Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Loneliest of them all

Witty Banter

It has been quite sometime posting and well things haven't been quite great for me in general. While I could rant about the problems of my life but no one gives a shit about this. So, here we go writing again and hopefully I'm not trauma dumping in this. Writing, for me, has always been less about fixing things and more about making sense of them after they’ve already gone wrong. So if this feels a little scattered, that’s probably accurate.

So, today’s topic is based on a simple thing that I keep questioning: If I expect some qualities from someone, am I actually just expecting the qualities I reflect in myself? And if that’s true, then what I call “standards” might just be mirrors I haven’t admitted to looking into yet. Anyway, that’s the thought. No grand conclusions, no moral high ground, just me thinking out loud again and seeing where it leads.

How to Keep Falling in Love with Our Own Reflection

Somewhere along the way, relationships stopped being about meeting someone and quietly became about recognising ourselves in them. We don’t notice when it happens. There’s no announcement. No dramatic shift. Just a slow, almost invisible slide from curiosity into expectation, from discovery into projection. We walk into people carrying invisible templates and then feel confused, even wounded, when they don’t fit perfectly.
We say we want connection, but what we often want is familiarity. Not comfort — something deeper and more dangerous than that. We want to feel understood without having to explain ourselves. We want to feel seen without being questioned. We want someone to intuit our silences the way we do theirs. And when that doesn’t happen, we don’t think, Maybe we’re different. We think, Why aren’t you trying?
That’s where the mirror begins.

The Expectation We Never Admit We're Carrying

Every relationship comes with a quiet list of unspoken expectations. We don't sit down and read them aloud, but we feel them the moment something goes wrong. Communicate like I do. Care like I do. Fight fair. Show up consistently. Put in effort the way I understand effort. These expectations don't come from nowhere. They're built from our own habits, our own survival mechanisms, our own idea of what love should look like because it's how we learned to give it.

The problem isn't having expectations. The problem is assuming they're universal. We forget that what feels obvious to us may feel foreign to someone else. We forget that our way of loving isn't the default setting of the human brain. And yet, when someone falls short of our internal checklist, we feel disappointed in a way that feels  personal, almost moral, as if they failed a test they were never told they were taking.

Why Disappointment Feels so Intimate

Disappointment in relationships doesn't just sting, it cuts close because it often reflects something about us. The traits we resent most in others are usually the ones we never over-invest in ourselves. We get angry when someone doesn't communicate because we've trained ourselves to over-communicate. We feel neglected when effort feels uneven because we're the kind of people who overextend without being asked. We feel unseen when emotional cues are missed because we've built an identity around noticing everything.

So, when someone doesn't meet us at that level, it doesn't register as difference. It registers as absence. As carelessness. As lack. And suddenly, the relationship isn't just about two people anymore, it's about one person quietly asking the other to validate their way of being in the world.

Wanting Love vs. Wanting to be Reflected

Here's the part that's hard to admit without sounding dramatic or self-absorbed, sometimes we don't want love. We want recognition. We want someone to notice the way we love, the effort we put in, the emotional labour we carry so naturally that we forget it's labour at all. We want our intensity to be matched, our depth to be acknowledged, our sensitivity to be mirrored back to us so we don't feel strange for having it in the first place. 

So, when someone loves us differently, more quietly, more loosely, less urgently, it feels insufficient, even if it's genuine. Not because they aren't loving us, but because they aren't loving us in a way that confirms our self-image. The mirror doesn't reflect clearly, and instead of questioning what we're looking for, we blame the glass.

How Relationships Turn into Silent Scorecards

Without realising it, relationships can turn into scorekeeping exercises. Who initiates more. Who explains more. Who cares more. Who notices more. And the more we keep score, the less present we become. We stop seeing the person in front of us and start comparing them to a version of ourselves we’ve quietly idealised.

We think we’re being fair, but we’re not. We’re measuring them against an internal standard shaped by our own fears, wounds, and habits. And when they fail to measure up, we feel justified in our disappointment. We call it incompatibility, emotional unavailability, or lack of effort. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes, it’s just two people loving differently and not knowing how to translate.

Limits of the Mirror

The problem with mirrors is that they only show one angle. When we expect someone to reflect us perfectly, we reduce them to a surface. We forget they come with their own inner worlds, their own pacing, their own emotional languages shaped by experiences we’ll never fully understand. What feels like emotional intelligence to us might feel like emotional exhaustion to them. What feels like depth might feel like pressure. What feels like care might feel like surveillance.

And yet, we keep holding the mirror up, waiting for our reflection to nod back, waiting for proof that the way we are makes sense.

Learning to Stay without Needing a Reflection

Maybe the real work in relationships isn’t finding someone who mirrors us, but learning how to stay present with someone who doesn’t. Learning how to sit with difference without interpreting it as rejection. Learning how to communicate expectations instead of assuming them. Learning how to let people love us in the ways they know how, without constantly translating it into our own language and finding it lacking.

This doesn’t mean settling. It doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries. It just means recognising that compatibility isn’t sameness, and love isn’t a reflection.

The Quiet Ending We Rarely Talk About

At some point, we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question, am I looking for a relationship, or am I looking for myself through someone else? Am I trying to be known, or am I trying to be confirmed?

Because the most dangerous illusion isn’t that people fail us. It’s believing they were meant to complete our reflection.

The mirror on the wall was never meant to answer our questions. It was meant to show us where our expectations come from. And maybe, just maybe, learning to love is learning to step away from the mirror, without losing ourselves in the process.