Loving Me Is Violence

There have been a few women I could’ve loved—maybe even did love, in that deep, subterranean way I’ve never known how to name out loud. The kind of women who looked at me with patience, who tried to pull the truth out of me like a splinter.

They were kind. Gentle. Willing. But no matter how good they were, I always pulled back. Not abruptly. I don’t scream. I don’t run. I vanish slowly—less weight in my voice, less eye contact, a slow erosion of presence until they start to feel crazy for noticing it.

And when they ask what’s wrong, I say nothing. Because the truth is too ugly, too complicated to say out loud: I’ve never known what a healthy love looks like. I grew up watching a woman I was supposed to trust weaponize affection—use her body to secure control, validation, survival.

My mother’s need to be wanted was endless. She brought men into our world like weather—sudden, unpredictable, vanishing just as fast. I watched her play roles: the flirt, the victim, the redeemer, depending on what the man in the room needed. And somewhere along the way, I internalized it. I saw relationships and sex as phony and bad.

I learned that love was transactional, that sex was currency, and that attachment meant danger. It meant instability. Betrayal. Replacement. So when a woman looked at me with real love in her eyes, I didn’t trust it. I assumed it came with a hidden cost. And before I could be discarded, I discarded myself. Slowly, politely.

I’ve walked away from more good women than I care to admit—not because they weren’t enough, but because they were too enough. Too good. Too real. And I couldn’t survive being seen that clearly. So I left them standing there, holding all the softness I didn’t know how to accept, and convinced myself they were better off without me.

But the truth is, I miss them. All of them. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me kind of way.

They didn’t lose me. I made sure they never really had me in the first place.

Saying no to them meant they’d never have a chance to hurt me.

Sexually, I’ve said no to more women than yes. I refused their advances more often than not. Many years ago, I found a deep sense of satisfaction in it. Now that I’m older I see for what it really was, repulsion for intimacy.

So when women looked at me like I mattered, like I was safe, like they could rest in me—I panicked. Because I didn’t know what to do with something that didn’t come with pain attached. I didn’t believe it was real. And if it was, I didn’t think I deserved it.

I never cheated. I never screamed. I never laid a hand on anyone.
But I was violent in other ways: Emotionally vacant. Cold. Strategic.

I made women doubt themselves with my silence. Made them question their worth because I wouldn’t name mine. I turned love into something measured, monitored, withheld. I called it caution. But it was cruelty. In my 44 years on earth, I’m just now seeing the damage I’ve done, and I’m ashamed for it. It’s a shame that makes me fucking stagger. It’s a guilt that is pure as sunshine. I wish I could go back and say I’m sorry, but what difference would it make at this point? What good what it do?

They loved me in spite of it. That’s what haunts me.

Because some nights, when I lie awake at night, I think about the women who curled their bodies next to mine and whispered things like you feel like home or don’t disappear on me—and I remember how I said nothing back.

Not because I didn’t feel it. But because I did. And feeling it made me want to burn the room down.

You don’t get clean from that kind of damage. You just get quiet. You build routines. You go out of your way to sit at the same table, sitting in the same chair, drinking the same coffee. You lift weights. You take long walks. You answer messages late. You tell yourself you’re healing. But really—you’re rotting in a nicer shell.

There’s a version of me somewhere that didn’t flinch when someone reached out. A version that let love stay. That didn’t take the softness and twist it into something sharp.

But that version of me died a long time ago. Maybe in a bunk under fluorescent lights. Maybe in a house where a mother played lover to a carousel of strangers. Or maybe he was never born at all.

All I know is this: I’ve been loved. Really loved. And I left every single one of them bleeding. Quietly. Elegantly. Sometimes suddenly. And I am utterly ashamed for it. I wish I could tell them how much I’m sorry.

And now I carry their ghosts like trophies. Not out of pride, but because they remind me of the man I might’ve been if I hadn’t learned so young that intimacy and being vulnerable is just another word for inevitable abandonment.

The truth is, I didn’t think I was hurting anyone. I told myself I was protecting them. Sparing them. That by retreating quietly, I was doing the noble thing. That vanishing slowly was somehow kinder than staying and failing.

But now I see it for what it really was: Cowardice wrapped in silence.

And because of someone just recently, I see now that I didn’t just hurt her—I made her question the softness she gave so freely. And for that, I carry a guilt that doesn’t speak, but lingers in cowardly silence. I wish I could say I’m sorry.