WHY DO I DO THIS???

There’s a kind of loneliness that people don’t talk about enough.

It’s the loneliness of being in a relationship with someone who is technically there, but somehow you still feel completely alone.Not single.Not free.Just… unseen.

When we first started dating, he told me he would eventually change his relationship status to “in a relationship.” It was a small thing, but it mattered to me. It meant acknowledgment. It meant I wasn’t a secret.

4 years later, my social media has pictures of our life. Little moments, memories, sweet paragraphs about the person I thought I was building something real with.

His page mostly has pictures of his truck.

When I once told him it hurt that he never posted anything for my birthday, our anniversary, or even wrote something small on my wall, he laughed it off. He said I was being stupid. He said he barely even used social media anyway, just Marketplace sometimes. He said expecting “mushy shit” online was dumb and that he simply wasn’t that kind of guy.

Fair enough, I thought.

Not everyone shows love publicly. People express things differently. So when I saw him commenting on a stranger woman’s Instagram post, I was honestly suprised. She had written something about feeling ugly. And there he was, jumping in to reassure her that she was “far from ugly.” Another time I saw him commenting on a completely different woman’s post. Someone he doesn’t even know. Saying that he was having a hard time with life, but her pictures reminded him that there was still beauty in the world.

Beauty.

He has never called me beautiful.

Not once.

Not privately.

Not publicly.

Not even in a quiet moment where it might have meant everything.

When I brought it up, he told me I was still stupid.He said he was just trying to make strangers feel better. He said he was just being nice.And that’s when something hit me that I think a lot of women eventually realize in relationships like this:

Why do strangers get kindness that the person who loves you the most has to beg for? Why is it so easy to offer reassurance, compliments, and empathy to people you don’t know, but the person who has stood beside you through everything gets dismissal, blame, and indifference? Why does the woman who has been loyal to you, supported you, sacrificed for you, and defended you, get treated like she’s asking for too much? There’s a certain kind of emotional cruelty in this dynamic. When someone constantly dismisses your feelings, you eventually start questioning whether your feelings are even valid.When someone refuses to acknowledge the good you’ve done for them, you start wondering if any of it ever mattered. And when someone blames you for everything wrong in their life, you start carrying weight that was never yours to begin with.The hardest part is that you keep trying.

You keep loving them.

You keep hoping that one day they’ll see you. That one day they’ll realize the loyalty that has been standing right in front of them.But hope can become a cage. Love should never feel like begging.You shouldn’t have to beg for kindness. Not from someone that youre in love with.You shouldn’t have to beg for recognition.You shouldn’t have to beg for the basic level of respect that strangers receive for free. At some point, the real question stops being: "Why won’t he treat me better?”And starts becoming:“Why am I still accepting less than I deserve?” Because loyalty is not supposed to be rewarded with lies.Love is not supposed to be rewarded with betrayal. And devotion is not supposed to be met with disrespect.The right person doesn’t make you compete with strangers for basic kindness.The right person sees you.They appreciate you.They don’t hide you, dismiss you, or make you feel small for wanting to be loved out loud. And the truth a lot of us learn the hard way is this:

If someone can go out of their way to make strangers feel valued....but can’t do the same for the person who has stood beside them through everything…

It says FAR more about them than it ever will about you.