At 40, I Have Stopped Expecting Love

Trigger Warning

This essay is deeply personal. It contains descriptions of emotional neglect, toxic relationships, verbal abuse, and experiences that may be triggering if you have lived through similar situations. Please read gently and take care of yourself.

I am 40 years old, and I do not believe that I will ever find my person or even partial happiness with a man. It sounds bitter when I say it out loud, but strangely it feels peaceful. There is relief in finally giving closure to all the relationships and hopes that never became anything real. It feels like I have stopped waiting for something that was never on its way.

Why do I think this way?

When I look back at the relationships I have lived through, and when I hear men admitting that they cannot even talk deeply with their own friends, I have to ask myself how any of them could have ever built a relationship with me. If they cannot talk about what is happening in their life or how they feel or where they struggle, how could they ever meet me where I am.

This is the list of men I let in, believing each time that something real could grow, and learning each time that it could not.

The first man

The first man was not the love of my life, but we cared about each other enough to move in together. On paper he was a university student with a part-time job. That was the story he told me, and the story I believed. In reality, every morning when he said he was heading to class, he was going to a full-time job while holding a student visa. I had no idea.

After a year he was caught and everything collapsed. Deportation, panic, chaos. And in the middle of all that, he turned to me and said it was my fault. That living with me had made him stop studying. That I made him depressed. As if I had created the whole mess he had been building with his own lies.

He never expressed feelings or deeper thoughts during the relationship. Everything stayed on the surface. He did not have the emotional capacity to tell the truth about anything, not even about himself. Looking back, it was a lucky escape.

The second man

The second man was my puppy love. I adored him in that pure and wholehearted way you can only love when you are young. I genuinely saw a future with him. But then, without warning, he started to pull away. No fight. No conversation. Just silence.

One day he simply turned off his phone. For a week I panicked, calling and texting and asking his friends what was going on. No one knew anything. No one said anything. Then, after seven days of nothing, he sent me a single text. It is over. That was it.

The third man

The third man was the kind of story people say only happens in movies. You walk into a bar, your eyes meet, and something inside you shifts before you even speak. But it actually happened. We fell for each other fast and hard. I was madly in love. He acted like he was too.

But he had a fiancée at home. She was pregnant with their baby. He chose not to tell me until the truth eventually surfaced. He let me fall without ever giving me the ground I needed to land on.

It left a crater in my soul.

The fourth man

The fourth man dismantled what little was left of my relationship identity. I was already wounded, and instead of healing, I found myself in another disaster. He was so insecure that he flirted with every woman he could find, even while standing next to me. His need for attention was endless.

Then came the insults. He told me I was ugly. He said that if I wore makeup, I was not beautiful, I was faking it. He compared me to random women on the street and told me their jeans would always look better on them than on me.

His words warped the way I saw myself. They chipped away at whatever fragile sense of worth I had left. And the worst part is that I believed him. That relationship did not just hurt me. It changed the way I saw myself.

The fifth man

I met the fifth man nine months after that breakup. I was sitting under a tree by a train station, waiting for a friend, when my dog walked up to him. He asked for my number. I wanted to believe this one was different. We moved in too soon. I fell in love too fast.

Then he started making comments about my desire to decorate our home, accusing me of being some spoiled girl from a wealthy family who thought nothing was good enough. Soon after, he said he had no money anymore. So I paid. For almost everything. Furniture. Holidays. Our life.

In return, he grew distant. We had nothing in common. I felt like a single woman sharing an apartment with someone who had already left emotionally.

After three years, I finally broke up with him. Days later he bought two apartments. All those years he had been saving money behind my back while I covered most things. And on top of that, he kept most of the furniture I had bought, claiming that since I had not paid rent to him, it was not really mine.

After the fifth man

After that relationship ended, I was completely broken. There was nothing left in me but shock and exhaustion. I felt like someone had emptied me from the inside out, and I had no other choice than to start piecing my heart together on my own. For a long time I expected a sixth man to appear from somewhere, like another chapter would simply arrive on its own. But no one came. Nothing happened.

Instead, something quiet and almost invisible started inside me. The healing began, and with it, every old trauma I had pushed down for years started to rise to the surface. One by one they appeared, demanding to be felt and understood. Some came as memories, some as physical reactions, some as emotional patterns I suddenly recognised for the first time. And slowly I realised that this was the turning point. My heart was going to be put back together, but only by me. Not by a man, not by a relationship, not by hope. But by me.

Why the pattern existed

So how did I stumble from one toxic man to the next? The answer lies in family dynamics and the atmosphere where you grow up.

If you are born into a family where there is love, stability, emotional regulation, and genuine care, you will almost always choose partners who reflect that same safety. It becomes your normal. But if you grow up in a home filled with chaos, fear, or emotional neglect, you will unconsciously choose partners who match that energy. Not because you want to suffer, but because it feels familiar.

Unfortunately, my own childhood home was extremely toxic. I did not learn what safety or love looked like. I learned how to survive, not how to feel held. And to give you an idea of the level of brokenness, I receive two messages a year from my family members. One on my birthday and one at Christmas. I have lived in Spain for eleven years and no one has ever visited me. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would even inform me if something drastic happened over there, but then again, I am not sure it would matter anymore. There is nothing left to repair, and I am genuinely at peace with that.

Growing up like that teaches you early to expect nothing from anyone, which is exactly how I walked into adulthood.

And when this is the foundation you come from, how could a healthy man even understand the level of neglect you have endured your entire life. It creates a gap that is almost impossible to bridge.

The men who show up are the ones who mirror where I come from, not where I want to go. And I do not know if healed men will ever approach me in this lifetime. That is something I have had to accept.

The strange reactions I get now

The funny part is that once you heal, something shifts. Toxic men glitch. They do not know how to approach someone who is no longer available for their chaos.

Some literally run to open doors for me, like their brain misfires and panic launches them into forced chivalry.

Some stand in the corners of restaurants or grocery stores, staring at me in the creepiest way, like they have never seen a woman before.

Some hand me business cards like mysterious invitations to something I have no interest in.

And others freeze or stumble over their own reactions, their whole nervous system glitching as if my presence pressed on a wound they did not know they had.

And all of this happens while I am doing absolutely nothing. I am not flirting. I am not inviting anything. I am simply existing in my peace, and somehow that triggers their internal alarms.

And what this has taught me is that emotional instability does not only appear in dating. It shows up in men everywhere, even in professional settings where it absolutely should not.

I learned that the hard way.

When I was trying to get funding for a business idea, I walked an investor around my area, explaining the concept and completely unaware that he had projected something else onto me. The moment he realised I had no romantic or sexual interest in him, something flipped.

His face changed. His tone changed. And he lashed out at me, saying angrily that I would open my legs for anyone who would give me funding.

It stunned and shocked me. It was the first time any man had directly called me a whore.

And it showed me something very important.

I have no built-in ability to recognise which men are emotionally safe, not even in business. And many men mix business and sex in their minds without even questioning it.

That moment became one of the clearest confirmations of why I no longer trust men to show up in healthy ways, anywhere.

The broken ones I feel drawn to

And of course, there are the broken men. The ones who are not toxic but carry wounds too similar to mine. These are the ones I sometimes catch feelings for. They look at me with quiet recognition, but then they panic, withdraw, glitch.

They do everything except ask me out.

I just sit and watch it unfold. No chasing. No hoping. I know how this story ends. Their wounds block anything real from ever happening.

Choosing peace

Healing did not bring me the love of my dreams. It brought something better. It brought peace.

I no longer need anyone to feel whole. I am happy alone. I am more balanced than I have ever been because I am no longer trying to survive someone else’s volatility. If I want to go to the movies, I take myself. If I want to walk by the sea, I go. If I want joy, I create it. For the first time, I have emotional safety in my life.

And even now, I am still decoding parts of myself. I read Carl Jung and try to understand the different reactions inside me, the shadows and survival instincts that still wake up sometimes. It helps. It gives me language for things I never had words for. It explains the fear, the patterns, the echoes of childhood. It explains me.

And another thing happens when you heal. Your friendships change. The people who once matched your level of chaos, who bonded with you through pain or trauma patterns, suddenly do not fit anymore. You lose friendships, sometimes quietly, sometimes abruptly, because you are no longer operating from the same wound. They cannot understand your calm. They cannot join you in your peace because they have not found their own.

And that is the strange beauty of it.

Peace creates peace. It also creates distance.

It removes people who are not meant for your next chapter. It leaves you with space rather than noise.

And in that space, I finally feel at home. Not the hardened version I had to be to survive my childhood. Not the desperate version I became inside those relationships. But the version who is soft and steady and safe within herself.

I can easily see myself living like this. Not because I have given up, but because I understand reality. Most people are not healed. Most people are not balanced. And I do not expect to find the love I once imagined.

I am at peace with that.

My only job now is to protect the life I have built. As long as I do that, I will be good. More than good. I will be whole.

The children’s song

While I was writing this, an old Finnish children’s song came to my mind. It is called Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen, and in English it goes something like this:

Twilight was already creeping over the land, Sunbeam Goldenwing Had just begun to fly past it, When she saw a little goblin Coming toward her. He had just risen from his cave.

They looked at one another, And in the goblin’s chest He felt a strange kind of blazing. He said: "You burn my eyes, But in my whole life I have never seen anything as beautiful as you! I do not mind if your glow blinds me — It is easy to travel in the dark. Stay with me, and to my home-cave I will show you the way, And make you my beloved!"

The sunbeam answered: "Dear goblin, Darkness would steal my life, And I do not wish to die. I must leave right away — If I do not fly toward the light now, I will not survive even a moment."

So the beautiful sunbeam left, But still, When the goblin wanders alone, He wonders why one of them is a child of light, And the other loves the night.