Back When We Were Trying

Most love stories are written as if love must succeed in order to matter. If the relationship lasts, the Story is called romantic.
If it ends badly, the Story is called a mistake. The truth is much less tidy. Some of the most honest love stories are the ones that reveal how they ended.

This book is about those stories-the ones people do not usually write down. The ones that end with confusion, disappointment, awkward silence, or the quiet realization that something once important has simply come to an end. These are the relationships that did not last, the connections that unraveled, and the attempts at love that did not work the way we hoped.

Yet they are love stories all the same.

A balanced understanding of love must include the moments when love evolves into something unexpected, incomplete, or simply unable to continue. These stories deserve to stand beside the love stories we celebrate because they reveal something just as important about how human relationships actually work.

Many people grow up believing that if a relationship ends badly, someone must have failed. Either we were not good enough, the other person was not good enough, or the relationship itself was flawed from the beginning. One person becomes the villain while the other becomes the victim.

Real relationships are rarely that simple.

Love can be sincere and still not endure. Two people can care deeply about each other and still discover that they are not willing-or not able-to continue together. Sometimes love ends because circumstances change. Sometimes people change. Sometimes it ends for reasons neither person can fully explain. Too often, we are so busy assigning blame that we fail to recognize our own role in the ending. Each experience shapes how we understand connection and influences how we approach intimacy later on. Together they form what might be called our operational definition of love-the evolving understanding each of us develops about what love is, what it asks of us, and what it cannot always give.

The stories in this collection explore many forms of connection: opposite-sex relationships, same-sex relationships, relationships involving more than two people, and sometimes the experience of standing alone as one tries to understand what love means.

Love does not belong to one kind of relationship. It belongs to anyone willing to accept the risk that love demands. And trying, as it turns out, is often the most honest part of the Story. Over time, I have come to believe that the most useful definition of love may be this: to relinquish control and to offer in its place unconditional acceptance-without judgment, without comparison-and to promise to protect.

Protection can mean many things. Sometimes it is simple: walking through the world together, caring for one another, sharing ordinary moments. Sometimes it means remaining present when life becomes painful, offering comfort when disappointment appears, and doing our best to reduce the emotional harm that life inevitably brings.

But love, like the people who attempt it, is not perfect. There are moments when we discover that we cannot continue in the same way we once promised.

Until we don't.

And when that moment arrives, we are left with something difficult but necessary: the responsibility to reassess, to change direction, and to carry forward what we have learned about love into whatever comes next. Because even the love stories that end badly still help us understand what love is.