Q: My partner of 5 years can't handle my dismantling. I’ve put him through a lot. I don't want to lose him, but how much effort should I put into making him stay if he can't stick by me in the worst?

A: You’re not really asking about effort, or relationships, or loyalty. You’re asking how much effort to spend on maintaining your dream-self’s support system while you’re trying to destroy the dream-self. That’s not a question, it’s a contradiction.

You want him to stay because you’re scared. He wants you to stay the same because he’s scared. Fear negotiating with fear isn’t love, it’s more like hostage management.

What you’re really asking here is, “Can I wake up without losing what I love in the dream?”  Some part of you likely knows that you don’t get to keep both. One of them dies:  either the false self, or the life built to protect it. That’s the price of admission.

But your partner isn’t really the issue; he’s simply the first structure showing the strain of your collapse.

“How much effort should I put into making him stay?” That’s the false self speaking, the one who believes relationships are maintained by performance, emotional management, and negotiation. The one who thinks love is conditional on you staying inside your old shape.

The child-self is bargaining for continued existence by believing things like, “If I lose him, something essential will be lost.” It’s trying to slow the dismantling by reframing the process as a “relationship problem.”

When someone begins to dismantle, the false self doesn’t just fall apart internally, it destabilizes every relationship built around it. That’s not failure, that’s architecture doing what architecture does when the foundation is being ripped out. So the mind grabs the nearest, most familiar fear: “What if this costs me love?”

But the real fear is: “What if this costs me me?”

You’re trying to choose between your partner and your process. But that’s not the real tension. The real tension is between the self you’re dismantling, and the life that was built around maintaining it. 

Right now, you’re not worried about losing him, you’re terrified of losing the story of you in which he plays a stabilizing role.

If someone loved (and depended on) the dream-you, they may not be able to handle the deconstructing-you. That doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them incompatible with what’s happening. But the bottom line here is, if someone can’t walk with you into reality, they’re an anchor keeping you in the dream.

Your question reflects Phase Two: Disruption. This phase always tests the structures that depended on the dream-version of you, and intimate relationships are usually the first to wobble. Relationships become strained when the old identity won’t play its part anymore. You feel misunderstood and unstable. Others almost always interpret your dismantling as a malfunction, not a metamorphosis. You’re caught between two worlds: unable to go back, terrified of what continuing forward will break next.

The forward-moving question is never going to be: “How do I make them stay?”  It’s more like: “What part of me is willing to stay asleep for companionship?”

If that question is pursued honestly, the truth reveals itself very fast.