Later

Every day, somebody somewhere is offering a very confident opinion about the terms under which love should be allowed to survive. We have rules for it now. Timelines. Checklists. A person does this, so surely you cannot still love them. A child makes enough bad choices, gets in enough trouble, breaks enough hearts, and somebody decides the love should have expired by now. A spouse becomes distant, distracted, absent in the ways that matter most, and people start talking as though the relationship can be reduced to a list of unmet requirements and a final recommendation from the audience. A parent gets it wrong. A friend disappears into a hard season of their own. A sibling becomes unrecognizable for a while. Then everyone standing outside the story seems to have an opinion about what the people inside it should feel.

I was scrolling through Pinterest looking for hair inspiration (I am a girl after all) but all I saw were quotes about “if he does these 3 things he hates you” or “if your spouse doesn’t do xyz, you should leave them” and the list went on. I got annoyed, really annoyed. And I thought about the fact that people, life, love, none of it makes any sense. No Pinterest board is going to tell me who to love, my heart does that, but the Pinterest boards highlight the noise that sometimes gets in the way of our hearts.

People can make absolutely no sense at all to us and still be loved. They can disappoint us, confuse us, embarrass us, frighten us, hurt us, leave us standing there with questions we never thought we would have to ask, and still somehow remain in that place inside us where love lives. The facts do not disappear because the love remains. The hard parts do not become less hard. Nothing gets polished up and tied in a bow simply because a person still matters to us. It just means that love does not always cooperate with the version of the story the outside world finds easiest to understand.

I think we confuse the presence of pain with the absence of love. We see distance, silence, disappointment, pride, fear, exhaustion, grief, humiliation, and all the other things people carry into relationships, and we assume that because those things have become loud, love must have left. But sometimes love has not gone anywhere. Sometimes it is sitting underneath all of it, quiet and buried, waiting for somebody to remember that it is still there. The storm gets so large that the people in it stop acting like the love exists, even though it does.

That may be one of the strangest parts of being human. We can love someone deeply and still become afraid to show it. We can care with every fiber of our being and still let hurt speak for us instead. We can be so embarrassed by what happened, so exhausted by what did not happen, so worried about looking foolish, so concerned with what everybody else will think, that we begin living as though we are indifferent when we are anything but. Pride becomes a bodyguard. Fear gets handed the microphone. Pain starts making decisions that should belong to the heart.

Then comes the bargain with later. Later is when they apologize. Later is when they take accountability. Later is when they finally come back to reality, come back to the relationship, come back home emotionally, or show us that they understand what they have done. Later is when they stop hiding behind a phone, stop avoiding the hard conversation, stop acting warm in public but distant where it counts, and start showing up in a way that can actually be felt. Later is when they reach out first, say the right thing, make the first move, make us feel safe enough to be soft again.

That is an understandable bargain. Nobody wants to keep offering their heart to someone who is not holding theirs carefully. Nobody wants to be the only person trying to build a bridge while the other one stands on the far side deciding whether they feel like crossing it. But the trouble with later is that it keeps moving. People do not always apologize. They do not always take accountability. They do not always show up in reality. They do not always become the version of themselves we have been waiting for them to become. And when we make our own willingness to love depend entirely on somebody else finally doing what they should have done, we can spend years waiting in a room that never opens.

There are moments when what we need is not complicated, even when the relationship is. We do not need a grand speech written by somebody in Hollywood who has never had to unload a dishwasher while carrying around a broken heart. We need to be chosen in ways that can actually be felt. We need somebody to walk across the room and stand beside us instead of staying where they are. We need them to take our hand without first checking to see who might be watching. We need them to come home, not merely pass through the house. We need them to look us in the eye. We need them to check in during the middle of an ordinary day because they know us well enough to understand that “I’m fine” can be a whole emergency disguised as two words.

We need people who are willing to be present in ways that cost them something. Not performatively present. Not present through a screen while they are physically ten feet away. Not present only when the room is easy or the story is flattering or the people watching are likely to approve. We need the kind of presence that says, without turning into a speech, “I see you. I know this is hard. I am still here.” Sometimes that means sitting in silence with someone so complete that the two of you could stare at paint drying on the wall and still know neither one of you is alone.

And yet, even when somebody cannot give us that, even when they refuse it, avoid it, miss it, or simply are not capable of meeting us where we stand, the love can still be real. That is the part people hate because it makes them uncomfortable. They like clean endings. They like villains and heroes. They like a story in which one person did something wrong and the other person is supposed to become wonderfully, efficiently, impressively cold. They like being able to say, “Well, I would never,” because it saves them from having to admit that the heart can hold more than one truth at a time.

A parent can love a child who has gone so far off course that everyone else has decided to define them only by the worst thing they have done. A grown child can love a parent who missed things they should have seen. A spouse can love the person who has made marriage feel lonely. A friend can love someone who became difficult to reach. A sibling can still love the person whose name brings up a whole complicated history before it brings up a conversation. There are relationships people do not know how to explain without sounding foolish or disloyal or painfully sentimental. Still, the love remains exactly where it was left.

I have spent enough time pretending not to care because caring made other people uncomfortable. I have spent enough time believing that if I acted untouched, perhaps one day I would actually become untouched. I have spent enough time thinking love needed to be returned perfectly, accepted fully, received gratefully, or proven safe by somebody else’s behavior before I was allowed to act like it existed. But the love does not need permission to exist inside us. It is there or it is not there. And when it is there, pretending otherwise does not make us stronger. It only makes us more alone.

There are nights when a person can cry because they miss someone they love, because they know exactly what is absent, because they know exactly what they cannot force another person to give. Then, somehow, that same person can end the night sitting on the couch with a quiet kind of peace. Not because the hurt has vanished. Not because the other person suddenly showed up, accepted the love, apologized, or became capable of returning it in the way it was hoped for. The peace comes from knowing that the love was real. It was not a performance. It was not a bargain. It did not become less true simply because someone else could not receive it.

Choosing love is not one thing. It can be a million different acts. It can be a phone call. A prayer. A softer answer. A meal left on the counter. A ride across town. A hand held in public. A question asked in the middle of the day. A decision to come home. A choice to sit beside somebody when there is nothing left to say. It can be allowing another person to know, through the way we show up, that whatever storm has come through the relationship, whatever distance has grown, whatever part of the story remains unresolved, they have not become invisible to us.

I cannot make anyone receive love. I cannot make anyone choose it back. I cannot make another person show up physically, emotionally, publicly, honestly, or consistently. I cannot make them cross the room, reach for my hand, come home, look up, check in, or see the hurt in my face before I have to explain it. But I can refuse to let their absence make me absent from my own heart. I can refuse to let hurt turn me into someone who acts indifferent when I am not. I can choose not to let fear, pride, embarrassment, pain, or the opinions of people who will never have to live inside my heart make me quiet about something that is still alive inside me.

At the end of a season, a relationship, or a life, I do not think the deepest regret will be that we loved too honestly. I do not think we will wish we had done a better job pretending to be untouched, unimpressed, unbothered, or above it all. I think the regret will be knowing the love was still there and letting hurt keep us from acting on it while we still had time. I think the regret will be realizing that someone we loved may have gone through this life believing we stopped caring simply because we waited for the right apology, the right moment, the right version of them, or the right conditions to make love feel safe again.

Later has buried more love than anger ever did.

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Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm