This is something I was thinking about in a conversation with myself, and I realised it’s relevant to almost every kind of relationship — friends, lovers, work relationships, even family.

There’s a difference between who treats us well and who we’re actually compatible with.

We often choose people based on soft skills:
how someone treats us, how they care for us, how safe we feel around them, how emotionally available they are. Those things matter. A lot. They’re not small things.

But there’s another layer we don’t talk about enough:
what we idolise, what we desire, what our mind is actually drawn to.

And the moment those two layers don’t live in the same person, tension starts.

You can love the way someone treats you.
You can feel safe, seen, nurtured by them.
And at the same time, your mind can still long for qualities, depths, or worlds that person doesn’t carry.

That doesn’t make either person wrong.
It just means love and compatibility aren’t automatically the same thing.

For me, the kind of care I look for is mutual depth. Someone who can take care of me the way I take care of them: unconditional love, openness, challenging each other to become our best selves, transparency, being able to talk about the most real things, and being present together in quiet ways too. Presence doesn’t always mean talking — sometimes it’s two people choosing to be in the same room doing different things, when they could be elsewhere. That’s intimacy to me.

But I also idolise certain things.
A desire to revolutionise how we live globally.
A willingness to go deep into spirituality without fear.
A hunger to understand reality, consciousness, quantum frameworks, how we’re all connected.
I don’t want to shrink my language or my curiosity to make myself easier to digest.

Up to now, I’ve only ever found fragments of this in different people.

And I realised something important:
it’s not fair to give my heart to someone who can care for it beautifully if I know that part of my mind will always be turned toward things they don’t carry. Not because they’re lacking — but because I would be asking both of us to live inside a quiet mismatch.

And it goes the other way too.

Someone can share my hunger for reality and spirituality, but not have the capacity to care for someone with the tenderness and maturity I value. That doesn’t make them wrong either. It just means the union wouldn’t be whole.

So instead of “waiting” for someone, it’s more about being okay with myself until someone naturally holds both sides.

And I apply this to myself too. I know I love deeply. I put effort into relationships. I value the people I choose. I’m not unfamiliar with care, commitment, or emotional labour. So if someone says to me, “No one can love me the way you do,” my response isn’t romantic — it’s honest:

If your mind desires things I don’t embody, how can I feel secure in the bond?

Because in a monogamous relationship, unacknowledged desire doesn’t just disappear. It becomes a quiet thirst. And unquenched thirst grows. It can turn into resentment. It can leak into cheating — sometimes consciously, sometimes in ways people don’t even fully recognise in themselves. Not because people are bad, but because desire that isn’t understood doesn’t dissolve — it mutates.

That’s why the structure of the relationship matters too.

Friendship has more room for difference.
Romantic bonds, especially monogamous ones, have more constraints.

If someone desires something fundamental that I am not — whether that’s a gender, a way of living, a depth of engagement with reality — then the honest options are:
either understand and integrate that desire,
or choose a relationship structure that matches it (open, poly, etc.),
or accept that the relationship, as defined, won’t be stable long-term.

This isn’t about being possessive.
It’s about being honest about how desire works.

And I hold myself to the same standard.

If I desire a partner who can meet me in depth of reality, consciousness, and care — and I choose someone who only meets me in one of those — I can’t pretend my mind will be fully settled. I don’t want to have to translate myself into smaller language. I don’t want to measure how much of my inner world I’m allowed to bring into the room before the other person clocks out. I want to speak my full language and be met there.

At the same time, I want someone who knows how to love without making everything personal, who understands growth inside relationship rather than fragility inside relationship.

For me, this is what maturity in bonding looks like:
not just asking “Do you treat me well?”
but also asking “Do you meet my depths — and do I meet yours?”

Care without compatibility creates quiet fractures.
Compatibility without care creates emotional starvation.

Longevity needs both.

Not perfection.
Not fantasy.
But alignment across how we love and what we long for.

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Hey, I was just having a chat to myself and I thought to put this down because it can be helpful for so many relationships of all kinds, really. Okay, minus family, but even in family, to be fair, family, friends, lovers, workers, whatnot. And that’s the, it’s the difference between who we see can take care of us, not can take care of us, but who we see with the soft skills, we can say, like the ways in which someone treats someone else. And we can love those things, and we can choose partners, we can choose friends based on those things. But there will forever be things that we idolize as well. And the moment the two are not in the same box, or not in the same box, sorry, and the moment the two are not found in the same people that might treat us beautifully, we might go for the real treatment, but at the same time, at the back of our minds, our mind will also feel attraction and openness and desire towards the things that we do idolize. And I was thinking about it in terms of, for myself, if I was to open myself romantically, okay, there is individuals that might treat me well, and provide for the care that I need and the love and care that I need, but they might not have the things that I idolize. For example, for me, I look for a specific type of care, someone that can take care of myself the way that I can take care of them, and that’s through unconditional love, openness, challenging each other to be our best self, grow together, being transparent, talk about the most, and just be present at any time that we are choosing to be present with each other. Because present sometimes, it also looks like just two people doing two separate things in the same room next to each other, but not speaking to each other. It’s the fact that we’re sharing the proximity and we’re choosing to do things that could put us in two different rooms and we’re deciding to do them in the same room, you know? It’s a different type of love that I’m calling to myself, though there are things that I also idolize, like someone that wants to revolutionize the way that we do life as a whole, like globally, genuinely globally, or someone that doesn’t fear the spiritual realm, but wants to, like, dive in, like, as much as possible. Someone that wants to understand, like, the quantum and how… we are all one and we and how all of the how our reality works, basically, you know. And up until now, I’ve either found, like, little aspects of this in different people. And I was just thinking to myself, it’s not fair to me to give my heart to someone that might take care of it well when I know that my mind will always look for and want and desire the other parts, like reality and spirituality and whatnot. Um, but at the same time, and vice versa, because one that might have the reality and spirituality might not have the type of care that I want. So it’s like, um, waiting for, not waiting, but being okay with myself until one has both sides, because even me, I know that I love beautifully other people and the people that I choose to have in my life, and I know that I can do it all for them. Um, putting effort in relationships isn’t something that I’m a stranger to, because I genuinely value the relationships, no matter the constraints, and something that I would tell to someone as well, it’s like, yes, I can take care of you and can love you and whatnot, but if your mind desires certain things, you might either want to fully dissect why your mind desires certain things. And on the other side, you might wanna really look at maybe finding someone that has the things that you desire plus the love that I can give. And then I was like, yeah, but let’s say that the person says, well, but no one can love me the way that you do. Well, in that case, it would have to be a… Again, it would have to be a matter of, like, how can I feel confident in our bond if I know that you desire those things, you know? Because, sure, I can give you the love, sure, we can nurse that and nurture that, but to an extent, there’s always gonna be at the back of your mind, well, I desire that. And unless obviously there is a component of, like, obviously, if it’s a friendship, then it’s different because obviously it’s not, it’s not as, it’s not as, I don’t wanna say limiting, but it’s not as bounded as a monogamous relationship, for example. In a monogamous relationship, something like that would be like, well, I can’t feel confident in knowing that you desire certain things that I am not, and I don’t, either I am not, like, I mean, let’s say that someone says I desire a man, but then they fall in love with me, I’m like, I’m not a man, so I cannot give you that. So unless you’re okay with making an open relationship where, or a polyamorous relationship, which the two are different, polyamorous relationship is having multiple romantic relationships, one or two or whatever, whereas open relationship is being in one relationship with the occasional opening to other people. The relationship itself as a monogamous won’t work because at the back of the mind, there’s always going to be that desire that the other person has, which means that it will be an unquenched thirst that keeps growing and growing until a point that person is going to either cheat, find themselves cheating maybe even in circumstances that they don’t even know or realize, or resent almost the relationship, no matter how good the love that they receive because at the back of their mind, there’s that desire. And if it’s not understood, it can grow, like it can spread like wildfires, whereas if it’s understood, then we can understand what about it is and then work it out. But that is like if someone is willing to sit down with themselves and actually do the work to understand it, dissect it, and to see it in multiple things, to then see it in me, in this case, because I’m using myself as an example. And that goes vice versa because I was literally putting myself in both shoes. OK, well, if I desire someone that wants to, that has the same thirst to understand reality as much as I do, plus also the love and care that I give, well, I need to, I need to understand that unless it is that, if someone doesn’t have one or the other, my mind wouldn’t feel fully locked in because, because there’s those aspects that I wouldn’t necessarily see or get the experience of, like if I want to talk about reality and dissect reality with a person, I want to feel free without having to, like, think, oh, how much can I say before they clock out, or how much can I, how do I word it out, you know, I want someone that’s just invested as I am so that we can both understand the language that we speak it. And vice versa, I also want someone that genuinely knows how to care for someone unconditionally and someone that doesn’t take things personally, but takes things for the greater of the relationship and for the growth of that relationship. And I see this as a very mature way to look at how we bond with each other, taking into account both sides for the quality and longevity of that union.