Youtube: MindMaze with Gari

People think love will save them. Wrong. Love doesn’t save anyone. It only exposes the wounds you’ve been hiding. We build these fantasies around romance, believing that finding the right person will somehow fix the broken pieces inside us. But here’s what nobody wants to admit. Love is just a mirror reflecting back all the darkness you thought you could escape. Today, we’re going to shatter one of the most dangerous myths sold to us by movies, songs, and endless self-help books. The myth that love is your salvation. That somewhere out there is a person who will complete you, heal your trauma, and make your pain disappear. This belief has destroyed more lives than it has ever saved. Think about it. How many times have you heard someone say they found their other half, their soulmate who makes them whole? This language itself reveals the problem. If you’re only half a person without someone else, what happens when they leave? What happens when the honeymoon phase ends and reality sets in? You crash back into the same emptiness you started with, except now it feels worse because you had a taste of what you thought was freedom. The common belief is simple. Love equals cure. Love will end your loneliness. Love will heal your childhood wounds. Love will give your life meaning and purpose. We’re told that the right relationship will transform us into the person we always wanted to be. But this is a dangerous delusion that keeps us from doing the real work of becoming whole on our own. Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Nobody talks about loneliness and suffering aren’t bugs in the human experience. They’re features. They’re not problems to be solved by finding the right person. They’re fundamental aspects of what it means to be alive and conscious in this world. When we try to use love as an escape route from these realities, we set ourselves up for devastating disappointment. So, if love doesn’t save us, what is its actual role? Why do we crave it so desperately if it can’t deliver what we think it promises? These are the questions we need to explore if we want to understand what love really is, not what we fantasize it should be. Let me tell you a story that might sound familiar. Picture someone who has been carrying pain for years, maybe from a difficult childhood, past relationships, or just the general weight of existence. They meet someone new and suddenly everything feels different. The world has color again. The pain seems to lift. They think they found their savior, their rescue from the darkness that has haunted them. For months, maybe years, this feels true. They believe they’ve been healed. They tell their friends they’ve never been happier. They make plans for a future built on this feeling of being saved. But then something shifts. Maybe the relationship faces its first real challenge. Maybe the initial passion fades into routine. Or maybe their partner shows their own human flaws and limitations. Suddenly, all that old pain comes rushing back. The loneliness returns with a vengeance. The wounds that seemed healed start bleeding again. They realize that love didn’t actually fix anything. It just provided a temporary distraction. The person they thought would carry their burden can’t even carry their own. They’re both drowning in their separate oceans of human experience, reaching for each other, but unable to truly rescue one another. This isn’t a failure of love. It’s the revelation of what love actually is. Love can walk beside you, but it cannot walk for you. Others can witness your pain, but they cannot live it for you. This is the harsh but liberating truth that most people spend their entire lives trying to avoid. The great existentialist philosophers understood this deeply. Saurin Kirkagard wrote about despair as something fundamentally non-ransferable. No matter how much someone loves you, they cannot take your despair away. It belongs to you alone. Your anxiety, your fear, your sense of meaninglessness, these are yours to face, not theirs to fix. Albert Camu spoke of the absurd nature of existence, the gap between our human need for meaning and the universe’s apparent indifference to that need. Love doesn’t bridge that gap. It doesn’t make life less absurd. At best, it gives us a companion to acknowledge the absurdity with us. The Stoic philosophers taught that our suffering comes not from circumstances themselves, but from our judgments about those circumstances. This means that even in the most loving relationship, your pain is still shaped by your own perceptions, your own thoughts, your own internal responses. No amount of external love can change your internal landscape without your own work. Here’s my anti-guru twist that will probably make some people angry. Don’t expect love to heal you. Don’t burden your relationships with the impossible task of fixing what’s broken inside you. At best, love can mirror back the parts of you that still bleed, giving you a chance to see them clearly and do something about them yourself. This isn’t cynicism, it’s clarity. When we stop expecting love to save us, we can finally appreciate what it actually offers. We can stop being disappointed when it fails to deliver miracles and start being grateful for the genuine connection and companionship it provides. But let’s be honest about love’s beauty, too, because dismissing it entirely would be just as naive as expecting it to save us. Love does offer something profound, just not what we think it does. Love provides moments of transcendence, times when we feel connected to something larger than our individual suffering. It offers glimpses of meaning in an otherwise chaotic existence. The problem isn’t love itself. It’s our expectations of what love should do. We’ve turned love into a drug, expecting it to numb our pain instead of appreciating it as a brief reprieve from the classroom of suffering. Think of love as recess, a beautiful, necessary break from the hard work of being human, but not an escape from the curriculum of existence. During recess, children play and laugh and forget about the tests waiting for them back in the classroom. But recess always ends. The bell rings and everyone has to return to their desks to face their own work. This doesn’t make recess meaningless. It makes it precious precisely because it’s temporary. Love gives us these moments of relief, these pockets of joy and connection that make the harder parts of life bearable. But the exam, the fundamental challenge of being alive and conscious, that’s still yours to take. No one can answer those questions for you. No one can live your life or face your mortality or make sense of your unique experience of existence. The intensity of this truth can be overwhelming, but it’s also liberating. Once you accept that no one is coming to save you, you stop waiting for rescue and start taking responsibility for your own salvation. You stop looking for someone to complete you and start working on becoming whole on your own. This doesn’t mean you should reject love or relationships. It means you should enter them as a complete person seeking connection, not as a broken person seeking repair. When you’re not desperate for someone to fix you, you can actually appreciate them for who they are instead of who you need them to be. Before we dive deeper into this uncomfortable truth, I want to share something that might resonate with those of you on this journey of self-discovery. Gari Nguyen, a 29-year-old author living in Silicon Valley, has been exploring these exact themes since she was 17. She’s published 13 books in Vietnam delving into the complexities of human connection, self-reliance, and the myths we tell ourselves about love and salvation. Her works, including titles like Just Hear Me Out and A Luxury Item Called Me, which you can find on Amazon, offer the kind of raw honesty about relationships and self-discovery that most authors shy away from. These aren’t feel-good books that promise easy answers. They’re explorations of the messy, complicated reality of being human. If today’s discussion has stirred something in you, her writings might provide the deeper dive into these concepts that a single video can’t offer. What makes her perspective valuable isn’t just her young age when she started writing, but her willingness to challenge the comfortable lies we tell ourselves about love and happiness. Her books serve as companions for those ready to face the truth about their own responsibility in creating a meaningful life rather than waiting for someone else to create it for them. Now, back to the uncomfortable reality we’re exploring. No one lives your pain for you. No one takes your test. In the end, it’s you and the truth you can’t escape. This isn’t meant to be depressing. It’s meant to be empowering. When you stop expecting others to save you, you discover your own strength. When you stop looking for external validation, you develop internal worth. The most profound relationships happen between two people who don’t need each other, but choose each other. They’re not trying to fill holes in their souls. They’re sharing their completeness. They’re not seeking rescue. They’re offering companionship for the journey. This is what mature love looks like. Not the desperate clinging of two drowning people, but the calm appreciation of two swimmers who choose to navigate the waters together while maintaining their own ability to stay afloat. Love is only recess. The real test, you still take a loan.