I thought love was two broken people finding their missing pieces in each other, but I learned that broken plus broken equals more broken, not whole. I thought relationship was about completing each other, filling gaps, becoming one person with two bodies. I thought the math was simple: half plus half equals one.
But healthy relationships don’t follow that equation. They follow different mathematics entirely: whole plus whole equals something greater than either could be alone.
The day I learned this, I was sitting across from someone I loved deeply, realizing that neither of us was healthy enough to create the relationship we both wanted. We were two people drowning who kept expecting the other to be the life preserver, two emotional refugees seeking asylum in each other’s brokenness, two incomplete people trying to math our way into completeness through addition rather than multiplication.
We had confused neediness with love, dependency with devotion, the inability to be alone with the desire to be together. We thought our mutual dysfunction was evidence of how perfectly we fit, when it was actually evidence of how similarly we were broken.
I had to learn the hardest lesson of relational mathematics: you cannot give what you don’t have, cannot offer stability from your own chaos, cannot provide emotional safety while living in emotional danger. Love is not a rehabilitation program where two people fix each other through proximity and good intentions.
Healthy relationships require healthy individuals—not perfect people, but people committed to their own growth, aware of their own patterns, responsible for their own healing. People who choose each other from abundance rather than scarcity, from wholeness rather than emptiness, from desire rather than desperation.
This doesn’t mean you have to be completely healed before you can love or be loved. It means you have to be actively engaged in your own healing, honest about your own work, willing to take responsibility for the emotional temperature you bring to every interaction.
The relationship becomes a place where two whole people choose to share their wholeness, where growth happens alongside each other rather than dependent on each other, where love multiplies health rather than divides dysfunction between two people who hope someone else will solve what only they can solve.
Maybe the real question isn’t “Are we right for each other?” but “Are we each right for ourselves?” Because the mathematics of love work best when the numbers being added are already complete.