You Can Love Someone AND Not Be Close to Them

On black and white thinking, the Dao, and the colours in between

Kauaii

There is a small word I have been practising for years now, and it might be the hardest word I have ever learned.

And.

Three letters. A child uses it a hundred times a day. But somewhere along the way, most of us trade it for a different word. But. Or. Either. We learn to sort the world into piles. Good or bad. Right or wrong. With me or against me. Stay or leave. Love them or let them go.

For most of my life, I sorted. And the sorting felt like clarity. It felt like knowing where I stood.

Then life started handing me experiences that refused to fit in one pile. People I loved deeply who were not good for me up close. Chapters I was grateful for and glad to leave. Feelings that arrived in pairs, joy holding hands with grief, relief walking in beside sadness. And slowly, with a lot of practice and a lot of slipping back, one shift changed how I hold almost everything.

I stopped choosing between the piles. I started saying and.

You can love someone AND decide not to be close to them. You can dislike something AND still accept that it is here. You can be grateful AND ready for change. Both true. At the same time. Without either one cancelling the other.

Black and white thinking feels like clarity. It is actually a cage.

Psychology has a name for the sorting: black and white thinking, or dichotomous thinking. The mind's habit of pushing everything to one pole or the other, with nothing allowed to live in the middle.

It is worth being gentle here, because this habit is not a flaw. It is a shortcut the mind takes under pressure. When we feel threatened or overwhelmed, nuance is expensive, and the brain reaches for the cheapest map available: safe or dangerous, good or bad, in or out. In a real emergency, that map saves your life.

The trouble is that most of life is not an emergency, and the map keeps running anyway. Research links rigid dichotomous thinking to more anxiety, more conflict in relationships, and real difficulty adapting when new information arrives. Which makes sense. If a person can only be wonderful or terrible, every disappointment becomes a betrayal. If a chapter can only be a success or a failure, every ending needs a verdict. The two piles keep demanding we feed them, and everything soft and true and in-between gets torn in half to fit.

The world is not two piles. The world is a sunrise. Have you ever tried to name the exact moment where the dark ends and the light begins? There is no line. There are a thousand colours, each one leaning into the next.

The oldest map of the in-between.

Long before psychology had a word for any of this, Daoism drew a picture of it.

You know the symbol. The circle holding a dark half and a light half, curled into one another like two fish. Most people read yin and yang as opposites. But that is exactly what they are not. In the Daoist understanding, yin and yang are complementary phases of one whole, each giving meaning to the other, each carrying a seed of the other at its centre. That small dot of light inside the dark, and dark inside the light, is the entire teaching in miniature. Nothing is purely one thing. Nothing ever was.

Lao Tzu opens the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching with this exact insight. When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. High and low depend on each other. The opposites are not at war. They are in conversation, and neither one can exist without the other holding its place.

Daoism also carries a word for how to live once you see this: wu wei. It gets translated as effortless action, or non-forcing, and it is often misread as doing nothing. It is closer to the opposite. Wu wei is action that stops fighting the current. And I have come to think that the sorting mind, the one that needs everything to be either this or that, is a form of forcing. It wrestles reality into piles that reality never agreed to. Saying AND is my small daily version of wu wei. I stop wrestling. I let both things be true, the way the river lets both banks exist without choosing between them. I wrote once about letting go becoming letting flow, and this is the same movement, one word deeper.

The Buddha arrived somewhere similar and called it the middle way. And what I love about the middle way is what it is not. It is not compromise. It is not lukewarm. It is not standing halfway between two extremes with a foot in each. The Buddhist teachers describe it as a wisdom that sees through the extremes entirely, a freedom from needing either pole to be the whole story.

That distinction matters, because when I first started practising AND, I feared it would make me indecisive. Wishy-washy. Neither here nor there. It did the opposite. It made my decisions cleaner, because I no longer needed to falsify half of my experience to justify them.

The therapy built on one word.

In the 1980s, the psychologist Marsha Linehan was working with people in the deepest kind of suffering, and she noticed that standard therapy kept failing them. Pushing for change made them feel unacceptable as they were. Pure acceptance left them stuck. The breakthrough came when she stopped choosing between the two.

She built an entire therapy on holding both at once, and she named it after exactly that: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. The dialectic is the AND. I am doing my best, AND I need to do better. I accept myself completely, AND I am committed to change. In DBT, learning to replace but with and is an actual skill, practised like a scale on a piano, precisely because the mind resists it so hard.

Linehan drew from Western psychology and from Zen. East and West, science and stillness. Even the therapy itself is an AND.

And the research that has grown around this way of thinking keeps surprising me. People who can hold mixed emotions show better judgment in complex decisions. One study that followed people for ten years found that those who regularly experienced positive and negative emotions together, rather than insisting on one at a time, had better physical health and less age-related decline. Grief researchers found that bereaved people who could feel moments of warmth and even joy alongside their pain coped better with loss, not because they grieved less, but because they did not force the grief to be the only thing that was true.

The ability to hold two opposing truths at once is not sitting on the fence. It seems to be a marker of emotional maturity, and the body itself responds to it.

What AND makes possible.

Let me bring this down to the ground, because this is not a philosophy for me. It is a daily practice, and some days I am terrible at it.

You can love someone AND decide not to be close to them. This one took me years. I used to believe that love obligated proximity, that if I stepped away from someone, it must mean the love was never real, or that I had to build a case against them to justify the distance. AND released me from the case-building. The love is real. The boundary is real. They live in the same sentence now.

You can dislike something AND still accept it. Acceptance used to feel like approval to me, so I withheld it, as if my resistance were a form of protest that would eventually change the thing. It never did. Accepting that something is here, exactly as it is, while honestly disliking it, turned out to be the only ground solid enough to stand on and decide what to do next.

You can be deeply grateful for a chapter AND know it is over. You can miss someone AND not want them back. You can be afraid AND go anyway. You can hold your opinion fully AND leave room for the person across from you to be partly right.

Each of these used to feel like a contradiction I had to resolve. Now they feel like the truth arriving in its natural shape. Two-handed.

A practice for the in-between.

If you want to try this, start with the smallest version. Catch one but and turn it into an and.

I love my family, but they exhaust me. Feel what that sentence does. The but reaches back and crosses out the love.

I love my family, and they exhaust me. Both halves get to breathe. Nothing is cancelled. And notice what happens in your body when you say the second version. For me there is always a small exhale, the relief of not having to choose between two things that were both true all along.

Then take it somewhere harder. The person you resent and learned from. The decision you regret and grew through. The place in your life where you have been standing between two piles for years, trying to figure out which one is the truth, when the truth was always both.

Some days the AND comes easily. Other days I catch myself sorting again, building the old piles, writing verdicts. That is part of it. The practice is not to never sort. The practice is to notice sooner, soften, and make room for one more colour.

The sunrise, again.

I keep coming back to that image. The sky before dawn, and the impossible task of pointing to the line where night becomes day.

There is no line. There was never a line. There is only a gradient, one shade leaning into the next, dark carrying light inside it long before the light arrives. The Daoists drew it as two fish curled together. Linehan built a therapy on it. The researchers measured it in decade-long studies. And an old, maybe silent part of you has always known it, from every sunrise you have ever watched without once asking where the night ended.

Black and white are colours too. They are just not the only ones.

And.

Where in your life are you holding a but that wants to be an and? I would love to hear.

If this speaks to something in you and you want to practise living in the in-between, softening the old either-or, and holding more of your life in both hands, Breathe and Bloom was created for exactly this.

Further reading:

• Lao Tzu — Tao Te Ching (especially chapter 2)

• Marsha Linehan — Building a Life Worth Living

• Barry Johnson — Polarity Management

• Thich Nhat Hanh — The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching