No One Will Ever Love You Exactly Like You Want (And Honestly? That's the Job.)

We keep handing people a script they never got to read, and then getting furious when they improvise.

It got me thinking...

It was 8:47 on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on my couch with a glass of wine and the day's session notes still open on my laptop, which, for the record, is not a metaphor for anything, it's just how Tuesdays go when your last client leaves at eight and your brain won't.

When my phone buzzed...

A text from a friend. Three words: "He should've known."

I stared at it. I took a sip of wine. Known what, exactly? That she'd had a hard day? That she needed him to say the specific thing, in the specific tone, at the specific moment, without her having to ask? That the entire architecture of her emotional well-being was, somehow, supposed to be telepathically maintained by a man who, two hours earlier, had answered "I'm fine" with a single thumbs-up emoji?

Here's the thing nobody puts in the wedding vows: No one will ever love you exactly like you want them to. Because that's your job.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like something you'd cross-stitch onto a pillow and then throw the pillow across the room. But stay with me.

In my practice, I watch this movie on loop. It's always a little different, and it's always exactly the same.

There's Gloria. Gloria is brilliant, funny, and has a very specific fantasy of what love looks like. In the fantasy, her partner senses the shift in her mood the way a seismograph senses a tremor; instantly, wordlessly, and correctly. He doesn't ask what's wrong. He just knows. And then he says the exact right thing, which is never the thing he actually says, because the thing he actually says is "Do you want to order Thai?" and the thing she wanted was "I can see you're carrying something heavy, and I'm here."

"It's like he doesn't even see me," she tells me, eyes wet.

And maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he sees her perfectly fine, and what he's actually failing at is reading the invisible script she's written for him in her head and never handed over.

It's like we've all decided that the truest test of love is whether someone can decode us without a cipher. And then we're devastated when they can't.

There's David. David's version of the movie goes like this: He doesn't want much. He just wants to come home and not have to explain that he's depleted. He wants his partner to read the room, lower the lights, pour the drink, skip the questions.

"Is it so much to ask?" he says.

Yes. It is. Not because he's wrong for wanting it. But because that's attachment history talking.

We learn, very early, whether the big people in our lives will anticipate our needs or whether we'll have to scream to be seen. And the kids who had to scream? They grow up and hand the script to someone else. Here. You do it now. You be the one who just knows.

The problem is that no adult can be a perfect stand-in for the caregiver you didn't get. Not because people are inadequate, but because that job doesn't actually exist. It's like asking someone to be the weather; comforting when it's sunny, invisible when you need to be left alone, intuitive about exactly when to rain.

A person can love you enormously and still not love you precisely the way you fantasized about being loved at age seven.

And I know, there's a part of you reading this that's folding its arms and thinking, "Okay, but some people do get it. Some people do just know."

Maybe. But here's what I'd bet on: the people who "just know" are usually the people you've actually told. The ones you've practiced being legible with. The ones who love you well because you stopped demanding they read your mind and started, instead, leaving the door unlocked.

This is the part nobody wants to hear, because it's so much less romantic than the movie version: "Love that lasts isn't the love that guesses. It's the love that's taught."

It's like this. You will, your whole life, meet people who love you badly, and people who love you well, and people who love you in a way that's almost right but misses by that last inch. And the inch? The inch is yours. The inch is the part you stop outsourcing. The inch is you, finally learning to name the thing you need out loud; to yourself first, and then, bravely, to someone else.

Maybe the real heartbreak isn't that no one loves you exactly the way you want.

Maybe the real heartbreak is how long you waited for them to.

And maybe the relief is this: the job was always yours. Which means you were never actually powerless. You were just waiting for permission to start.

So consider this your permission.

The inch? It's yours to measure.

Coco x