THE TYRANNY OF HOPE: WHEN WAITING FOR THE RELATIONSHIP TO CHANGE BECOMES COMPLICITY WITH ONE’S OWN SUFFERING

There is an illusion so deeply rooted in human experience that few dare to question it: the belief that love, in itself, transforms. That it is enough to wait, to understand, to forgive one more time—and the person beside you will finally become what you always knew they could be. This belief is not naive. It is dangerously sophisticated, neurologically reinforced, and culturally celebrated as the supreme virtue. To call it hope would be too generous. In truth, it is a refined form of complicity—a mechanism through which we become accomplices in our own imprisonment.
Because abusive relationships do not thrive solely on explicit violence. They thrive, above all, on chronic hope—that unshakable faith that “this time it will be different,” that “after the holidays he will change,” that “in the new year she will finally value me.” Hope, in this context, ceases to be a virtue and becomes relational anesthesia: a way to temporarily interrupt pain without ever treating the wound that causes it.
Schopenhauer was right when he stated that human beings are guided in their pursuit of happiness not by reason, but by illusion. In abusive relationships, this illusion takes a specific form: projective illusion. You do not see the person in front of you—you see what they could be if only they changed, if only they wanted to, if only they loved you the way you deserve. And in this endless projection, you lose sight not only of who the other truly is, but also of who you are becoming by remaining.
This text is not about relational optimism. It is about the tyranny of hope—and about how to reclaim sovereignty over one’s own affective life before the next empty promise arrives.
When Hope Replaces Action
Saint-Exupéry wrote that happiness can only be found in the warmth of human relationships, that only a good friend can take us by the hand and set us free. The phrase is beautiful. However, he did not foresee the question that haunts millions today: what if the hand that should liberate is precisely the one that imprisons? And what if the warmth of human relationships burns, hurts, leaves invisible scars that no one else sees—except you, in the silence of the early hours, when hope finally tires and the body screams what the mind insists on denying?
The philosopher Simone Weil made a devastating distinction between true attention and projective illusion. True attention demands that you see the other exactly as they are—with their limitations, their choices, their repeated patterns. Projective illusion, on the other hand, is the fantasy you construct about who the other could be if only circumstances changed, if you loved better, if you were more patient, more understanding, more silent in the face of violence disguised as a “difficult moment.”
Iris Murdoch, the Irish philosopher and novelist known to few, called this consoling fantasy: the narrative we construct to endure the unbearable. “He’s going through a phase.” “She’s not really like that.” “Once he gets that job, everything will improve.” “In the new year, we start from scratch.” These phrases are not hope—they are chronological anesthesia applied to relationships. They work exactly like New Year’s promises: they offer temporary relief, activate reward circuits in the brain, and ensure that absolutely nothing truly changes.
Because there is a perverse neurological component in this dynamic: the nucleus accumbens, a brain structure involved in reward anticipation, releases dopamine not when you receive love, respect, reciprocity—but when you imagine that you finally will. The promise of change is enough to trigger pleasure. “This time he really promised to stop.” “She said she realized how much she hurt me.” Your brain receives the dose of anticipated satisfaction and, with that, loses a significant part of the urgency to act.
You become addicted to the promise, not the practice. Addicted to hope, not real transformation. All of this returns to the same point: hope, here, is not virtue—it is a sophisticated mechanism for maintaining the sickening bond, sustained by dopaminergic anticipation, cognitive denial, and existential postponement.
And meanwhile, the cycles of promise-disappointment repeat. Emotional violence—subtle, invisible, always denied—continues to erode your self-esteem. Gaslighting makes you question your own perception of reality. Control disguises itself as care. Manipulation dresses as vulnerability. And you, exhausted, continue waiting. Because chronic hope in abusive relationships is not virtue—it is a psychic survival strategy. It is the way you have found to avoid facing the unbearable truth: that perhaps you need to leave. That perhaps there is no possible salvation for something that was never truly love.
When Waiting Imprisons
Gaston Bachelard, the French phenomenologist whom few read today, dedicated his life to studying how we inhabit spaces—not only physical, but affective. He created the concepts of topophilia (affection for places) and topophobia (fear disguised as attachment). In abusive relationships, we live a specific form of relational topophobia: the fear of leaving disguised as love that remains.
The “affective home”—that relationship which should be refuge, security, a place where you can let your guard down—becomes a prison. You walk on eggshells within your own relationship. You measure words. Avoid topics. Anticipate moods. Adjust behaviors to avoid triggering anger, coldness, temporary emotional abandonment disguised as “I need some time.” You inhabit the relationship as one inhabits enemy territory—always alert, always on defense, never at peace.
Edith Stein, the German philosopher and phenomenologist, studied the nature of empathy in depth. She made a crucial distinction: true empathy is a rigorous cognitive act—you understand the other’s suffering without dissolving into it. However, in abusive relationships, empathy transforms into self-annihilation. You feel so much for the other—their pains, their wounds, their justifications—that you stop feeling for yourself. You dissolve. Lose boundaries. Your pain becomes less important than the pain of the one who hurts you. And thus, paradoxically, you care for the one who makes you ill while neglecting your own emotional health.
Neuroscience confirms what these philosophers intuited: chronically waiting for change in a relationship that does not change activates the same neural circuits as generalized anxiety. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis persistently releases cortisol. The body enters a state of chronic alert. Muscle tension settles in the shoulders, jaw, stomach. Sleep fragments. The default mode network—the neural network responsible for autobiographical narratives—runs in an infinite loop: “Will it change? What did I do wrong? If I’m more patient, maybe…”
You are not just tired. You are existentially exhausted. Because living while waiting for the other to change is living perpetually suspended between “how it was before” (the idealization of the beginning) and “how it will be after” (the promise that never arrives). And in this suspension, you are never here—fully present, inhabiting the reality of the relationship as it is now.
The most insidious emotional violence is not the one that shouts. It is the one that whispers: “You’re overreacting.” “I never said that.” “You’re too sensitive.” “If you really loved me, you’d understand.” Gaslighting is the art of making you doubt your own sanity. And the more you doubt yourself, the more you cling to the hope that the other will finally validate your perception, acknowledge the damage, change.
This hope is the prison.
The Moment You Stop Waiting
Emmanuel Levinas, the Lithuanian philosopher who revolutionized contemporary ethics, proposed that we are infinitely responsible for the Other. Ethical responsibility arises even before freedom—you are responsible simply because the Other exists before you. It is a powerful idea. However, in abusive relationships, this non-reciprocal responsibility becomes an existential trap.
You feel eternally responsible for the well-being, happiness, transformation of someone who never assumes responsibility for you. You carry the weight of the relationship alone. You go to therapy to “improve communication” while the other refuses to acknowledge there is a problem. You forgive infinitely because you “understand”—while your own wounds are never even seen.
Gabriel Marcel, another French philosopher forgotten by the mainstream, made a fundamental distinction between problem and mystery. Problems are issues that can be solved with method, analysis, technique. Mysteries are realities in which we are immersed—we cannot solve them because we are part of them.
Abusive relationships are often treated as problems to solve: “If I change my approach…” “If I read more about non-violent communication…” “If we go to couples therapy…” However, some relationships are not problems. They are mysteries that demand rupture, not solution. The way out is not finding the right key—it is recognizing that you are trying to open a door that never existed.
And here lies the radical turning point: the reconquest of relational sovereignty. It is not about completely abolishing hope—it has an adaptive function when applied to contexts that can, in fact, change. It is about shifting power: stopping waiting for the other to finally see you, value you, respect you—and starting to act from who you are, not from who the other could become.
It is about recognizing that transforming a relationship requires movement from both parties. And if only one person is doing therapy, reading, reflecting, changing—while the other remains untouched, denying, blaming—then there is no relationship. There is monologue disguised as dialogue.
The question that T.S. Eliot left us echoes here with devastating force: there is no greater agony than the agony of living an inauthentic life. Relationships sustained by empty hope, by promises that never fulfill, by idealized versions that never materialize—these are devolved relationships. You are physically present, ontologically absent. You perform love while dying inside.
And the question no one wants to ask, but which can no longer be postponed, is this:
If this relationship had to continue exactly as it is today—without changes, without promises, without the hope that “one day it will be different”—would you accept it?
Not the idealized relationship you “could have.” Not the romantic version from the beginning that you revisit so often. This relationship. Now. Exactly as it is.
If the answer is no—if there is fear, exhaustion, or the clear sensation that you are dissolving—then the hope you cultivate is not virtue. It is complicity with your own imprisonment.
Relational Sovereignty Protocol:
Identify the signal of relational saturation.
Do not justify it. Do not relativize it. Feel it in the body as irrefutable evidence that something is profoundly wrong. It may be tension in the stomach upon seeing a message from them. It may be the fear of contradicting. It may be the sensation of walking on eggshells in your own home. It may be the exhaustion of always explaining, always apologizing, always being the one who yields. The body knows before the mind allows itself to accept.
Map the micro-decisions that sustained the pattern.
Without self-pity. Without victim narratives—but also without paralyzing guilt. Name them precisely: they were choices made under emotional coercion, under fear of abandonment, under illusory hope. You silenced when you should have shouted. Accepted empty apologies as if they were real changes. Prioritized superficial peace over necessary truth. Automatically repeated what you never examined with radical honesty.
Execute the incongruent action. Now.
Just one. Small enough to be immediately viable. Large enough to break the chain of submission to the abusive pattern. Do not promise to do it after Christmas. Do not plan for the new year. Do it now. Say no without elaborate justification. Set a clear boundary. Seek professional help. Talk to someone trusted whom you have been avoiding out of shame. A single incongruent action already initiates the process of recovering authorship over your own life—something grandiose promises never achieve.
Repeat in continuity.
John Schaar, the sociologist, said something devastating: the future is not a place we are going to, but the place we are creating. The path to it is not found, but built—and the act of building it changes both the builder and the destination.
Your relational future will not be different because the calendar turned. It will be different because you decided to build it differently—choice by choice, boundary by boundary, truth by truth spoken aloud.
And here Philip Chesterfield offers us the final principle: firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary elements of character. Without it, even genius wastes its efforts in a labyrinth of inconsistencies. Applied to relationships: without firmness, you will wander eternally in the labyrinth of chronic hope, repeating the same cycles, believing the same promises, dying slowly within a relationship that was never home.
Simone Weil left us a phrase that few truly understand: “Love does not console; it transforms.” If what you live consoles you with promises, with sporadic moments of tenderness amid long periods of coldness, with elaborate excuses that never become concrete change—then that is not love. It is projective illusion disguised as relationship.
It is existential authorship that dies when we cease to assume that no external force—time, technique, unilateral therapeutic discourse, or symbolic milestone—can replace confronting the truth. There are relationships that do not enter crisis because something went wrong, but because they never constituted themselves as an ethical space of encounter. What we call hope, in these cases, is merely the organized postponement of lucidity.
The affective life you live is not something that happens to you. It is something you build—or allow to be destroyed—choice by choice, silence by silence, forgiveness by forgiveness given without received remorse. And this construction does not happen in grandiose moments of revelation. It happens in the imperceptible accumulation of instants where you decide: I deserve to be treated with dignity, and if this relationship does not offer that, then it does not deserve my permanence.
Christmas is just a few days away. And you know exactly which conversation you have been postponing, which boundary you need to set, which truth you need to say aloud. Give this to yourself as a gift!
The question remains, implacable, inescapable: would you live this relationship forever, exactly as it is today?
If the answer is no, then you know what needs to be done.
There are no more prayers, priests, or pastors; no gurus, miracles, and certainly no magic that will do this for you. There are no therapists who will heal those who refuse to change. There is no new year that will erase patterns you continue to allow. There is only you, here, now, deciding whether you will continue to be complicit in your own imprisonment—or whether you will finally reconquer sovereignty over your own life.
Not in January. Not after the holidays. Now.
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