Real love always starts from me.

Consider someone who learned, late, to apologise properly.

It began internally, with the ability to be wrong without collapsing — no small acquisition at fifty, after decades of defending every position on instinct.

Then it changed a marriage. Then how their children argue with each other, and probably how their grandchildren will.

That is the direction of travel. Love that begins with you is meant to leave the building, and the version that stops at its own front door hardens into something else. You have seen that too: a person so carefully protected that nobody ever gets near enough to disappoint them.