When Love Is a Mission ~ Love That Asks You To Abandon Yourself Isn’t Love.

The Psychology of Longing, Fantasy, and the Urge to Rewrite Our Story

By Katrina Steel

Trying to Finish a Story That Was Never Yours to Write

We don’t always stay in painful relationships because we’re afraid of being alone. Sometimes, we stay because we’re trying to finish a story.

We’re trying to turn a fragmented, inconsistent relationship into a secure one. We’re trying to prove that we are loveable, if we just stay patient, kind, loyal, forgiving, or healed enough. We’re trying to change the ending.

Here’s what we often don’t realise: We’re not just trying to heal this relationship, we’re trying to heal the ones that came before it.

When Hope Becomes a Survival Strategy

As a therapist, I’ve seen countless people stay tethered to relationships that are painful, confusing, or emotionally unsafe, not out of passivity, but out of deep, internalised hope.

• Hope that they’ll change.

• Hope that things will go back to how they were in the beginning.

• Hope that this love story will finally make up for all the past ones that ended in loss.

  
  

This kind of hope isn’t delusional, it’s devotional. However, it’s also often misplaced.

Because the person we’re trying to “fix” things with may not actually have the capacity, willingness, or tools to meet us in the ways we need. And still… we stay. Not because we’re naive, but because some part of us is still trying to repair the past through the present.

The Unconscious Mission to "Get It Right"

Psychologically, this pattern is known as repetition compulsion, an unconscious drive to recreate old relational wounds in the hope that, this time, they’ll be healed.

It’s why we’re drawn to partners who mirror our early caregivers. It’s why we tolerate inconsistency or emotional neglect. It’s why we confuse anxiety with chemistry, or intensity with intimacy.

And it’s why letting go can feel so excruciating, not just because we’re losing the relationship, but because we’re losing the fantasy that this time, we’d finally be enough to make it work.

You Don’t Have to Earn Love Anymore

Fantasy vs. Reality

It’s painful to admit that the person we’ve been holding out hope for may not become who we imagined. That the relationship we’ve been trying to salvage was never capable of becoming what we needed.

Facing that truth, and grieving it, is often the turning point.

Once we stop trying to change someone else, we can begin to reparent the parts of ourselves that were left waiting… hoping… chasing… earning.

We can start to untangle love from performance. Affection from obligation. Safety from silence.

We can start asking a much deeper question:

What would it look like to stop proving I’m loveable and start treating myself like I already am?

The Grief of Letting Go, and the Freedom Within It

This kind of healing doesn’t come with a grand gesture.It often begins in a quiet, aching grief, the grief of finally seeing that we never received the love we needed as children, and that we may not receive it from this partner, friend, or parent now.

That grief is sacred. It’s not defeat, it’s clarity. It’s the beginning of taking yourself out of a dynamic that was never your burden to carry. It’s the moment you realise you don’t have to earn love. You never did.

What Comes Next

Healing comes when we:

• Stop chasing the unavailable.

• Start grieving what we hoped would be.

• Learn how to meet our own needs with compassion.

• Reconnect with people, places, and practices that feel safe, reciprocal, and nourishing.

  
  

This doesn’t mean we won’t still long. But it means we’ll no longer hand our wholeness over to people who don’t have the tools to hold it.

Final Thoughts

Love that asks you to abandon yourself isn’t love, it’s a performance.

You don’t have to perform anymore.

You are allowed to be messy, human, growing, and still fully worthy of love.

You are allowed to stop waiting for someone to choose you, and begin choosing yourself, every day, in ways big and small.

That’s how the story changes. Not because someone finally gives you what you were waiting for. But because you do.