Loving someone without making them your only support
A late reply can unsettle an entire day when one relationship carries the weight of your whole life. Virtology asks how intimacy can grow without either person disappearing inside it.
By Isabella Becker · 12 min read
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
Forty minutes without a reply. You have read your last message three times, looking for the sentence that might have sounded wrong. You put the phone down, pick it up, and decide you will not check again.
When the answer arrives, it is ordinary. A meeting ran over. Nothing happened.
The relief is anything but ordinary. Your shoulders release. The afternoon becomes possible again. Something as small as a notification has restored a sense of safety that the rest of your life could not supply.
This scene does not prove that you do not love your partner. It asks a more useful question: how much of your ability to feel settled has come to depend on this one person's availability?
In Eduardo Casarotto's Virtology, that question opens a distinction between encountering another person and recruiting someone to hold together your entire sense of yourself.
The pattern is often visible in ordinary habits before it becomes visible in a crisis.
You check your partner's mood before you notice your own.
A disagreement unsettles several days, even after the practical issue has been addressed.
Friends, interests and activities that once mattered have quietly disappeared.
The thought of leaving feels more frightening than the unhappiness of staying.
You avoid raising a concern because the relationship seems unable to survive your honesty.
An evening alone becomes a long wait for the person who makes the evening feel bearable.
Any one of these can have several explanations. A recent loss, an unreliable partner, illness or a period of unusual stress can change how much support someone needs. The invitation is to examine a pattern, not to diagnose yourself from a checklist.
Look especially at what has become smaller. Did your world expand when you met, or has it gradually narrowed until nearly every source of meaning passes through the same door?
The mask belongs at the edge, not everywhere
The original essay uses an image of concentric circles. Strangers stand toward the outside. Trusted people occupy places closer to the center. What you reveal changes with the relationship.
There is nothing dishonest about this. A colleague does not need your entire emotional history. Privacy is part of discernment. The difficulty begins when the polished version of you remains on duty even where trust should make some honesty possible.
You can be physically close, share a home and know each other's schedules while still concealing the things that most need words: a fear, a limit, an uncertainty, a wish for affection that feels embarrassing to admit.
Then the relationship may contain a great deal of access and very little recognition. Someone sees your daily life but rarely meets the person living it.
Intimacy is not unlimited disclosure. No partner earns automatic access to every memory, device or private thought. Revealing more is meaningful when it is voluntary and sufficiently safe. If honesty brings punishment, the problem cannot be solved by demanding that the vulnerable person lower the mask further.
Two people, rather than one person and a mirror
Casarotto's ideal is a relationship in which the other becomes increasingly visible as a person in their own right. The Portuguese expression outro-realidade points toward that encounter with the real other.
You begin to distinguish their tiredness from rejection, their preference from an insult, and their opportunity from a threat to your importance. They can have an experience that is not primarily a statement about you.
This is an aspiration, not a claim that human perception can become completely free of history or interpretation. Everyone brings expectations. The work is to notice when an expectation has replaced curiosity.
Consider the difference between asking, “What was that experience like for you?” and silently asking, “What does that experience mean about my place in your life?” Both questions sometimes matter. Trouble begins when the second prevents you from hearing the first.
A mirror must return an image. A person can answer unexpectedly. Making room for that difference is one of the demanding parts of loving someone.
The reassurance that never quite lasts
The source describes a particular cycle: affection arrives, brings relief, and soon seems insufficient again. The next reassurance must do the same work all over again.
This does not mean that anyone asking for more affection is impossible to satisfy. A partner can be unavailable, dismissive or inconsistent. Real needs can remain unmet. Asking for reliable contact or greater mutual care is not automatically an expression of inner emptiness.
The question is narrower. When care is present and recognizable, can you take it in? Or does your attention immediately move to the next possible sign that it may disappear?
Virtology interprets some persistent reassurance seeking through an underlying sense of incompleteness. In Casarotto's philosophical account, another person's affection can temporarily cover that lack without resolving it. This is the author's explanation of a pattern, not an established biological cause of every difficult attachment.
It can nevertheless offer a useful distinction: your partner may be responsible for keeping a promise, while being unable to guarantee that you will never again feel uncertain about your worth.
Needing people is part of being human
The answer is not to become someone who needs nobody. Relationships provide comfort, practical help, affection and a base from which to explore the world. Mutual reliance can support freedom rather than undermine it.
The problem is concentration: one person becomes the only acceptable source of comfort, the only witness whose recognition counts, or the only reason your day feels meaningful.
A broad support network does not make a partner replaceable. Different relationships and activities can meet different needs. A friend may understand an aspect of your work. A walk may help you settle. A community may provide continuity. Your partner can remain deeply important without having to perform every role.
This matters particularly when illness, disability or caregiving makes practical dependence unavoidable. Receiving substantial assistance does not make love less real. The distinction concerns dignity, choice and the range of support available, not whether two people can live as completely independent units.
Three things that can look like the same need
The source separates three kinds of expectation that can become tangled inside a relationship.
An expectation of relief from inner lack. You hope another person will finally make you feel complete, permanently secure or beyond comparison. No ordinary act of affection can realistically promise all of that.
Concrete human needs. You need rest, companionship, tenderness, help or a conversation. These are specific enough to discuss. Physical and sexual wishes also belong in honest conversation, with consent and the other person's boundaries fully intact. Having a need never creates an entitlement to another person's body.
A sense of identity. Being chosen becomes the answer to “Who am I?” A change in the relationship then feels like the disappearance of the self, rather than a painful change in one part of life.
The same sentence can contain all three. “I need you here tonight” might mean practical help after an operation, a reasonable wish for closeness, or terror that being alone makes you insignificant. Sometimes it means a mixture. Specific language makes a more useful conversation possible.
Two ways of having no room in the middle
One arrangement contains many acquaintances and almost no intimacy. The calendar is full, yet nobody knows what the difficult week has actually been like. The outer circles are crowded and the center remains protected.
Another arrangement has the opposite shape. One person occupies the center and nearly everything around it. Friends fade, interests become shared by default, and a separate evening starts to feel like abandonment.
Neither arrangement tells the whole story of a person. They are pictures to think with. The point is to notice whether your relationships have room for different kinds of closeness.
Casarotto also uses the language of a fusion of the Self at the innermost point of intimacy. Read as a relational ideal, this describes profound openness and recognition. It should not be confused with literal loss of individuality, unlimited access or the disappearance of consent.
Being deeply connected can include keeping a separate friendship, disagreeing, closing a door, or needing time to think. Nor must every couple rank a partner above every friend in precisely the same way. The quality of trust matters more than winning a place in a diagram.
Wanting contact and enjoying contact are different questions
A person can spend the whole day longing for a meeting and feel tense or dissatisfied throughout it. The pursuit appears powerful; the actual encounter brings little ease.
Research distinguishes aspects of wanting from liking in reward processes. That distinction helps explain why motivation and enjoyment need not move together. It does not turn every intense relationship into an addiction or identify the cause of your attachment from a distance. Berridge and Robinson's account
Ask two separate questions: “How urgently do I seek this person's attention?” and “What is it like when we are actually together?”
Unpredictable availability can sometimes keep attention fixed on the next moment of relief. But predictability alone does not define love, and excitement is not evidence of dysfunction. The useful observation is whether anticipation repeatedly promises something that the relationship itself does not provide.
The capacity to be alone can grow inside connection
Donald Winnicott made the capacity to be alone the subject of a 1958 psychoanalytic paper. The idea belongs to a tradition that takes the experience of dependable presence seriously; it is not a celebration of emotional self-sufficiency. Original publication
For this essay, the practical question is whether some time with yourself can become tolerable and eventually nourishing, without constant escape into contact, performance or distraction.
It would be unfair to turn that aspiration into a rule that people who struggle alone cannot love. Distress, trauma and present circumstances can make solitude difficult. A capacity can be developing while affection is already real.
The source also distinguishes an existential sense of separateness from loneliness caused by inadequate connection. A relationship cannot live your inner life for you. It can, however, reduce loneliness and provide meaningful belonging. Those are different claims.
You do not need to stop missing someone. You need more possibilities than waiting for them to return before your own life can resume.
Unhurried time together
The source calls one expression of intimacy ócio do casal: unhurried time together, without a task that must justify it.
One person reads while the other sketches. There is no requirement to entertain, provide continuous reassurance or fill each silence. Attention can turn elsewhere without the bond having to be re-established every few minutes.
For some couples, this is an ordinary pleasure. For others, quiet shared time is uncomfortable, boring or unfamiliar. It is an invitation to explore, not a clinical test of relationship quality.
You might begin with ten or twenty minutes, by agreement, doing separate activities in the same space. Afterwards, ask what the experience was like. Did you enjoy the companionship? Were you waiting to be noticed? Did either person feel dismissed because the arrangement had never been made clear?
The conversation matters more than achieving a prescribed kind of silence. Being able to ask for contact is as important as being able to enjoy a little space.
Two observations, without testing your partner
Imagine your partner receives good news that will involve some time away. Do you notice pleasure for them, fear about the separation, or both?
A mixed first response is normal. It is not a secret verdict on whether your love is genuine. What becomes possible after that response matters: can you recognize the opportunity, discuss practical needs and speak about your worry without turning it into a prohibition?
The second observation concerns an ordinary, agreed period apart. What else supports you during that time? Do you have routines, relationships and interests that remain accessible?
Do not manufacture three days of silence or withdraw affection to discover how either of you reacts. Unexpected withdrawal can create the very distress it claims to measure. Use experiences that naturally occur, and make arrangements openly.
These questions are for understanding the organization of your life. They are not covert experiments on someone else's attachment.
Two weeks with a little more room
Recover two small parts of your own life.
Write down activities or connections that mattered before the relationship occupied so much space. Include modest things: a friend, a class, reading, movement, making something.
Choose two realistic activities, one for each week. Make room for them without treating the choice as a punishment or a declaration of independence.
Before, during and after each activity, write one sentence about your experience. Thoughts of your partner do not invalidate it. Notice whether anything else also becomes available.
If both of you want to, try a short period of unhurried shared time with separate activities. Talk afterwards about what helped and what felt difficult.
At the end of two weeks, compare ordinary moments. Has the relationship gained a little space? Can you make a request more clearly? What still needs support or an honest conversation?
A small return to your own interests may initially feel disloyal. That feeling is something to examine, not an instruction you must obey. A relationship can be important enough to deserve care and secure enough to allow two lives within it.
If your partner controls your friendships, money, movement or contact with others, this is not merely an exercise in becoming more comfortable alone. Seek confidential support appropriate to your situation. Persistent distress also deserves professional help; you do not have to solve it through willpower.
From the need to be chosen to Structural Americanism
This intimate question connects directly to God Bless America. Casarotto's concept of Structural Americanism examines a wider organization of value around recognition, comparison and external confirmation.
A partner can become another place where that logic operates: proof that you have succeeded, a witness who must continually certify your importance, or a possession whose independence feels like a loss of rank.
The connection is an interpretive invitation, not a claim that culture explains every attachment difficulty. It asks what changes when another person is no longer required to function as evidence of your value.
