My Husband Said If I Were “Easier to Love” His Family Wouldn’t Have to Fake It – He Meant to Break Me, But He Had No Idea He’d Just Handed Me the One Thing I’d Needed for Five Years

It felt like nothing, and the nothing was the most freeing sensation I have ever known.

Because the nothing meant it was truly over.

For years my hunger for their approval had been so large that it distorted everything, bent my whole life around it like light around a heavy star; I could not have felt nothing toward Eleanor in those years if I’d tried, because I wanted her love too badly, and wanting it that badly meant she still had power over me, meant a single warm word from her could still make my whole week and a single cold one could still ruin it.

And now she was standing in front of me offering the warm word at last, the one I’d have crawled across broken glass for a year earlier, and it landed on me and found nothing to hold onto, because the hunger it was meant to feed had simply died.