Why don't people change? Well, they do, but the dread that accompanies doing something differently is almost impossible to withstand, and it doesn't always announce itself as dread. More often it subtly structures your life towards staying in bed, wasting time, or using something to blur or blunt how you feel.

Love is the most difficult diversion. Not because it is an obstacle to change but because it is often the structure that makes change unthinkable. When we love someone, or believe we do, our bodies need that arrangement to hold fast: to stick. To change is to threaten the bond, and threatening the bond can feel more dangerous than whatever the bond is costing you. So you stay stuck.

Being in love is not a consistent feeling. It is a state that includes feelings that are sometimes painful and hard to tolerate, and those feelings are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are part of what love actually is. The problem is the pursuit of the feeling of love: the need for it to be warm, reliable, and pain-free. That pursuit is indistinguishable from dependency. You are no longer negotiating with another person; you are managing a feeling, and managing it means protecting it, which means protecting the arrangement that produces it, which means never changing anything. You sacrifice your interests not for the person but for the feeling. Sex, substances, busyness work the same way, but love is where the biology is oldest and the grip is strongest. These aren't obstacles to change so much as its silhouette. They show you exactly where the fear is.

To change is to inhabit a different state of body, which is how we know it through our state of mind. Mind and body are not two things but one ongoing event of registration and expression. Your mind, a conscious representation of your body in all its fluctuating states, always emotional and never objective, may lose touch with something that has hurt you. You may believe you can forgive and forget. But your body knows. It will rebel, flooding you with anxiety when you try to proceed as if things have changed, when nothing has really changed. What felt like the only option, or the best one, turns out to have been a response to a danger that no longer exists.

What are you protecting, and what is it costing you?