When Love Isn’t Enough

I was 13 when I watched Robin and Barney let go of each other.

But wasn’t just a breakup. It was a moment that cracked open a corner of my world, one I hadn’t realized was so fragile. Love was supposed to hold everything together. That’s what I thought. That’s what I wanted to keep thinking. But here were two people who loved each other and still chose to walk away. And I didn’t know what to do with that.

At 13, love was still an equation that made sense to me. If you cared enough, if you fought hard enough, if you wanted it badly enough, it worked. That was the promise, wasn’t it? And yet, watching Robin and Barney, I couldn’t stop thinking: What do you do when love isn’t enough? That question lodged itself somewhere deep in me, waiting for the years to catch up, for life to make it real.

It wasn’t dramatic. That’s what haunted me. It wasn’t a betrayal or a fight; it was the kind of ending where both people knew they couldn’t stay. They loved each other. That much was clear. But their lives pulled in different directions, like gravity working against them. Watching it unfold was like watching something alive slowly dissolve. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t stop wondering: If love can’t hold on, what can?

I don’t think I fully understood why it unsettled me so much, not then. But as the years passed, I started to see myself in that heartbreak. In the spaces where love existed but couldn’t survive. In the people I loved deeply but still had to let go of, even when it felt like losing them meant losing pieces of myself.

Robin and Barney taught me something I wish I didn’t have to learn: love isn’t always about staying. Sometimes it’s about knowing when holding on would hurt more than letting go. And that’s love, too—the love that lets someone go because you want them to have what you can’t give.

When I think about the people I’ve let go of—the ones who felt like home for a while, the ones who left their mark—I don’t think about failure anymore. I used to. I used to see every ending as proof that something had gone wrong, that I hadn’t loved them well enough or held on tightly enough. But now, I see the love itself for what it was. Fleeting.

That's why I don't see Robin and Barney’s story as a failure. They didn’t break because they didn’t care—they broke because sometimes, love doesn’t fit the lives it’s trying to hold together. That doesn’t make it less valuable. It makes it human.

At 13, I wanted love to be invincible. Now I know it’s not. I don't think love means fighting every battle to stay together. It’s more about what happens in the moments when staying isn’t possible. It’s about how it changes you, how it leaves its fingerprints on your life, even when it’s gone.

The people I’ve loved and lost—their love didn’t disappear. It’s still here, in the way I see the world, in the parts of me they helped shape. Love isn’t measured by how long it lasts. It’s measured by how deeply it lives in you, even after it’s over. And some loves, no matter how brief, never stop living there.

Robin and Barney let go, but their love stayed. It stayed in the spaces they grew into, in the people they became because of it. That’s what I’ve come to believe about love. It doesn’t stay the same, and it doesn’t always stay with you. But it leaves you different.