Coming to Terms with Being a Disappointment
Love becomes more real and sustainable when we accept that both we and our partner will inevitably disappoint each other, and learn to stay connected through it.
My husband organised a poetry series in South Wales for eight years called Poetry On the Border. It was a simple but beautiful idea. Each event brought together a poet from Wales and a poet from “elsewhere”, creating a meeting place between voices, landscapes, and inner worlds.
There was something about those evenings that lingered. The sense that poetry, like relationship, lives in the space between people rather than in any single voice.
On one occasion, one of the visiting poets was David Whyte. I remember sitting in the room as he spoke, and feeling unexpectedly stopped in my tracks by something he said. It was not a line of poetry, but a reflection on relationship.
He said he was coming to terms with being a disappointment.
And then he went further. He suggested that in relationships we have to accept that we will be a disappointment to our partner, and that our partner will be a disappointment to us.
I remember feeling a sharp internal resistance. I could accept the second part quite easily. Of course my partner would disappoint me at times. He would forget things, get things wrong, be human in the ways all of us are human. That felt familiar and unsurprising.
But the idea that I would be a disappointment to him was much harder to take in.
Something in me wanted to be the exception. To be the one who got it right. To be the one who loved well enough, cared enough, paid enough attention, so that disappointment would not be part of the equation.
There was a quiet grief in recognising that this was not possible.
Not because love is lacking, but because love is lived between two separate human beings, each with their own histories, sensitivities, longings and limits.
We will inevitably bump into each other’s edges.
We will misattune.
We will fail to notice.
We will say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
We will not always be able to meet what is needed.
And in those moments, we are a disappointment.
What struck me most was not the idea itself, but the permission embedded within it. It softened something. It took the fantasy of perfect attunement out of the centre of relationship and replaced it with something more grounded, more human, and ultimately more bearable.
Over time, I have come to see that trying not to be a disappointment is a very heavy way to live. It creates an impossible standard, and with it a constant low-level anxiety of getting it wrong.
Whereas accepting that disappointment is part of relationship brings a different kind of freedom. It allows repair. It allows honesty. It allows us to come back to each other after we have missed.
Perhaps love is not the absence of disappointment, but the willingness to stay in relationship through it.
To disappoint and be disappointed.
And to keep returning, not because we have succeeded in being perfect, but because we are willing to remain human together.
June 2026
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