Two in the morning. The other person is already asleep, or pretending to be, and somewhere across the city someone stares at the ceiling knowing, with a certainty that needs no proof, that they still love the one they swore they had gotten over.

It is not longing for the body. It is something else. It is the phone still sitting on the nightstand, screen up, waiting for a light that will not come on. It is the habit of leaving an empty space in bed, months after sleeping alone became the rule. It is the hand that, out of pure reflex, still reaches for a number long deleted from the contact list, though never from the one that matters.

I spent years working with networks. Lines, signals, repeater stations scattered across miles of road, towers that had to talk to each other without failing, because a single second of silence there meant an entire city cut off. I learned, in all that time, something no manual ever taught me: a line never drops all at once. It degrades. It loses quality bit by bit, crackles, stutters, disappears for a moment and comes back, until one day it simply does not come back at all. And even then, the equipment stays powered. Current still runs through the cable. The system, stubborn, keeps searching for signal where there is no network left.

Love does exactly that.

Nobody switches off from a love the instant the relationship ends. The body stays charged, the antenna keeps turning, hunting for that specific signal, at that specific frequency, that only one person in the world ever transmitted. And that is where the quietest kind of anguish lives, not the pain of loss, which at least has a name, but the discomfort of staying plugged into something that no longer transmits anything at all.

I keep thinking about how many people mistake this for weakness. They believe missing someone who hurt them proves they got something wrong along the way, that they should have moved on faster, that there is a correct schedule for heartbreak and they are behind on it. There is no schedule. What there is, instead, is a nervous system that spent months or years learning to associate safety with one specific presence, and now has to unlearn that the hard way, without a manual, without a deadline, without an emergency switch.

I came across a study recently that stopped me mid-sentence. Scientists found that during sleep the brain replays, at high speed, fragments of what we lived through during the day. A kind of nightly rerun, almost editorial, choosing what gets stamped in harder and what gets let go. Researchers managed, in the lab, to artificially amplify that mechanism, and the memory grew stronger whenever they did. In other words, there is, literally, an editor at work while we sleep, deciding what is worth keeping.

And here is the part that unsettled me. According to that same research, what tips the scale is not how intense the emotion was, it is the conscious intention to remember. The line that kept echoing in my head was simple: telling yourself “I want to remember this” weighs more, at the moment memory gets written down, than the feeling itself ever did.

Think about what that means for love.

How many times, in the middle of a good night, in a comfortable silence next to someone, has a person quietly told themselves, I want to keep this. And how many times, in the middle of a fight, of a humiliation dressed up as honesty, of an absence that hurt more than any shouting ever could, has a person also decided, without noticing, to record that with the same force.

We love and we suffer with the same machine. There is no part of the brain reserved for the good kind of affection and another for the bad. It is the same circuit, the same nightly editor, working both scenes with equal care. That is why we remember, with the same sharp clarity, both the day we were loved properly and the day we were wrecked by someone who swore to take care of us. And that is why it is so hard to separate the two memories when they live in the same person.

I think romantic anguish is born exactly on that blurred border between what we choose to keep and what we were forced to keep without asking for it.

There is a kind of love we choose to remember because it was good. And there is a kind we remember without choosing to, because the pain carved itself in too fast, too deep, before any consent was given. The trouble is that both live at the same internal address, often in the same person, sometimes on the same day. And so people spend years trying to understand why they miss someone who hurt them, as if feeling that proved the whole thing was a lie, when really it only proves the system recorded both signals at once, on the same frequency, without sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I want to sit with one point I consider central.

Nobody loves a whole person. We love an edited cut of them, shaped by that same nightly machinery that decides what stays and what fades. That is why two people who lived through the same relationship, so often, walk away holding completely different versions of it. One remembers the warmth, the closeness, the private jokes. The other remembers the silence, the pressure, the surveillance disguised as care. Both of them are right. Both edited the same story by different criteria, shaped by earlier stories that have nothing directly to do with that particular love at all.

That changes how I read couple fights, drawn-out breakups, reconciliations that should never happen and happen anyway, the same way every time.

It is not a lack of willpower. It is that the body, trained by years of shared life, keeps running the same emotional software, waiting for the same kind of response, even after the other person has changed their number, their city, their whole life.

Back to the network, to the towers, to the signal.

One thing I learned working with infrastructure is that there is a world of difference between a line that drops for good and one that stays unstable. The one that drops for good, hurts, but it resolves. You know you need to rebuild everything, find another route, another fiber path, another provider. The one that stays unstable is worse. It works just enough to keep you believing it still might. Signal comes through, hope kicks in, the signal drops again, you tell yourself it was just a glitch, you try again, it works for a moment, drops again.

There is a name for this in telecommunications. Progressive degradation. And it is, without exaggeration, the most precise description I have ever found for loving someone who cannot love you back with any consistency.

The anguish does not come from the ending. It comes from the instability. From never knowing whether the next signal will arrive with its old strength or whether it will be just one more flicker before the final blackout. And the body, worn down by the oscillation, learns to stay on alert around the clock, because letting the guard down might mean missing the exact moment the signal, against all odds, comes back.

I know brilliant people, competent, admired at work, who turn into this small, watchful version of themselves the instant the subject is love. Checking the phone before checking their own breathing. Memorizing the other person’s patterns like network protocol. Able to tell, just from the tone of the first message of the day, whether it will be a strong-signal day or a long-silence one. That is not weakness of character. That is adaptation. The organism learned, over months of instability, that survival there depended on staying constantly on standby.

The trouble is the cost of that standby.

Nobody lives well in a permanent state of alert. Not a network, not a body. A system that keeps searching for signal around the clock burns energy even in the moments when nothing is transmitting at all. Same with us. The person who lives with one eye on the other’s phone, trying to decode patterns, spends an enormous amount of emotional energy just keeping the antenna on, even in the stretches when nothing is being said, nothing is being promised, nothing at all is actually happening.

And then comes the question I find most uncomfortable of all.

Why do we choose to stay on standby for an unstable signal instead of switching the equipment off for good?

I do not have an easy answer. I have a suspicion.

I suspect there is, inside each of us, a kind of perverse comfort in instability. It keeps hope alive, and hope, even a painful one, is more bearable than the certainty of loss. As long as the signal keeps flickering, there is a chance it will come back strong, steady, final, the next time. The moment a line drops for good, that chance dies along with it. And some people would rather suffer through the flickering than face the grief of a certainty.

That suspicion followed me for years, until I noticed, listening to love stories in the room where I work, that instability was not the only reason. There were two distinct patterns of suffering underneath it. Two kinds of love that refuse to switch off.

The first is the love that never was. The relationship ended, only the truth is it had already ended long before, indifference, coldness, and neglect had been sitting where affection used to live for years. The breakup only put a name on what was already a done deal. Whoever lives through this does not suffer over the ending, they suffer over having believed, over having held on, over having mistaken crumbs for a banquet. The anguish here is having to prove to yourself that you were loved, even while knowing, deep down, that you were not.

The second is the love that was, only it was not enough. There was real feeling, real closeness, a genuine wish to be together. What was missing was the tools. Missing was the maturity to separate love from competition, to understand that giving ground is not weakness, to know that individual growth, when it refuses to talk to the other person’s growth, turns into a quiet contest. And the relationship, full of love, collapsed for lack of craft, for lack of knowing how to make love last in the daily grind. Whoever lives through this does not suffer over the loss of feeling, they suffer knowing the feeling was there, alive, and still was not enough to hold the relationship together.

The first leaves the feeling of having been deceived. The second, the feeling of having failed.

Both, in different ways, keep the antenna running. One because it needs an answer that will never come. The other because it believes that, wiser now, it could walk the same road again with a different ending.

There is another piece of this puzzle I only understood after years of handling network systems: redundancy. Every serious communication structure needs an alternate route, a backup path, in case the main line fails. That is basic, that is safety, that is the responsibility of whoever designs the thing.

The trouble starts when we bring that same logic into our affections and start keeping quiet, almost unconfessable emotional backup lines, just in case the main one drops for good. An old contact who never quite leaves the archive. A conversation kept lukewarm with someone who was never truly chosen, but who stays available, like the backup generator of a house that was never supposed to need one.

That is not betrayal, at least not in the most obvious sense of the word. It is fear dressed up as caution. And the side effect is a nasty one, because as long as an alternate route stays open, we never have to actually face the problem with the main line. Just reroute some of the traffic, ease the pressure, without ever fixing the instability at its source.

I have known plenty of people, myself included, in another chapter of life, who mistook this for emotional maturity. I thought keeping my options open was a sign of independence, of not depending on a single source of affection. I see it differently now. Keeping an emotional backup line is, more often than not, a sophisticated way of never truly committing to any single frequency, and of never feeling, at full intensity, what it costs when one specific signal is lost for good.

There is a real difference between having support, a healthy emotional network built from friendship, family, work, self-knowledge, and having an escape route disguised as an alternative relationship. The first strengthens the whole system. The second only postpones the collapse, and charges steep interest later, in the form of guilt, confusion, the constant sense of being halfway present in everything and fully present in nothing.

I want to offer another way of thinking about this.

What if romantic anguish were not a problem to solve, but a signal, in the most literal sense of the word, that something inside us is still trying to reach something that is no longer on the other end of the line?

Seen that way, the anguish is not weakness or emotional immaturity. It is information. It is the body speaking in the only language it knows, telling us that part of us is still waiting for a reply from a channel that whoever was on the other end already shut down. And the work, slow and painful, is not to silence that anguish in a hurry, it is to recognize which ghost is on the other end of the line. If it is the ghost of a love that never truly existed, the work is accepting that there was never a real transmission, no matter how much the body insists on searching for proof otherwise. If it is the ghost of a love that was mishandled, the work is forgiving your own immaturity and understanding that some stories, however beautiful they once were, do not need a second season.

Switching off for real is not an event. It is a reverse process of degradation, deliberate, almost handmade. It is turning the signal down bit by bit, until it stops going out on its own. It is stopping the checking, not because you stopped feeling, but because you decided that particular investment of energy has no return left in it.

There is a curious detail in that memory research that made me think about love all over again. They found that the conscious intention to remember weighs more than the emotion felt in the moment. Which means the opposite must also hold true: the conscious intention to let go carries weight too. That is not magic, not toxic positivity, it is simply recognizing that part of how we store things depends on a decision, not only on raw feeling.

That does not mean you can choose to stop feeling on command. It means there is a margin, narrow, difficult, but real, between what the body records by reflex and what the mind chooses to reinforce afterward. And it is in that narrow margin that every possibility of healing lives.

There is nothing romantic about staying on standby for someone who already left. There is courage in it, yes, but courage badly aimed, spending reserve energy on equipment that should already be unplugged.

The question I leave, with no closed answer, no formula, no recovery checklist, is this: how many antennas are you still keeping on, burning energy, waiting for a signal that may never come back with its old strength?

What if, just for today, you let yourself notice that without guilt, without rushing to fix it, simply recognizing how much it costs to keep everything running.

Maybe real love does not begin the moment someone shows up.

Maybe it begins the day we finally accept switching off what no longer transmits, whether because there was never a real transmission at all, or because the transmission got interrupted for lack of craft.

And in the silence that follows, only one question is left standing: which ghost are you still keeping powered on, the one that never existed, or the one that existed and never had the tools to last?

#relationships #romanticanguish #loveandhealing #emotionalbonds #emotionalhealth #marcellodesouza #marcellodesouzaoficial #coachingevoce

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