Vachon Imagined

When love is a game, it becomes hard.

People pretend they don’t want affection, attention, praise, or tenderness. They pretend they don’t need love, comfort, support, or correction. But we all do. I do. You do. It is human.

And those who truly love us will sometimes discipline us. Discipline doesn’t always look like staying. Sometimes it looks like leaving after we’ve tried everything we can to be seen, loved, understood, or appreciated.

This has no gender or creed. It is human.

We all need love, and when we don’t receive it consistently, we develop interesting ways of shutting down, not only to love, but sometimes to life itself.

Those who genuinely love you and remain committed to you are often practicing good discipline. They respond rather than react. They correct rather than punish. They don’t abandon you at the first sign of difficulty, but neither do they enable what is destroying you.

When someone has become accustomed to love being unreliable, hurtful, or false, they can develop patterns that become almost addictive, and strangely, the world often praises these patterns.

Ghosting is one of them.

But when a person develops self-control, something changes. You cannot manipulate them into loving you, nor can you force them to stop. Love doesn’t work that way.

Love welcomes. Peace confronts. And peace moves through everything.

When someone leaves, it may be the opportunity you needed to grow closer to God—to be taught your own ways, your own patterns, your own defenses.

Because sometimes we cannot learn while everyone is standing around us.

We learn when everyone leaves.

When there is no one left to blame, fix, chase, or convince, we are finally left with ourselves.

And this is where we begin to understand love differently.

When love stops becoming a game, a performance, or even human, it becomes something else entirely.