One morning, while browsing articles online, a byline made me stop. The name pulled me back into a previous relationship I never fully understood while I was living it — one I can now recognize with clarity and tenderness: a man I had fallen in love with. What surprised me wasn’t the rush of nostalgia, but the narrative we’re taught about love: that if something doesn’t last, it doesn’t count.

I grew up on my mother’s stories about love — not just the kind that lasted, but the hovering casí algos: emotionally intimate, deeply significant, yet never official. They taught me that not all love arrives fully formed, and not all loss comes with closure.

Psychologist Pauline Boss named this experience ambiguous loss. It describes relationships that lack a clear ending, where someone is emotionally present but structurally absent — or gone in practice, but never fully gone in the mind. Unlike breakups that come with a clean line to cross, ambiguous loss resists resolution. The love lingers, suspended, shaping how you move through future connections even as you try to move forward.

That framework helped me understand why it feels easy — and so dishonest — to dismiss past love simply because it didn’t survive. Our culture tends to treat relationships like proof of success: If it doesn’t harden into commitment, we’re encouraged to downplay it, to frame it as a lesson at best or a waste of time at worst. 

Boss writes that this kind of uncertainty can freeze people emotionally — not because they are indecisive or mature, but because not knowing whether to hold on or let go makes decisive action feel impossible. 

He was the man I had fallen in love with, whose absence I carried and whose presence still lingered in my memory. 

And our story began in high school in the most unconventional way. I messaged him to say he looked like a famous TikToker. What followed were months of conversation about everything: favorite books, wandering without direction and our mutual need to write about things we didn’t fully understand. We hovered in a space that was more than friendship, though neither of us knew what to call it.

After graduation, we drifted apart, blaming distance while really figuring out who we were. Years later, we wandered through North Beach, filled with awkward pauses and half-finished sentences. I still couldn’t give him what he needed emotionally, conditioned to believe love meant losing autonomy, and by the end of the night, we both knew things had gone awry.

One of the hardest truths about ambiguous love is that it produces mixed emotions all at once. You can feel deep tenderness and quiet resentment in the same breath. You can want closeness while instinctively pulling away. Loving someone in an undefined space creates an emotional tug-of-war where neither staying nor leaving feels entirely possible.

Nearly four years later, I can see he was good for me. Boss suggests that when ambiguity can’t be resolved, the task is to redefine the relationship rather than erase it — you don’t stop loving; you change the form it takes. I mourned not only him, but the future version of myself I thought loving him would lead to, and in taking a different path, I learned to love differently, make mistakes and build friendships that sustain me — carrying forward what ambiguous love taught me.

Boss argues that the turning point in ambiguous loss doesn’t come from answers, but from naming the experience itself. Once you recognize that uncertainty — not personal inadequacy — is the source of the pain, helplessness loosens its grip. For me, that shift didn’t look like closure. It looked like learning to hold regret without self-blame, and gratitude without denial. The love didn’t vanish — it moved inward, becoming part of how I understand connection, patience and care.

I love the life I have now, and I still regret that this relationship didn’t work. Both feelings are true, and both deserve space.

Society often frames life as a series of closed chapters — to tie up loose ends, to move on neatly from what didn’t work. But meaningful life does not require closure; it requires honesty. After reading his article, I did what curiosity demanded: I Googled him. He has changed drastically, and yet not at all. He’s still a writer, still a reader — just like me. We made our choices, and those choices led us to separate lives. 

The cultural narrative tells us that carrying love from the past means we’re stuck, that healthy people move on without looking back. But you can love your present life and still grieve a past that never became real. You can be fulfilled and unfinished at the same time. Even if that love exists now only in memory and possibility, it was real — and maybe that’s enough.

Andrew Cardenas is a junior writing about love in all its forms in his column, “No Straight Answers,” which runs every other Wednesday. He is also the DEIA Director and Talkin’ Troy Editor at the Daily Trojan.