The smile without soul

On truth, loss and the search for recognition

 

 

 

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Introduction – The moment everything broke

She was sitting next to me, in that familiar room, with that same face I had known for years.

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And yet, I was looking at a stranger.

 

We had been together for almost three and a half years. Three and a half years in which my love had time and again proven stronger than my doubt. Stronger than the unrest, the discomfort and the many fractures. Love was my compass and in that love, I slowly lost myself. Not all at once, but piece by piece — in silence, in yielding and in hoping that this time would be different.

 

She had left again. For the umpteenth time. She had cheated again. For the umpteenth time. And once again she had returned, as if the rupture had never happened, as if everything had become fluid and without boundaries. We sat together on her couch. I was still trying to understand. Not out of anger, but out of love — out of the desire to truly know her, to understand what drove her. How it was possible for someone to be so close, and yet so unfathomably far away.

 

She told me that, once again, she had had unprotected sex with a man.
He worked at her children's after-school care.

 

I knew him.
Or rather: she had introduced me to him.

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On an apparently ordinary day, she asked if I wanted to come along to pick up the children. I came, unaware, as I still mostly was at that time. He was standing there. I introduced myself. A friendly, superficial encounter. But in hindsight, it feels... filthy. Not just painful, but tainted. As if I had been pulled in as a prop in a play I knew nothing about. As if, without knowing it, I was taking part in my own erasure.

 

I asked her how it had happened. What he had said, how he dealt with that lack of safety — with a heavily pregnant woman at home, no less. She told me he had asked if she was using contraception. She said she wasn’t. And he responded, “So you could get pregnant?” Her reply: “I wouldn’t mind having a third child.” She laughed. A smile without depth. A smile without a soul.

 

I don’t remember everything I said in return. Everything in me froze. My body was still there, but my awareness pulled away. Something broke inside me. Without sound or drama — but in silent stillness. A kind of inner crumbling, a quieting from within. As if my soul retreated to protect itself from something too cold, too empty and too unreal.

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The love in me watched — and fell silent. Stunned. Paralyzed.

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She kept talking. She asked whether it hadn’t occurred to me that he might really like her. She said she wanted to stay friends with him. “I’ve had sex with all of my friends,” she added. Not just once — she kept repeating it. As if she were trying to explain her behavior. Or worse: justify it. Words that might have been light-hearted in another context, but here they felt like a slap in the face. I heard them, but I didn’t. My mind drifted away. As if I were watching a film in which I played a role, but could no longer direct anything.

 

Later we sat at the table with her children. One of them mentioned his name in passing. And I saw her face change. She smiled. But not at the child. Not at me. She turned and looked at me with a gaze I knew — the gaze she once used to save for me. The smile of someone in love. And then I knew. Without evidence, without words. I knew it in every fiber of my being. And at the same time I knew: my knowing would be denied.

 

At another moment I brought up that remark again. That she had had sex with all her friends. She looked at me smiling, slightly surprised. “Oh, did I say that?” As if it had never happened. As if I had made it up. The gaslighting was subtle, but deadly. It wasn’t the distortion of facts. It was the evaporation of reality. As if my memory lost its right to exist the moment she no longer recalled it — or pretended she didn’t.

 

What ultimately kept me grounded were my journals. I had written everything down. Every event, every sentence, every conversation. As silent witnesses, they held on to what was being denied. Thanks to those words — my own words — I still knew who I was. What had happened. What was true. They anchored me in a reality that otherwise might have been lost in the foggy no man’s land of her lies and insincerity.

 

That conversation, on that day, was a breaking point. No fight, no shouting, no dramatic ending. Just that smile. And its echo in my body. A memory that doesn’t fade, but becomes sharper the further I look back. Because I know: that’s when I saw through her — and lost her at the same time. But also — slowly, in the emptiness she left behind, I began to find myself again.

 

 

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Dissociation and the Mirror Without Reflection

There are moments when your body keeps functioning while your consciousness quietly withdraws. That’s not weakness — it’s self-preservation. As if your soul whispers: I’d better not be here right now. That conversation, that look, that smile… it wasn’t a moment of clarity, but of dissociation. Not knowing what was worse: what was happening or the fact that I was no longer fully present.

 

In relationships that have lost their grounding, the other becomes a mirror in which you slowly begin to fade. You look and no longer see yourself. Not because you’ve disappeared, but because the other no longer makes room for your existence. No reflection, no recognition, no awareness of you as a subject. Only projection. Judgment. Confusion. It feels like freefalling into an unfathomable depth.

 

In psychology, dissociation is often seen as a symptom — something to be treated. But in reality, it’s a highly intelligent response of the self. An attempt to preserve inner order when the outer world becomes disorienting. In my case, dissociation wasn’t a choice, but an automatic movement: my mind retreated at the moment my soul was no longer being acknowledged.

 

What makes gaslighting so insidious isn’t just the lie itself, but the systematic undermining of your inner compass. It’s as if the other is quietly sawing at your foundation, until you no longer know what’s real — or worse: until you’re no longer able to recognize truth at all. You start doubting your memories, your feelings, your interpretations, your perception. Not because you’re crazy, but because you are being systematically untethered from your inner truth.

 

And that’s why my journals were vital. Not so much as a record of facts, but as a testimony of my existence. They offered anchoring in a reality that was constantly being erased. If she said: “I never said that,” I could reread it. If she smiled with that bottomless smile, I could catch the pain of it in words. My writing became my mirror. A place where I could find myself again. Not because I was certain, but because I had felt it — and had written it down, uncensored. In a relationship where truth had become liquid, my words became my lifeline.

 

What I didn’t fully realize at the time, but now see all the more clearly: dissociation was my soul withdrawing from an environment in which it was no longer safe. And my journals were the place where my soul could still breathe.

 

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The undermining of recognition and the ethics of inner life

What was most disorienting wasn’t the infidelity, not the lies, not even the coldness with which they were delivered. It was the absence of recognition. Recognition of my pain. Of my love. Of my existence as a feeling human being in front of her. My grief stirred nothing. My silence was not heard. My boundaries not felt. I disappeared — not because I wasn’t there, but because she didn’t want to — or couldn’t — see me.

 

In her eyes, I wasn’t an Other but a function. Someone who was supposed to love her. Who confirmed her sense of being, polished her mirror and absorbed her pain. But never truly seen. And that is the real tragedy: not that love ends, but that it may never have truly existed for the other.

 

In relationships where love is merely a façade, the moral compass slowly shifts. What once seemed self-evident — honesty, responsibility, empathy — becomes optional. Negotiable. And with every shift, not only the relationship becomes skewed, but also the image you have of yourself. You begin to lose yourself in the gray zone of justification, hoping and trying just one more time.

 

When she said she wouldn’t mind having a third child with a man who was cheating on his heavily pregnant wife — and did so with a smile — something broke inside me. But what broke was also that part of me that had clung to illusion. To hope. To the belief that love naturally leads to reciprocity. That illusion fell apart. What remained was raw and painfully real: the absence of moral reflection.

 

The problem wasn’t that she loved others. The problem was that she felt no responsibility for her actions. No real empathy. No inner ground in which guilt and shame had a place. Everything was strategic, evasive, wrapped in nuance, lies or manipulation. She was incapable of truly allowing herself to be affected — and those who don’t allow themselves to be touched, cannot touch others.

 

Recognition is not a compliment. It’s not about being liked or valued. Recognition is existential recognition: I see you as a human being before me, with your pain, your desires, your boundaries and your soul.

 

And that’s what was missing.

 

Not just in her gaze, but in the entire dynamic.
She stood at the center. The other was a function: lover, comforter, mirror, refuge.
But never a full-fledged you opposite her I.

 

That realization led to the deepest pain: that love — without inner life, without moral awareness — has no ground to rest in. That someone who does not know themselves can only use the other. Not necessarily out of malice, but out of emptiness, out of incapacity. And still — the result is devastating. For the other. For me.

 

But I held on to my journals. To the small ritual of writing. Not to accuse her, but to preserve myself. To continue affirming my existence in the face of someone who rendered me no one. Who saw me as a projection screen or stage prop, but not as an inner, present other.

 

That’s why I believe love without truth is not love. And that truth is not an abstraction,
but something alive: something that begins with the willingness to be affected. To truly let the other in. That’s where morality begins. That’s where being human begins.

 

 

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The rebirth of truth – How the Self saved itself

There comes a moment when the body knows — before the mind — that something no longer fits. A tremble. A tension in the chest. A tiredness no sleep can cure. I felt myself slipping away, but no longer knew how to find myself again. Until I returned to my own words. To the journals I had kept all those years.

 

There it all was. Unvarnished. Without gaslighting. Without doubt.
There I was — in my own words.

 

I hadn’t just written everything down — I had anchored something. Something that would later save me. Because what undermines truth isn’t the complexity of the situation, but the constant distortion of it. The subtle erasures in her words, her glances, her smiles. What was true kept evaporating.

 

Except on paper.
There, I had kept it.
There, it remained.

 

And perhaps this holds the deepest insight: truth is not a possession, but a relationship. A continuous return to what resonates inwardly. Not just literal facts, but the felt knowing that something important has been lived — and that this deserves to be recognized, first and foremost by yourself.

 

My journals were my witnesses. My mirror when the other no longer reflected me. They held my Self together when everything inside me was splintering. That wasn’t only because I rationally knew what was true — but because I had felt it and then put it into words. And that feeling — that shaping — became my defense against the void.

 

Truth became an act.
An act of love.
For myself.

 

For the part of me that never stopped feeling, even when it found no place to rest. Since then, I’ve known: those who dare to feel the truth — beyond the mind’s strategies, beyond the defenses of fear and dependency — save themselves. Not in one blow, but in layers. In falling and rising again. Not without scars — but with soul.

 

My truth is not an attack on her. My truth is the return to myself. And maybe that is the true ethics of love:

 

That we do not possess each other — but see each other.
That we do not use each other — but recognize one another.
That we are one another’s ground — or, if that is not possible, that we at least refuse to deny the other.

 

Because it is in denial that the soul disappears.

And in recognition that she returns.