The Saddest Kind of Happiness: On Love, Loss, and the Boulder We Carry

There’s something no one tells you about relationships—especially the long ones, the complicated ones, the ones that come with children, history, and heartbreak:

They don’t break all at once.
They wear you down slowly, like water carving through stone.
And when you're in them—really in them—the emotional labor feels like carrying a boulder up a hill that never ends.

Sometimes I think about the myth of Sisyphus.
The man condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down, over and over again.
That myth has become a mirror.

Because relationships—real ones, flawed ones, the ones where your values don’t align, where your worldviews are different, where every conversation feels like a different language—can feel exactly like that.
And yet, you try again.
And again.