She could find fault with every sunrise, locate the flaw in every compliment, transform every achievement into evidence of her inadequacy. Watching her dismiss her own brilliance was like watching someone burn money—wasteful, painful, seemingly compulsive. I loved her completely, but I was drowning in the impossible equation of trying to love someone more than they hated themselves.

Every “you’re beautiful” I offered met her “you’re just being nice.” Every “you’re talented” crashed against her “I’m a fraud.” Every “I love you” was filtered through her conviction that I must be either lying or temporarily confused about who she really was. The compliments I meant sincerely became evidence of my blindness, proof that I didn’t truly see her, because if I really saw her—saw her the way she saw herself—I would recognize the worthlessness she believed was her fundamental truth.

Loving someone who can’t love themselves is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in the bottom. No matter how much you pour in, it never stays full. The love drains away as quickly as you can provide it, not because it isn’t real or powerful, but because it can’t be held by someone who fundamentally believes they don’t deserve it. I would spend hours reassuring her, convincing her of her value, listing her strengths, and by morning she would have forgotten everything I said, the self-hatred rushing back in to fill the space my words had temporarily occupied.

The weight becomes crushing—not just witnessing their pain, but feeling responsible for healing it. You start believing that if you could just love them harder, better, more convincingly, you could override their self-hatred. You become a therapist without training, a healer without tools, a savior in a story where salvation requires work only they can do. I read articles about building self-esteem, learned techniques for cognitive reframing, tried to model self-compassion, as if I could love her into loving herself through sheer force of will and strategic intervention.

But here’s the cruel mathematics: your love, no matter how pure, cannot solve an equation they’re constantly rewriting. For every piece of evidence you provide of their worth, they generate ten counterarguments. For every moment of acceptance you offer, they produce hours of self-condemnation. I would point to her accomplishments and she would explain why they didn’t count. I would mention how others admired her and she would insist they were being polite. I would hold her and tell her she was enough and she would pull away, unable to accept affection she believed she hadn’t earned.

The most heartbreaking realization is that their inability to love themselves isn’t about the amount of external love available—it’s about the internal war they’re fighting with voices you can’t hear, with histories you can’t change, with wounds that opened long before you arrived on the scene. Her self-hatred had roots that went deeper than our relationship, deeper than anything I could reach. It was built from childhood experiences I could only glimpse, from accumulated rejections I hadn’t witnessed, from messages about her worth that had been internalized so completely they felt like truth rather than opinion.

You begin to lose yourself in the futile mathematics, sacrificing your own emotional needs to focus entirely on theirs, thinking that if you can just be patient enough, understanding enough, loving enough, you can teach them by example how to treat themselves kindly. I stopped talking about my own struggles because hers seemed more urgent. I suppressed my own needs because hers seemed more desperate. I abandoned my own boundaries because setting them felt cruel when she was already suffering. I became so consumed with trying to save her from herself that I forgot to maintain myself.

But love cannot be a curriculum in self-acceptance. It cannot be a one-person campaign to convince someone of their own value. Love can witness, support, and encourage, but it cannot do the internal work that self-love requires. I could sit with her pain but I couldn’t feel it for her. I could suggest therapy but I couldn’t do the therapy for her. I could love her but I couldn’t force her to love herself. The equation was impossible not because love wasn’t enough, but because love from outside can never substitute for love from within.

The hardest lesson is learning that sometimes loving someone means accepting your powerlessness to heal them, setting boundaries around your own emotional well-being, and understanding that their relationship with themselves will determine the health of your relationship with them more than any effort you make. I had to learn that staying in the relationship while sacrificing my own mental health wasn’t noble—it was unsustainable. That watching someone self-destruct while feeling responsible for preventing it was destroying both of us. That love without boundaries becomes martyrdom, and martyrdom helps no one.

Tonight I honor both the beauty and the impossibility of loving someone who struggles to love themselves—and I acknowledge that the most loving thing I can do might be to step back enough to let them find their own path to self-acceptance. Not because I stopped loving her, but because I finally understood that my love, however genuine and powerful, could not be the solution to a problem that existed within her relationship with herself. The equation was impossible because I was trying to solve it from the outside when the variables could only be changed from within. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is release someone to do their own work, to fight their own battles, to learn that their worth doesn’t depend on someone else believing in it. And sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is recognize when staying means drowning together instead of swimming separately toward shore.