“Do you believe in soulmates?” I once asked a friend over a glass of plum wine. She paused, swirling her drink thoughtfully. “I’m not sure,” she replied, “but I know I’ve met people who’ve changed the course of my life forever.” That exchange stayed with me. Maybe soulmates aren’t singular or romantic; maybe they’re simply the people who help us grow, nudging us gently—or sometimes violently—toward a better version of ourselves.

I’ve believed for years that relationships are mirrors. They reflect our desires, fears, and blind spots with startling clarity. But writing about them? That’s a different beast. The hardest piece I’ve ever written wasn’t about some grand love affair or a tragic heartbreak. It wasn’t poetic musings on Tokyo’s hidden alleys or an ode to Vancouver’s rain. No, the most difficult article I’ve ever created came from trying to articulate one simple truth: the way we love others is often a reflection of the way we love—or neglect—ourselves. Writing about it felt like holding up a mirror and daring myself to look closer.

The Writing That Wrote Me

Let me confess something right away: writing about relationships is much harder than living through them. We’ve all been there—crying in the shower after a breakup, hyping ourselves up before a first date, deciphering cryptic texts like it’s the Da Vinci Code. But putting those raw, messy human moments into words, moments that people will read and relate to, took me to places I wasn’t ready to revisit.

The piece I struggled with the most required me to reflect on an old relationship that had ended years ago, but one I thought I’d long since buried. Let’s call him A—an artist with messy hair, a penchant for Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the uncanny ability to critique my favorite novels in a way that left me rethinking my taste entirely. When we met, I was fresh out of grad school, still wide-eyed with ambition, and held together by caffeine and overpriced oat lattes. He carried the storm of someone discontent with the world, priding himself on rejecting social scripts—except, apparently, the one where he expected me to fix him.

I remember trying to write about A—about what had gone broken between us without simply collapsing into the cliché of “wrong person, wrong time.” Our relationship had played out like a Mozart sonata: beautiful, layered, and inevitably tragic. Explaining it required me to confront my own insecurities—the need to please, the fear of being alone, the quiet shame of loving someone who didn’t know how to truly love themselves.

Every paragraph felt like a therapy session I hadn’t consented to. Each draft left me exposed, picking apart the tension between freedom and containment in relationships. And yet, in writing about love that yearned for balance but thrived on chaos, I learned something that surprised me: part of understanding A wasn’t just analyzing him—it was acknowledging the reflection I saw in his eyes.

What Makes Writing About Heartbreak So Difficult?

Looking back, I’ve realized there were three reasons that piece was so challenging to write:

  1. Clarity Comes Late
    Love—and its aftermath—is like fog in the morning. You stumble through it, unable to see more than a few steps ahead, and by the time the sun rises and clarity arrives, the moment to react has often passed. Writing forces you to articulate emotions you didn’t have the words for at the time, which can feel maddeningly unfair. How do you put into words something like homesickness for a person who never felt like home?

  2. Self-Reflection Hurts
    You know those carnival mirrors that stretch and shrink your features into unrecognizable shapes? Heartbreak is like that. Writing about it demands you confront discomforting truths about yourself: why you stayed too long, why you walked away too soon, why you let someone convince you to watch their obscure arthouse films even though all you wanted to do was rewatch My Neighbor Totoro.

  3. Everyone Thinks They’re a Critic
    The hardest part about publishing something personal is offering it to an audience that will inevitably weave their own interpretations into your words. One reader might nod along, feeling seen, while another scoffs and wonders why you didn’t just move on faster. But isn’t love inherently subjective? What devastates one person could bore another. That tension makes writing about relationships humbling, to say the least.

The Advice I Wish I’d Written for Myself

Through the process, I didn’t just learn about love. I also learned about writing, and along the way, myself. Here are the lessons I wish I could have mailed my younger self on a postcard embossed with sakura petals:

  • Start With the Mess
    Life—and by extension, relationships—rarely wrap up into tidy conclusions. Instead, they resemble the sketchbooks my father used when preparing lectures on history: filled with doodles, half-finished ideas, and overlapping notes. Don’t wait for the perfect words to appear. Chances are, the truth lies in the mess.

  • Be Playful
    Just because love can be serious doesn’t mean it has to be dour. Humor helps. Try comparing your ex to an anime character—say, the brooding, unintentionally funny one who keeps getting into philosophical debates with a literal talking cat. The point is, it’s okay to find lightness in the dark.

  • Let the Mirror Reflect Without Judgment
    When writing—or reflecting—on relationships, resist the temptation to narrate yourself as the hero or the villain. Remember that people are complex, contradictory, and maddeningly human. Maybe A wasn’t the storm, and I wasn’t the savior. Maybe we were just two people trying desperately to navigate love without a roadmap.

  • Finish the Sentence
    There’s bravery in finishing the sentence. Even if—especially if—it forces you to confront something ugly. During one sleepless night mid-draft, I wrote: “I stayed with him because I believed his unhappiness was a riddle only I could solve.” That sentence felt like a gut punch at first. Later, it felt like freedom.

Finding Your Own Storyline

Whenever I sit down to write now, I remind myself of the lesson I learned from that impossible piece about A: writing and loving share a common denominator—vulnerability. Both require you to crack yourself open, expose the fractures, and trust that there’s value in what lies beneath. And, as with love, writing doesn’t have to deliver neat answers. A beautiful question is often enough.

If you’ve ever struggled to make sense of a relationship—whether it’s with a partner, a family member, or yourself—take heart. It’s okay if the story feels incomplete, or if your part in it veers between pride and regret. What matters most is the effort: to reflect, to learn, and to grow stronger through it all.

And as for me? I eventually finished that article about A. It still makes me cringe a little when I read it back, not because of what it reveals about him but because of what it reveals about me. But every time someone emails to say that it helped them understand their own love story, I can’t help but smile. Real relationships, after all, are rarely written in straight lines. Why should the ones we write about be any different?