For many years, I lived on hope.

Not the light, spacious kind of hope that opens futures, but a heavy, determined hope that asked me to endure, to wait, to try harder. A hope that whispered: If you can just get this right, things will change.

Recently, while watching a television show, I recognised parts of my own life unfolding on the screen — a woman navigating a relationship shaped by imbalance, disappointment, and unspoken strain. What struck me wasn’t the familiarity of the story, but my response to it. I could see it clearly. I could feel compassion. And yet I was no longer bound or defined by it.

That distance allowed a phrase to surface — one that has stayed with me ever since: Hope can require self-betrayal.

For over a decade in my first marriage, I hoped against hope. I hoped the relationship would improve. I hoped the toxicity I couldn’t yet name would lessen. I hoped that if I could just find the right key — say the right thing, be the right version of myself — then the marriage would become healthy and whole.

What I couldn’t see at the time was the cost of that hope.

In holding on to what I believed was a virtuous, faithful, even noble form of hope — shaped by my Christian faith and the cultural expectations placed on women within marriage — I was quietly betraying myself. I betrayed my needs. I betrayed my values of honesty, openness, and mutuality. I betrayed the truth that while I was strong, I could not — and should not — have to carry everything alone.

I needed partnership. I needed steadiness. I needed my husband’s strength alongside my own.

Instead, I learned to endure. To accommodate. To keep working at something that was not working for me.

The turning point did not come through greater effort or deeper faith. It came when hope finally died.

I realised — with devastating clarity — that there had never been a time when that relationship was truly healthy. Stable at moments, perhaps. Functional, mostly. But never grounded in the kind of mutual care and integrity that allows two people to flourish.

And when that hope died, something else became possible.

Without hope tethering me to an imagined future, I could finally listen to the truth of my own body, my own values, my own needs. I could begin to be faithful to myself — not as an act of selfishness, but as an act of integrity.

This reflection isn’t an argument against hope itself. It is an invitation to examine what kind of hope we are holding — and at what cost.

If this resonates with you, if you recognise yourself in this tension between endurance and self-betrayal, I’d love to hear from you.

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Sometimes the bravest act is not holding on — but letting go.