Toleration Is Not Love (But Neither Is Perfection)
When settling and sanctifying both become a form of self-abandonment.
We don’t want to be tolerated.
We want to be loved.
Felt.
Chosen.
Received.
And yet, in the real world—not the curated one—every relationship carries some degree of disappointment, mismatch, friction.
No one meets every need.
No one gets it right every time.
So we begin to negotiate, quietly:
“This, I’ll accept.”
“This, I’ll overlook.”
“This… I’ll just hold.”
And slowly, toleration takes the place of aliveness.
David Whyte reminds us that, “The price of our vitality is the sum of all our tolerations.”
That sentence doesn’t ask you to judge yourself. It asks you to get honest: What parts of you have been numbed just to keep the connection intact?
Because if we’re not careful, our discernment becomes defense.
We start raising standards not from integrity, but from exhaustion.
And from there, we search not for love—but for safety from ever having to feel loss again.
That’s where perfection becomes a fortress.
We’ve all been told not to “settle.”
To hold out for someone who meets us fully.
To walk away from anything that feels like “just tolerating.”
And so we tell ourselves:
“If I just raise the standard high enough, I’ll never have to be disappointed.”
But here’s the paradox:
Too much tolerance? You disappear.
Too much perfection-seeking? Everyone else disappears.
So where is the space in between?
We think it lives in discernment.
And maybe it does.
But it also lives in the body.
And here’s where it gets complicated:
Most people don’t choose their tolerations logically.
They inherit them somatically.
There’s a corrupted subconscious program many of us are still grappling with—one that loops like this:
We over-tolerate → we burn out → we raise the bar → we dismiss too quickly → we isolate → we fear loneliness → we tolerate again.
It’s not because we’re confused. It’s because our system only learned extremes. It doesn’t know how to feel safe in the in-between.
This isn’t logic—it’s nervous system memory.
Protective programming meant to keep you alive.
But it can’t teach you how to live.
So the healing doesn’t come through checklists or compatibility charts.
It comes when your body remembers what it feels like to relax in someone’s presence.
To unhook from hypervigilance.
To unclench the jaw of the soul.
That’s where the work begins.
Not with a partner who never fails… But with the you who no longer believes that failure is fatal.
The body often tells the truth long before the mind catches up.
And in that truth lives a quiet question: Are you enduring this connection—or are you embodied in it?
David Whyte writes, “Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.”
Real love, then, is not performance—it’s presence.
It’s not the absence of friction, but the willingness to remain real inside it.
Brianna Wiest might say, “It’s not that you’re asking for too much. It’s that you’re asking the wrong people.”
But she doesn’t stop there—because she also reminds us that healing isn’t about getting exactly what we want.
It’s about becoming the version of ourselves who no longer betrays our truth to avoid conflict.
And Richard Rudd, in the Gene Keys, speaks of the alchemical shift from shadow to gift—how the very qualities we once disowned become the raw material of awakening.
He would ask:
What if the thing you’re “just putting up with” in others is also asking to be transmuted within?
When we tolerate too much, we exile the part of us that longs for integrity.
When we demand perfection, we exile the part of us that longs for connection.
But when we drop the armoring—when we return to the body, not as battleground, but as guide—we begin to hear a different voice.
Not “What do I deserve?”
Not “What will protect me?”
But something quieter, older, wiser:
“What opens me?”
“What allows me to soften and stay?”
“What relationship with myself makes room for others without collapsing?”
Because in the end, toleration and perfection are not opposites.
They are compensations.
And the real invitation is to stop compensating…and start connecting.
