Editor’s Note: This blog was written especially for the Humanity Project by Tracy Ikola, a freelance writer on health issues.
The Cost of Their Love, The Power of Ours
by
Tracy Ikola, RN-MSN, CNL
Love, in its purest form, should be safe, steady and unconditional. It should lift us up, not break us down. But for many in the LGBTQ community, love comes at a cost. It is a price paid in fear and rejection. Sometimes, it means losing everything we believe is ours.
Fear is woven into our daily lives, no matter how much the world progresses towards equality. Fear lingers in the way people look at us, in the shift of conversations when we walk into a room and in the whispers they think we cannot hear. I still remember the first time someone screamed at me from across the street: “Dyke!” Someone meant that word to wound and strip me of my humanity. In that moment, I was not a person. I was a target. More than a decade has passed, but that memory has never left me. It is a reminder that acceptance can be fragile and rejection is never far away.
Some of us face rejection in the most public, humiliating ways. Others experience it in silence, erased by those who are supposed to love them the most. My wife knows that kind of loss intimately.
It was 2020. We had known each other for two months and had only been on one date when Marissa’s mother found out we were talking. One afternoon, I got a text: I’m in my driveway with all my stuff. While she was at work, her family had thrown her belongings outside. The only message she received was cold and final: You can come get all your things and find somewhere else to live. Just like that, she was homeless.
I still get choked up remembering her standing there, her entire life stuffed into black trash bags. As I helped her load them into our SUVs, fear and anxiety sat heavy in my chest. If they could do that to their daughter, what might they do to me? But none of that mattered. I just needed to get her out of there.
My home became our home. We barely knew each other, but there was no time to figure things out. We joked about adding her things to the decor. We celebrated the idea of sharing makeup, clothes and jewelry. We laughed about the old stereotype of lesbians moving in together too quickly. But beneath the jokes, there was grief. She was in a place that wasn’t hers, trying to settle into a life she hadn’t chosen. The challenges of dating while learning to live together were nothing compared to the weight of losing everything familiar. And no matter how much love I gave her, I could not bring her family back.
Her mother’s rejection escalated. She showed up unannounced, leaving pamphlets on our front porch filled with religious propaganda disguised as salvation. Scripture-laced text messages twisted faith into a weapon. Each word was meant to convince her daughter she was broken. The pain did not come from any truth in the messages but from the source: a mother who was supposed to love unconditionally.
Next, she stripped away what little security my wife had left by draining the savings account meant for her future. It was never about the money. It was about control and making Marissa feel powerless, as though without them, she would fail. She contacted Marissa’s extended family, childhood friends and lifelong neighbors, turning them against her. They disappeared. They blocked her, ignored her and shut her out. This was not just about empty seats at our wedding. It meant silent birthdays, lonely holidays and the cruel certainty that no matter how much Marissa tried at first or how deeply she still loves them, they have chosen not to love her back in the way she deserves.
Finally, in 2022, her father died suddenly from COVID. The man who had been there for every childhood milestone left this world without ever trying to mend what was broken. She grieved not just his death but the finality of it. There was no chance for healing, no last conversation and no redemption. She wept because he died alone and wept because she had to mourn him alone, carrying the weight of everything left unsaid.
Loving my wife means carrying some of that pain with her. It means standing beside her when the weight of rejection is too heavy, when grief resurfaces in the silence of lost connections, and when the world reminds her of everything she lost. But our love also means building something stronger in those spaces of pain.
Self-worth means refusing to let rejection shape who we are. It’s knowing that real love, steady and unconditional, isn’t something we must fight for or prove we deserve. The world may not always be kind, but we still get to choose how we show up in it. We get to create spaces where love and respect aren’t given on conditions, where we are seen and where we belong.
Fear and love often exist side by side. We feel it when we hold hands in public, introduce each other as spouses or step into spaces that should feel safe but don’t. But fear does not diminish love. My wife and I share some scars of rejection, but we also carry something far more powerful: the unshakable truth that we are not broken, that our love is real and that we deserve to exist in this world without fear.
Our love remains. When family turns away, we create our own. When the world tries to silence us, we speak louder. No matter who turns their back or what is taken, we are still here. We are still whole. And we are still worthy of love.
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