At some point in life, you become tired of convincing people. Not dramatically, and usually not after one final conversation in which you announce that from now on you will participate only in perfectly reciprocal relationships. It happens much more quietly. One day you simply notice that you no longer have the energy to explain why someone should make an effort, why a friendship should not depend entirely on you, why affection without action eventually becomes exhausting, or why being understood should not require a presentation complete with supporting evidence.
For a long time, I associated effort with care. If someone mattered to me, I tried. I reached out, explained, gave the benefit of the doubt, and considered what they might be going through. I wondered whether they were afraid, overwhelmed, emotionally unavailable, simply bad at communicating, or whether I was being too demanding by expecting clarity. There is something generous in that instinct, and I still believe relationships require patience. People are imperfect, timing is imperfect, and all of us occasionally disappear into our own lives. But there is a difference between making room for another person's humanity and building the entire relationship yourself. It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand that difference.
When Effort Becomes Maintenance
Some relationships continue not because they are mutually alive, but because one person keeps them alive. They send the message, suggest the plan, reopen the conversation, explain the misunderstanding, and create another opportunity for closeness. Remove that person's effort and the relationship becomes strangely quiet.
That silence can be difficult to accept because it reveals something we may have preferred not to know. We often tell ourselves that another person is busy, emotionally complicated, afraid, distracted, or simply different in the way they communicate. All of these things can be true, but they still do not change the reality of what exists between two people. I have become increasingly interested in the difference between explaining someone and experiencing them. We can understand someone beautifully and still not be met by them. We can know exactly why they struggle with intimacy, communication, or commitment and still be the person receiving the consequences of those struggles. Empathy helps us understand behavior, but it should not require us to pretend the behavior does not affect us.
There is a particular kind of emotional fatigue that comes from constantly translating another person's absence into something more hopeful. We become interpreters of silence. We find meaning in inconsistency. We examine small gestures for evidence that the connection is still there. At some point, the relationship exists less in what is happening and more in the story required to keep believing in it. That is often where chasing begins.
Chasing Is Usually More Subtle Than We Think
When we hear the word chasing, we tend to imagine something visible and slightly embarrassing: endless messages, repeated phone calls, someone obviously pursuing a person who has already said no. Most chasing is much more sophisticated than that. It can look like constantly being the one who keeps the emotional door open, making ourselves endlessly available while pretending we have no expectations, lowering a standard before the other person even asks us to, or spending extraordinary amounts of mental energy trying to understand someone who is giving us very little actual information.
We can stop contacting someone and still chase them internally for months. Attention is energy, and where we repeatedly place it matters. A relationship can occupy enormous space in our consciousness even when very little is happening in physical reality. We can spend hours wondering whether someone will understand eventually, whether they will realize what they lost, whether they will come back differently, or whether one more conversation would finally make everything clear.
This is why letting go is rarely only about contact. It is about withdrawing energy from the negotiation. We stop trying to reach the version of another person who might exist under different circumstances and begin responding to the person who is actually here. That shift can feel almost disappointingly simple after so much analysis, but reality often is simpler than the stories we build around it.
Resonance Does Not Require Constant Persuasion
In my book, Islands Within, I write about connection based on resonance rather than need. The idea is not that meaningful relationships require no effort. Every real relationship asks for attention, communication, and adjustment. The difference is that effort moves in both directions. We are not continually trying to persuade another person to participate in something that supposedly matters to both of us.
There is something profoundly peaceful about relationships in which nobody has to be convinced. We do not need to persuade someone to be curious about us, repeatedly teach them that communication matters, perform indifference to make them interested, or become more mysterious, attractive, unavailable, or strategically detached in order to create desire. We are not marketing campaigns.
There is a surprising amount of relationship advice built around becoming better at generating somebody else's interest. Wait longer before answering. Be less available. Create mystery. Make them miss you. Let them wonder. I understand the psychology behind some of it, but the older I get, the less appealing it becomes. I do not want to become more skilled at creating scarcity in order to manufacture desire. I want relationships in which interest does not require manipulation.
Being genuinely wanted is much quieter than trying to be irresistible.
Henri Gervex, Le Bal de l'Opéra (detail), 1886. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photo by Laura Achrem, August 2021.
Not Everyone Will Recognize You
One of the harder lessons of self-worth is accepting that knowing your value does not mean everybody else will recognize it. There will be people who misunderstand you, underestimate you, prefer somebody else, meet you at the wrong moment, or simply do not resonate with you regardless of how much work you have done on yourself.
This can be difficult to accept because self-development sometimes carries a hidden promise that if we become healed enough, confident enough, attractive enough, successful enough, or conscious enough, rejection will disappear. It does not. Becoming more yourself does not make you universally desirable. If anything, it often makes you less compatible with more people because your edges become clearer.
This is where real confidence becomes very different from performance. Performance wants to become so impressive that rejection becomes impossible. Confidence allows another person not to choose us without turning their choice into a verdict on our value. That is much harder, because it asks us to let people have their own perception of us without turning that perception into an emergency.
We Cannot Manage Other People's Perception Forever
There is a particular temptation to chase people who misunderstand us. We want to explain one more time, provide missing context, correct the version of us they have constructed, and finally make them understand what we really meant. Sometimes clarification is necessary. Mature relationships depend on communication, and misunderstandings should not automatically become endings.
But there comes a point when explanation turns into an attempt to control another person's perception. That is a battle we cannot really win.
People see us through their own history, desires, fears, and emotional capacity. Two people can experience the same person completely differently and both feel certain that their interpretation is obvious. We cannot manage ourselves into being correctly understood by everyone. Eventually, there is freedom in allowing some people to be wrong about us.
This becomes especially important when we notice how much energy goes into trying to repair an image that exists in somebody else's mind. We can spend days explaining ourselves to a person who has already decided what they want to believe. At that point, the problem is no longer communication. It is attachment to being understood.
Being Chosen Is Not the Same as Being Valued
Chasing is often connected to a much older desire: the need to be chosen. There is something incredibly seductive about changing someone's mind. If the unavailable person eventually chooses us, the rejection is repaired. If the distant friend finally makes an effort, our importance is confirmed. If the person who overlooked us eventually recognizes us, the story gets a satisfying ending.
But wanting to be chosen can keep us invested in people we would not necessarily choose ourselves if our ego were removed from the equation. One question has become increasingly useful to me: If I were not trying to win here, would I even want this?
Would I want this person if they had been available from the beginning? Would I admire the way they communicate if I were not attracted to them? Would I consider this friendship nourishing if I were not attached to its history? Would I work this hard to maintain the connection if I were not trying to prove that it mattered?
Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable because we are not always chasing the person. Sometimes we are chasing the feeling of finally being chosen by them. Those are very different desires.
Nobody Has to Become a Villain
One of the reasons letting go becomes unnecessarily dramatic is that we often believe we need to make someone wrong before we can stop wanting them. We search for evidence that they were selfish, avoidant, emotionally immature, or incapable of appreciating us. Sometimes those descriptions are accurate. Sometimes they are simply the mind's attempt to make separation easier.
But someone does not have to be a bad person for the relationship to stop deserving our energy. They can be interesting, kind, complicated, intelligent, and completely wrong for the life we are building. This has become one of the more peaceful realizations for me. I no longer need disappointment to become resentment before I allow myself to move forward.
We can understand somebody and still step away. We can wish them well and stop waiting. We can love someone and decide that love alone is not enough to create a shared life. We can appreciate what a relationship gave us without continually trying to extend its expiration date. Not every ending requires a villain. Sometimes there are simply two people who are no longer meeting in the same place.
Reciprocity Is Quieter Than Uncertainty
Healthy reciprocity rarely produces the same adrenaline as uncertainty. When we have become accustomed to relationships that require pursuit, steadiness can initially feel almost suspicious. There is nothing to analyze, no mixed message to decode, and no tiny shift in tone requiring an emergency meeting with three friends and a detailed review of the evidence. Someone simply behaves as though they want to be there.
For people accustomed to emotional unpredictability, this can feel less exciting at first. The nervous system sometimes confuses activation with chemistry. Waiting becomes tension, tension becomes attraction, and attraction begins to feel like depth. But there is another kind of connection that is much quieter. It is based on reciprocity rather than suspense. It does not require constant proof because both people are already participating.
This is close to what I mean when I write about resonance. Resonance does not mean two people are identical, nor does it mean perfect harmony or the absence of conflict. It means the relationship does not depend on one person continually dragging the other toward it. There is movement from both sides. That sounds obvious until we notice how many relationships survive without it.
When We Stop Chasing, Reality Gets Quieter
If we stop initiating, explaining, repairing, and maintaining everything, some relationships will disappear. Not necessarily because those people never cared. They may simply have become accustomed to a version of the relationship in which our energy compensated for theirs.
When we withdraw that energy, reality becomes visible.
This is why changing relational patterns can feel lonely before it feels freeing. We imagine that stronger boundaries will immediately attract wonderful new people, when often the first thing they do is reveal how much of our existing social world depended on us having very few boundaries at all. There may be fewer messages, fewer plans, and less noise. It is easy to interpret this as evidence that we were better off chasing.
We were not. We were simply busier.
Paul Burty Haviland, Florence Peterson, l'un de ses modèles favoris, c. 1914. Cyanotype. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photo by Laura Achrem, August 2021.
Space is uncomfortable when we are used to filling it with people who require us to overfunction, but space is also the condition in which something different can eventually become visible. We begin to notice who reaches out without being prompted, who remembers, who asks, who listens, and who is capable of meeting us without being continually pulled closer.
The Freedom of Letting People Choose
There is a particular freedom in letting people choose without trying to influence the answer. We allow them to come closer or move away, respond or not respond, understand or misunderstand, without turning any of it into a strategy designed to make them chase us instead.
This is not detachment as performance. It is respect for the fact that another person's choice belongs to them, just as ours belongs to us.
When we stop trying to control both sides of a relationship, we finally receive useful information. We discover what exists when our effort is no longer compensating for someone else's absence. Sometimes what remains is beautiful. Sometimes almost nothing remains. Both answers are valuable.
One of the ideas in Islands Within is that real connection begins where people can be themselves in one another's presence rather than constantly trying to persuade, control, or reshape each other. I have started to believe the same principle applies to letting go. There is dignity in allowing another person to be exactly who they are, even when who they are cannot meet us where we hoped they would.
Your Energy Has Somewhere Better to Go
The most significant change that happens when we stop chasing is not that other people suddenly start chasing us. That would still make them the center of the story. The real change is that our energy returns.
All the hours spent analyzing, all the imaginary conversations, all the attempts to understand why someone did or did not do something, and all the attention invested in whether they will finally move closer become available again. That energy can go into work, creativity, friendships that already feel mutual, the body, home, curiosity, travel, rest, or meeting people without secretly comparing them to someone who never fully arrived.
This is the part of letting go that interests me most now. Not loss, but reallocation.
There are only so many places our attention can live at once. When a disproportionate amount of it is occupied by someone who is barely participating in our life, we are paying an extraordinary energetic price for very little reality. Eventually that stops feeling romantic. It simply feels expensive.
The People We Stop Chasing
I no longer believe every meaningful connection needs to be pursued until it produces an answer. Some answers are already present in the pattern. Some relationships reveal themselves through what repeatedly does not happen.
There is no bitterness required in recognizing this. If anything, there is relief. We can stop trying to convince people that we are worth knowing, loving, choosing, understanding, or keeping close. The people who genuinely resonate with us may not always agree with us, may occasionally disappoint us, and may have their own complicated lives, but the relationship will contain movement in both directions. We will not have to create all of it ourselves.
The people who do not choose us are allowed not to, and that is the strange freedom at the center of self-worth. It eventually becomes less interested in winning. Instead of asking how to make another person see us, we begin asking whether we can see ourselves clearly enough to recognize when our energy belongs somewhere else. We stop turning hesitation into a project, misunderstanding into an emergency, and another person's capacity to recognize us into a measure of our value.
And when that happens, there may be fewer people to chase, but there is much more of us left to live our own life.
xx, Laura
If this note stayed with you, you might also like The Flowers I Never Waited For, on buying flowers for myself and what it taught me about love.
More on: Relationships · Psychology · Identity · Shadow
