13/01/2026
LOVE left UNEXAMINED can [and does] become a kind of GRAVITY
LOVE has COST too MUCH
When THE SELF vanishes into THE SHADOWS of another SOUL the SPIRIT within ABANDONS the SYNERGY within the SACRED SYSTEM
LOVE becomes a BURDEN
LUST becomes DEMONIC
CHOICES are FACED with options of YOU/ME/I or THEM
The MERGE of MOTIVES and MINDS are INFUSED with FRACTURES and sometimes we NEVER get to SEE them with OUR CONSCIOUSNESS but when we DO we MUST *CHOOSE* to ACCEPT them for there ILLUMINATION … Is *LOVE* being CHOSEN or is it *DEPENDENCE, VALIDATION and the SEDUCTION to be NEEDED*???
SENSATIONS FUEL SACRIFICE - too GIVE and to TAKE - TIME, ENERGY and PRESENCE … Who’s DEMONS are YOU *FEEDING*?
🔥⛓️🔥
There’s a quiet shock in realizing that love can be exhausting rather than enlarging. Not the dramatic kind of heartbreak, but the slow fatigue that settles in when devotion becomes a full-time occupation and there’s nothing left over. The ache in Sophia Tolstoy’s reflection comes from that recognition, arriving late, unwelcome, and painfully clear.
By 1890, Sophia had been married to Leo Tolstoy for nearly three decades. She was not merely his wife. She was his editor, copyist, estate manager, and the practical mind that kept a famously impractical genius afloat. She copied War and Peace by hand multiple times while pregnant. She raised thirteen children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. She negotiated with publishers, handled finances, and managed Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where Leo Tolstoy was born, like a small enterprise. All of this while being emotionally tethered to a man whose moral and spiritual convictions grew more severe with age.
Her journals, later published as The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, are unsparing. They record not only resentment and sorrow but an almost forensic attention to what it costs to orbit another person’s purpose. By the time she wrote the line in question, Leo Tolstoy had entered his late period of spiritual crisis, rejecting private property, questioning marriage, and promoting chastity, even as he remained married and dependent on her labour. The contradiction was not lost on her. Nor was the asymmetry.
What makes her regret so unsettling is its specificity. She isn’t lamenting a lack of love. She’s grieving the erosion of energy. Talent, in her telling, didn’t vanish in a dramatic blaze. It thinned out, siphoned off by the constant vigilance of loving someone who required emotional oxygen at all times. Anyone who has spent years calibrating their mood to another person’s needs knows the feeling. The way the body learns to stay alert. The way one’s own interests feel indulgent, even vaguely disloyal.
There’s something culturally revealing here too. Nineteenth century Russia offered educated women like Sophia limited legitimate outlets for ambition. Marriage to a great man could look, from the outside, like a form of participation in greatness. And for a while, it was. She admired Leo deeply. She believed in his work. But admiration hardened into obligation. Emotional dependence, as she names it, wasn’t romantic fragility. It was a structure, reinforced by social expectations and by a marriage that quietly demanded self-sacrifice as proof of love.
Her words anticipate questions that later thinkers would ask more explicitly. Virginia Woolf would argue for a room of one’s own. Simone de Beauvoir would describe how women are encouraged to live as mirrors for male achievement. Sophia Tolstoy arrived at the problem from the inside, without theory, with only the evidence of her own depletion. That’s what gives the passage its enduring power. It’s not ideological. It’s bodily. Energy once felt abundant and now it’s gone.
There’s also courage in the regret itself. To admit, even privately, that love has cost too much is to violate a deep taboo. We are trained to frame devotion as ennobling, especially for women. To suggest that it might be corrosive feels almost ungrateful. Sophia knew this. Her diaries were not meant for public consumption. They were a place to think honestly, perhaps the only one she had.
It’s easy to imagine the moment. A quiet room after the household has finally settled. The scrape of a pen. The heaviness in the shoulders that no amount of rest seems to lift. That small, unglamorous setting matters. This is not a manifesto. It’s an inventory taken when the day is done.
Sophia Tolstoy has often been cast as a tragic footnote to a great man, or as an obstacle to his spiritual purity. That framing misses the point. Her writing offers a rare account of what it means to live adjacent to genius and slowly disappear. Not because of malice, exactly, but because love, left unexamined, can become a kind of gravity.
The line endures because it asks a question that never quite goes out of date. How much of oneself should love be allowed to consume. And how late is too late to notice the answer.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
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