.
For most of us, this gap is painful. It feels like disconnection, and it reminds us of all the times we've felt unlovable or unworthy across the lifespan. In other words, it touches our trauma. And when trauma is touched, our survival strategies awaken.
The development of performance based love as a survival strategy
When we grow up learning that love must be earned, our nervous systems wire themselves around survival strategies:
"If I don't show up in the right way, I won’t be safe. I won’t be loved."
and likewise, we also wire in a story that “if they don’t show up in the right way, I’m not safe, and I’m not loved.”
It's not just about disappointment; it's about survival. It's about our nervous system’s desperate effort to protect our most fundamental human need: connection. But when love becomes tied to performance, we lose something vital. Connection starts to feel contingent on proving, performing, being "enough" to keep love from slipping away.
We learn that love is performance, rather than presence. We begin to measure love by how well our partner performs — and when they inevitably fall short, we don't just feel disappointed. We feel unloved, or worse — unlovable.
Even if we grew up in the most loving and caring households, the narratives in our culture reinforce this survival script. The “if they wanted to they would” craze exemplifies this culture of performance based love we all exist in at least from time to time.
When love becomes a performance, relationships start to feel like demand and control rather than invitation and trust. When we expect love to be proven only through perfect, visible actions, we set ourselves up for chronic evaluation:
Are they doing enough? Am I worth enough?
We chip away at the true intimacy in our relationship. and confirm our deepest fears and wounds around not being enough as we are.
The humanity of imperfection
Our partner’s failure to show up exactly the way we want is not a failure to love us.
It’s a marker of their humanity. Their fear, their imperfection, their limits — these are not failures of love. They are reflections of what it means to be human.
We all fall short.
Love deepens not when we demand perfection, but when we offer grace — and stay curious about the barriers to connection we're experiencing.
The grief of the love-gap
That doesn’t mean that the grief of the love-gap isn’t real. It’s the sadness of realizing that even when love is present, it doesn’t always arrive the way we hope for. It’s a spaciousness that allows us to feel our deepest longings, our biggest fears, and our most sacred wounds.
And here’s a deeper truth:
The grief of the gap is universal — everyone who has ever loved has felt it at some point. And to love well, we must learn to tolerate the ache of that gap —
to feel the pain and recognize that it is our pain without collapsing into despair, blame, or self-abandonment. We must learn to stay present with our longing, without demanding that another person erase it for us.
Learning to live inside that space — not by collapsing our needs, not by demanding perfection, but by increasing our capacity for presence — is part of what allows love to truly grow.
Three truths before you go:
distance exists in every relationship — it’s the space between our deepest longings and the reality of two imperfect human beings trying to love each other.
your partner’s humanity is not a failure to love you.
true love deepens when we learn to embrace the gap
