Was it love or trauma?

When I look back now, I no longer ask whether it was love.
I ask what kind of love it was — the kind that expands you or the kind that consumes you.
The kind born in safety, or the kind forged in survival.

Because when two people come from families where love was mixed with control, approval with fear, tenderness with shame, the nervous system learns a strange rhythm:
if it’s calm, it must be fragile; if it’s intense, it must be real.

So when we met, something in me recognized him instantly — not from this life, perhaps, but from the emotional landscape I already knew.
That ache of vigilance. That longing to be chosen and the fear of what being chosen costs.
Our chemistry wasn’t just attraction — it was recognition.
My nervous system whispered, “This feels familiar. This must be love.”

At the beginning, there was truth in the warmth.
There always is.
We shared wonder, laughter, the fragile tenderness of two people trying to rewrite their pasts through each other.
But beneath it, we were both negotiating ghosts.

He needed to be validated of his self image — the child whose existence depends on the superiority defined by the dominant parent, so he doesn’t become the parent who was erased. 
I needed to be safe — the child who learned to earn love by anticipating everyone’s moods.
We were both trying to finish unfinished sentences from our childhoods.
We mistook healing each other’s wounds for intimacy itself.

And in that mix of need and devotion, real affection bloomed — but so did dependency.
Every reconciliation felt like salvation.
Every misunderstanding felt like death.
That is the chemistry of trauma love: the high of relief mistaken for the depth of connection.

There were moments of real love — of course there were.
The way he made me laugh when life was impossible.
The way we dreamed together, for a while, of a gentler future.
But real love needs air.
And we, afraid of losing each other, built a house where neither could breathe.

The bond that kept us together wasn’t peace; it was hope.
The hope that this time, love could fix what it once broke.
That if I stayed long enough, forgave deeply enough, he would become the man I sensed inside him.
That if I understood him perfectly, I would finally be safe.

That’s the hidden contract of a trauma bond:
each person promising to be the parent the other never had.
And each breaking the promise simply by being human.

It took years to understand that it wasn’t my foolishness that kept me there.
It was my loyalty — to love itself, to the possibility of redemption.
I stayed because I loved.
I left because I finally learned that love isn’t meant to hollow you out.

Now, when I grieve the decades lost, I remind myself:
they weren’t wasted; they were training.
I was learning the language of real safety, the one I never heard growing up.
Learning to tell the difference between calm and emptiness.
Between passion and re-enactment.
Between being needed and being known.

So, was it love or trauma?
It was both.

It was love that tried its best inside the only story we knew.
It was love that mistook intensity for truth because peace felt so foreign.
It was love that began as a promise to save each other and ended as a mirror showing what still needed saving within ourselves.

And maybe that’s enough — to honor it not as a mistake,
but as the first draft of the kind of love that no longer hurts to hold.