TumbleDweeeb

Push Pull Love
The Description of a Specific Kind of Love
This is Me, #ThisIsMineEO
By: Emmitt Owens
(Index #02282026-03012026)

There’s a kind of love that nobody warns you about. Not the love that’s too cold or the love that’s too consuming … but the love that exists somewhere in between, pulling you in with everything it has and then pushing you back out before you can get too comfortable.
It’s not cruelty.
It’s not games.
It’s just the way some of us are wired, loving deeply but needing space to breathe, wanting connection but terrified of what it costs us when we let someone all the way in.
The push pull is exhausting to live inside of. You genuinely want someone there. You want the warmth, the conversation, the feeling of being chosen by another person. But then they get close … really close … and something in you shifts.
The walls go up without permission.
You go quiet.
You pull back.
And the person standing in front of you, the one you actually care about, starts to wonder what they did wrong when the truth is they didn’t do anything at all.
You just needed air.
You just needed to remember who you were before they got there.
What makes it hurt the most is that the people who love you through it … the ones patient enough to stay … rarely get the explanation they deserve.
They feel it as rejection.
They feel it as not being enough.
And you’re standing on the other side of the wall you built, wanting to tear it down, not always knowing how. Some people leave. Some people fight. Some people match your energy and pull back themselves, and then you’re both standing in the distance wondering how you got so far apart when all you wanted was to be close.
The push pull doesn’t make you broken. It doesn’t make you unlovable. It makes you someone who needs a very specific kind of patience … including patience with yourself. Because the goal was never to hurt anyone. The goal was always love. It just got complicated somewhere between the wanting and the having, between the need to connect and the need to survive.
And if you’ve ever loved someone like this, or been someone like this, you already know … it’s one of the loneliest feelings in the world, being afraid of the very thing you want the most.