John Lennon told us that all we need is love. It is one of the most quoted sentiments of the last century, and there is something genuinely appealing about its simplicity: the idea that love, by itself, is sufficient. I have come to think the sentiment is right, but incomplete. Love is indeed what we need. The trouble is that love is not a single thing. It has parts. And one of those parts, the one we discuss least and honour least, is closure.
Love is also not forever, however much it feels that way from the inside. The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes captured this better than anyone: he wished not for a love that lasts forever, but for one that is infinite for as long as it happens to last. That small paradox holds an enormous truth. Love can feel eternal and still be finite. It can be total and still end. And once we admit that endings are part of love rather than a betrayal of it, a question opens up: what love actually is, and how the whole process, beginning to end, ought to be conducted.
Consider how love begins. It begins slowly, almost always. We meet someone, and over time we discover the things we share, the small overlaps of taste and humour and value that make us happy in each other's company. The beginning of love is a process of accumulation, of learning, of gradually building something between two people. We grant this beginning all the patience in the world.
What we rarely grant is the same care to the ending. When those shared things begin to wane — and sometimes they do — there ought to be a process for the ending too, a winding-down conducted with the same attention we gave the beginning. Without it, the ending becomes traumatic, and we lose more than a partner. We lose a friend, because we never sat down to talk about why the things that joined us had come to separate us. A relationship that begins with a process deserves to end with one.
There is a reason this matters so much, and it has to do with what a relationship costs.
When we enter a relationship (any relationship, but romantic ones most of all), we spend the only currency we can never earn back: time. Every hour given to another person is an hour that does not return, regardless of how the story ends. This is worth sitting with, because it reframes what a relationship actually is. Seen this way, a relationship is an exchange of irreplaceable life: pieces of a finite existence handed to another person. And if that is true, then how a relationship ends is the final accounting of something that cost both people a part of their time on earth.
So why do we do it? Why spend the unrecoverable on something so uncertain? Because we are drawn to one another, and rightly so. We are pulled toward people who are interesting, who expand us, who make the spending feel worthwhile. But the same pull that draws us toward what is good can draw us toward what is harmful: toward relationships that wound, and, more insidiously, toward relationships that look like love from the outside while functioning as something else entirely on the inside. We have all been surprised by people. And, to be honest, we have all been someone else's painful surprise. None of us comes to this subject with clean hands.
Here is the first thing I have come to believe: love is not enough.
We say it as though it were, of course. We treat love as the answer, the destination, the thing that justifies everything else. But love, on its own, is unstable. How often have we watched it turn into its opposite, into resentment, into contempt, into hatred? Love that is not handled well lingers and combusts. It is a fuel, and like any fuel, it can warm a home or burn it down. Left unspent, misdirected, or trapped without resolution, it keeps burning long after the relationship is over, and it is usually the person still holding it who gets scorched.
The extinguisher, I have come to think, is closure.
So what is closure, precisely? It is a word people throw around without defining, which makes it easy to dismiss. Let me try to be exact. Closure is honesty, clarity, the capacity to communicate without lies: telling another person, plainly, what happened and why, even when the truth is unflattering to the one delivering it. It carries no requirement of agreement, of reconciliation, or even of kindness, though kindness helps. Its single ingredient is the truth, offered openly, so that the other person can understand the shape of what they lived through and carry it forward without a permanent question mark where an answer should be.
Pain is survivable, and often necessary. What truly lingers is the ending with no closure at all, where one person is simply ghosted, or blocked, or erased, denied the basic dignity of understanding what occurred. To be left without explanation is to be left holding the fuel with no way to put it out.
There is a harder version of this problem, and it is the one I have come to understand most intimately, having been on the receiving end of it.
Some relationships lack closure by accident. In others, closure is withheld by design, because the relationship itself was built on something other than truth. There is a phenomenon often called trauma bonding: the powerful attachment that can form between a person and someone who is harming them. It develops through cycles: mistreatment followed by warmth, cruelty followed by apology, distance followed by sudden affection. The unpredictability is itself the mechanism of the bond. Intermittent reward binds us more tightly than steady kindness ever could, which is one of the crueller facts about how the human mind works.
People who have lived through this sometimes carry the damage forward in a particular way. Unable to love fully because of what was done to them, they construct relationships out of reassurance rather than reality, building, through repeated and practised words, a world that feels solid but is in fact a house of cards. And here is the trap: the person who builds such a world is always one step ahead of the person living inside it. They maintain the illusion to your face while their actual reality unfolds somewhere behind your back. The narrative is seamless precisely because it was authored, not lived.
It is more disorienting still when the architect of the illusion casts themselves as the wounded party, presenting their entire history as a chronicle of having been mistreated, of never having been respected, of being the perpetual victim. The story is sympathetic, and sympathy lowers your defences. That is, of course, the point.
I take a certain quiet pride in being someone who plans, who anticipates the unexpected, who tries to have a contingency for the thing that might go wrong. I still believe in planning, and I still do it. But I have learned that there is one situation for which you cannot fully plan, and it is this one. You cannot plan against deliberate deception, because the person being dishonest holds a structural advantage that no foresight can overcome: they are always one move ahead. As you plan, they plan in response. Your honesty becomes information they use; your openness becomes the surface they manipulate. Nobody is immune to this. I was not, recently, though I had thought I would be. Surprise finds everyone eventually, and the people most confident of their own preparedness are sometimes the easiest to catch.
I say this to correct a myth: that careful, thoughtful people are somehow protected. We are not. Intelligence offers no shield here. Being misled is the predictable result of meeting someone who decided, in advance, to lie.
Which brings me back to where I began.
Whatever happened, however the relationship began, however it curdled, however badly one or both people behaved, the people we have loved deserve to know. Simply, plainly, to know, even when the knowing is unflattering to everyone involved. Closure is the floor beneath which we should not let ourselves fall, the minimum dignity we extend to someone with whom we once spent that irreplaceable currency. To deny it, by ghosting, blocking, vanishing, or maintaining the illusion rather than admitting the truth, takes something from another person that they can never recover, on top of the time they already gave.
So perhaps Lennon was right after all, with one correction. All we need is love — but the whole of it. Not only the beginning, with its warmth and its discovery, but the ending too, conducted with honesty and care. Love that knows how to start and does not know how to finish is only half a love. The complete love includes its own conclusion. It includes closure. That is all we need: the whole of love, every part of it, right down to the last honest word.