It hurts. 

Let's not pretend otherwise.
The Margin | I can't choose you
Being somewhere you don't feel you belong. Being around people who take more than they give. Feeling unwanted. Feeling unseen. These are real aches, and there is no philosophy sharp enough to cut through them without first sitting with them for a moment.
 
So let's sit.
 
There is a girl I once loved. Her name was Nicky.
 
We studied together, laughed together, failed exams together. The feeling grew slowly and then all at once — the way these things do — until I couldn't hold it anymore. I told myself she already knew. I told myself she felt it too. I had already built a home for her inside my chest before I ever said a word.
 
When I finally told her, she looked at me with something that wasn't cruelty — which somehow made it worse.
 
"I love you," she said. "But not the way you want me to."
 
She said I was kind. She said I had good energy. She said she enjoyed being around me. And then she said the sentence I still carry: "I can't choose you."
 
I can't choose you.
 
Four words. And the strange thing is that she wasn't wrong. She wasn't cruel. She was just honest — and honesty, when it closes a door you thought was open, feels like its own kind of violence.
 
I went home that night and I turned those words over and over. Not to find a way around them. Just to understand them.
 
Here is what I've come to believe, slowly, imperfectly, and still with some bruising:
 
Love is not a transaction.
 
We treat it like one. We give expecting return. We wait for the account to balance. When it doesn't, we send the long message. We pull away. We call it disrespect. We recast the person we love as someone who wronged us — simply because they couldn't love us back at the same volume.
 
But that is not love. That is a contract we wrote alone and handed to someone who never signed it.
 
Real love — the kind worth carrying — is a posture, not a transaction. It is what you bring to the relationship, regardless of what returns. It does not diminish because it goes unreturned. It does not become foolish because the other person couldn't meet it.
 
The measure of love is not whether it was received. The measure is whether it was real.
 
And here's the proof I keep returning to:
 
Jesus loved people who mocked him. People who spat on him. People who, in the end, crucified him. He did not stop because the love wasn't returned. He did not revise his love downward to match what was given back. He simply continued — because that is what love actually is when it is stripped of all expectation.
 
If you're a Christian, you know this already. And if you're not, it still stands as perhaps the most radical definition of love ever lived: to give fully, knowing nothing is guaranteed in return.
 
So what do we do with people who can't choose us?
 
We keep loving them — not desperately, not clinging, not sending the message at midnight hoping it lands differently this time. But genuinely. From a place of wholeness rather than hunger.
 
The hurt is not a sign that something went wrong. It is a sign that something was real. That you were real. That your heart still works, still reaches, still risks — and that is not weakness. That is the whole point of being human.

You loved Nicky. Or whoever your Nicky is. And it hurt because it was true.
Nothing about that needs to be fixed.

Let the love stand on its own. Let it exist without needing a destination. Let it be enough that you were capable of it — because not everyone is.
 
Is there anything wrong with being real, and being open, and caring for the ones you love?

No. There isn't.

That's expected of us. That's the whole point.