You Can’t Save People Who Love the Struggle
I threw lifeline after lifeline to someone who kept cutting the rope, extending hand after hand to someone who preferred treading water to swimming to shore. For three years, I exhausted myself trying to rescue someone who had made peace with drowning, who found familiar comfort in the struggle, who mistook my urgency for his salvation as proof of love rather than evidence of my inability to watch someone choose their own destruction.
The realization came when I found myself underwater too, pulled down by the weight of someone else’s refusal to be helped. I had become so focused on his rescue that I had forgotten my own need for air, so committed to his survival that I was suffocating in the process.
You cannot save people who don’t want to be saved. This truth feels cruel because it contradicts everything we believe about love’s power, about determination’s ability to overcome any obstacle, about the possibility that caring deeply enough can change someone who doesn’t want to change.
But salvation requires collaboration. It demands that the drowning person grab the lifeline, kick toward shore, choose rescue over the familiar rhythm of sinking and surfacing. When someone prefers the drama of near-drowning to the responsibility of swimming, your lifelines become props in their performance rather than tools for their rescue.
The hardest part is recognizing that some people have built their entire identity around being saved, around the attention that crisis provides, around the dynamic where someone else is always responsible for their wellbeing. They don’t want solutions—they want saviors. They don’t want to change—they want to be changed by someone else’s effort.
I had confused enabling with helping, codependency with love, exhaustion with dedication. I thought my willingness to sacrifice myself proved the depth of my caring, when it actually proved the depth of my confusion about where I ended and they began.
Learning to let someone sink who refuses to swim feels like the opposite of love, but it’s actually love’s most mature expression. It’s loving someone enough to let them face the consequences of their choices, to experience the discomfort that might motivate change, to take responsibility for their own rescue.
Tonight I practice the difficult art of loving without saving, caring without controlling, offering help without demanding it be accepted.