The love was probably real, as a feeling.

I do not think Christopher was lying when he said he loved me; I think, in the private theater of his own heart, he genuinely felt something warm when he looked at me.

But a feeling is not a fact about the world; it is a fact about the person having it.

And what I had spent years mistaking for love was, I came to see, only Christopher’s experience of a warm feeling — an experience that cost him nothing, that lived entirely inside him, that never once had to be tested against what he was willing to do or sacrifice or risk for me.

Real love is not measured on the inside, in the warmth of the feeling.