Love

Love may be one of the most powerful forces that shapes a human life.

Throughout history, it has inspired people to cross oceans, build kingdoms, write poetry, compose symphonies, and sacrifice everything they have for someone or something they believed was worth dying for. Parents have willingly laid down their own comfort, dreams, and even their lives for their children. Entire movements have been born from a love of justice, freedom, humanity, and God.

Love has always been the force that moves us, and it possesses the power to change the direction of our lives. It reshapes our priorities and often asks us to risk what feels safe in pursuit of what feels meaningful. Few forces have inspired as much courage, sacrifice, beauty, creativity, or devotion throughout human history as love has.

But what is love actually?

I’m not talking about love simply as a feeling. But what is true, genuine love? How do you know you’ve found something real and not something simply born out of attachment, dependency, familiarity, or the need to have a part of yourself fulfilled by another person?

Maybe the easiest way to understand what love truly is starts by stripping away what it is not.

When we are little, we learn about love the same way we learn almost everything else. Long before we’re old enough to have language to define it, we’re learning about love by watching how our parents speak to one another and to us. We notice whether conflict is met with curiosity or criticism, whether affection is given freely or asked to be earned, or whether emotions are welcomed or dismissed. We absorb what love looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like, what it expects from us, and what it costs before we’re ever old enough to fully understand what we’re learning. And before we have the ability to question those lessons, we’ve already become them.

This becomes our first blueprint for love and the standard our nervous system recognizes as familiar. It’s why we unconsciously find ourselves drawn toward people who recreate the very dynamics that once hurt us. Not because we’re choosing pain, but because we’re choosing what’s familiar.

The people who raise us become our first definition of love. The difficult part is that our first definition isn’t always the healthiest one. Sometimes we spend the first half of our lives learning what love is, only to spend the second half discovering what it isn’t.

I know I had to face this painful truth myself.

There was a pivotal moment many years ago in a therapy session that I’ll never forget, one that completely shattered any illusions I had about what love is.

Up until that moment, I had spent years convincing myself that staying in my marriage was the most loving thing I could do for my children. I believed that sacrificing my own happiness was simply part of being a good mother and wife, and that it was the right thing to do. If I could just endure a little longer, love a little harder, and hold everything together, then maybe I could give my children the stable family I never had. But that hope and desire was the very cage that kept me stuck in a cycle I struggled to give myself permission to break.

The two questions my therapist asked me that stopped me dead in my tracks that day were:

“How would you feel if Bella married someone who treated her the way you’ve been treated?”

“And what if Ryan grew up believing this was how a man loves a woman?”

I don’t remember anything we talked about after that. I only remember the rapid dismantling of long-held beliefs around what love is and isn’t. For the first time, I wasn’t looking at my marriage through my own eyes. I was looking at it through theirs, which helped me see the situation clearly for the first time. Every behavior I tolerated suddenly looked different. Every moment of unkindness I accepted felt sharper. Every year that lacked affection, tenderness, or genuine partnership felt lonelier than I remembered. I realized these weren’t just my experiences anymore. They were becoming my children’s understanding of love unless I showed them something different.

Before that moment, I spent years believing that I was protecting my children by staying. What I couldn’t see was that I was teaching them to repeat the exact same painful cycle that I was waiting to liberate myself from once they were grown. In trying to protect them from the pain of divorce, I had unknowingly been teaching them to accept the pain of unhealthy love. I was also asking them to reconcile two completely different realities: the happy family we tried to present to the world and the relationship they quietly witnessed at home. Children are so perceptive and know more than we give them credit for. Even if we believe we're hiding the truth from them, they can still feel the reality. That lack of truth and integrity can carry into adulthood, especially when it comes to them forming romantic partnerships.

Children don’t learn about love because we explain it to them. They learn it because they watch us live it. They watch what we tolerate, what we forgive, what we excuse, what we fight for, what we settle for, and what we call normal. And most importantly, they learn from us what love feels like. Children can’t separate love from pain, so when the two consistently arrive together, they quietly begin to believe that pain is simply something they must accept as part of being loved. Whether we realize it or not, we're quietly teaching them what they should expect from love, and what love should expect from them.

That conversation with my therapist wasn’t only about my children; it was about me. My children had simply become the mirror I never knew I needed. What they reflected back most clearly was my own truth that I had been avoiding, and that made it impossible to continue lying to myself. For years I had convinced myself that I was staying for them. That was the story I told everyone, and it was even the story I told myself. But somewhere beneath that story was another truth I wasn’t yet ready to face. I was terrified of what leaving would require of me. The grief. The uncertainty. The judgment. The guilt. But mostly, it was facing everything I had been avoiding for years head-on and letting others into the reality that our marriage was the complete opposite of the happy-family lie we'd worked so hard to convince everyone of.

As long as I could tell myself I was staying for the children, I never had to fully acknowledge that I was also using them as a reason not to choose myself. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to admit. Not because it was shameful, but because it was true. It showed me how deeply fear can disguise itself as love.

For a long time I believed sacrifice was simply part of what commitment looked like. I thought love meant staying, no matter what it was costing me. I never stopped to ask whether love was supposed to cost me myself. Without realizing it, I had begun measuring my worth through someone else’s inability to love me well.

Throughout the years of owning my own practice, I’ve had the privilege of sitting with hundreds of people as they’ve shared the parts of their lives they rarely spoke about anywhere else. People came carrying every imaginable struggle. Anxiety. Addiction. Grief. Trauma. Burnout. Questions about who they were. But no matter where the conversation began, it almost always found its way back to the same place.

Love.

They wanted to know why they kept choosing the same kinds of partners even though they wanted someone different. What it was that made them stay long after they knew something wasn’t right. Why they couldn't let go of someone who had hurt them. And mostly, why healthy love felt so unfamiliar and just out of reach while unhealthy love felt impossible to walk away from.

Over time, I realized my clients weren’t simply asking about love; they were asking about what it meant about themselves. They wanted to understand why they accepted what they accepted, why they tolerated what they tolerated, and why they struggled to believe they deserved something different. While many thought they were searching for the right partner, what they were really searching for was a new definition of love. And the more stories I heard, the more I realized they were all wrestling with the same question.

How do we recognize healthy love?

For those of us whose very first blueprint of love wasn’t healthy, it’s easy to spend years chasing relationships built on a misunderstanding of what love actually asks of us. Looking back, I don’t think I was attracting healthy love nearly as much as I was settling for something that felt familiar enough to call love. I spent years chasing, protecting, sacrificing for, and grieving relationships built on a misunderstanding of what love actually was and what it required of me. And maybe that’s why so many of us confuse love with things it was never meant to be.

It wasn’t until I began working on the relationship with myself and experiencing relationships that felt different that I realized how much I had misunderstood. Not just one thing, but almost everything. I thought love meant sacrifice. I thought that the more I gave away, the more deeply I loved. I thought chemistry meant intensity. I thought compassion meant making room for behavior that slowly diminished me. I thought being chosen mattered more than choosing someone who was capable of loving me well. I confused unconditional love with unconditional access.

None of those beliefs appeared overnight. They quietly shaped themselves throughout my childhood and were reinforced by the relationships I chose for a lot of my adulthood. That is, until I began questioning if those longstanding beliefs were healthy for me. At some point in my journey, staying the same became more painful than changing. I had spent years fearing what would happen if I left. Eventually, I became more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. That was the beginning of everything changing for me.

There’s a great deal of wisdom in the idea that we can't fully love another person until we’ve learned how to love ourselves. Not because we’re incapable of loving before then. I know I loved deeply before I loved myself well. The difference is that when we don’t know how to love ourselves, we often ask relationships to answer questions they were never meant to answer. Am I enough? Am I worthy? Am I loveable? Will someone finally choose me in a way I’ve struggled to choose myself?

The journey back to myself wasn’t about becoming someone new. It was about unlearning everything that had taught me to abandon myself in the name of love, and slowly replacing those patterns with healthier ones that let me stay connected to who I really was. Some beliefs disappeared quickly while I had to grieve others before I could let them go.

I don’t think healthy love begins the day we meet the right person. I think it begins the day we stop abandoning ourselves in order to keep someone else.

Once I stopped asking relationships to answer questions about my worth and gave the other person space to meet me equally, I began noticing something I had never paid attention to before. My relationships no longer centered on the other person and how they made me feel about myself; they became focused on how I felt about myself when I was with them. Some people made me feel like I had to become smaller while others made me feel like I could finally breathe.

Recognizing that difference changed everything for me.

It also changed the way I showed up in my relationships.

I stopped overextending myself to make them work. I stopped overgiving. I stopped carrying the emotional weight of two people. I stopped overexplaining my needs or hiding parts of myself to make someone else comfortable. I stopped offering more grace, empathy, and understanding than I was receiving in return. Most importantly, I stopped molding myself into the version I thought someone else needed so they would choose to stay.

Something unexpected happened when I stopped working so hard to hold everything together.

I could finally see the other person and their capacity clearly.

Since I wasn’t trying to manage the relationship or outcome anymore, I could finally pay attention to what was there. I noticed whether the relationship naturally felt mutual or whether I was the one doing most of the reaching. I noticed whether accountability came easily or whether pride always got there first. I noticed whether they made room for my truth the same way I had always made room for theirs. I noticed whether their words and actions told the same story.

And perhaps most importantly, I stopped trying to make potential feel like reality.

I stopped trying to create the relationship I hoped we could have and allowed myself to experience the reality of the relationship I was living inside of.

So if healthy love begins with the relationship we have with ourselves, then perhaps the better question isn’t, “How do I know if someone loves me and that the connection is healthy?” It’s, “Who do I become when I’m with them and do I like that version of me?”

When I’m with people who love and care for me well, I notice something soft happens inside me. I don’t feel the need to put my armor on. The gentle parts of me naturally come forward. I’m kinder. More playful. More curious. I laugh more easily. My wit shows up without me thinking about it. I don’t rehearse what I’m going to say before I say it, and I don’t spend time after an interaction wondering if I shared too much or whether I should have been quieter.

I simply get to be ME.

Then something else shifts too. I’m no longer trying to figure out whether someone likes me enough, whether they’re slowly pulling away, or whether today’s kindness will somehow become tomorrow's leverage. I stop scanning for danger. I stop preparing for disappointment. I stop trying to stay one step ahead of someone else’s moods. Instead, I become present. And there is so much peace in that.

Something else magical happens: my inner child comes out to play inside healthy relationships. When my inner child comes out, she gets curious. She laughs. She’s silly. She isn’t worried about saying the wrong thing or being too much. She’s not performing or protecting herself. She’s simply enjoying the moment. She’s soft. To me, that’s one of the clearest signs of emotional safety and trust because children only play when they feel safe enough to stop surviving.

The healthiest relationships in my life also have a way of reflecting back the best parts of myself. Not the fearful version. Not the people-pleasing version. Not the version constantly wondering if she’s enough or if she’s chosen. They reflect back the parts of me that have always been there. My humor. My kindness. My compassion. My curiosity. My intelligence. My heart.

And every time someone sees those parts of me so clearly, I find myself loving those parts more too.

The greatest surprise in all of this has been realizing that I don’t think I was searching for love nearly as much as I was searching for emotional safety. Somewhere along the way, I realized I needed to stop trying to earn peace and safety by giving it to another person, and that, instead, I needed to be the one to create peace and safety within. And that all began with learning how to tell myself the truth. I learned to trust what I felt without needing outside validation. I learned that any relationship asking me to betray myself to keep it wasn’t asking me to love; it was asking me to disappear.

Over time, something inside me began changing. The things that once felt exciting no longer felt peaceful. The relationships that once kept me awake at night stopped feeling like love. The more I learned to trust myself, the easier it became to recognize the people and places where I no longer had to betray myself just to stay connected.

Aside from my children, the relationship I now fight to protect the most is the one I have with myself. I’ve spent years becoming someone I no longer want to abandon. Nowadays, I only let people close to me who are equally as protective of their own heart and mine.

One of the things I’m most grateful for is that this journey didn’t harden my heart the way I was afraid it would. If anything, it made it softer. I love more freely now than I ever have before. I tell people more often what they mean to me. I notice beauty more easily. I cry more quickly. I laugh harder. I let people see me. I’ve realized that protecting my peace hasn’t made me less loving; it's made me more emotionally available to myself and others.

Our hearts are remarkable teachers if we’re willing to listen. Mine has led me through grief, fear, hope, disappointment, healing, and back to myself again. If there’s one thing this journey has taught me, it’s that love was never asking me to become someone else.

It was inviting me back home.

“Let your teacher be love itself.” - Rumi

Before You Go...

Take a moment to think about the people in your life who make you feel the most like yourself. They may be a partner, a lifelong friend, a child, a mentor, a sibling, or someone whose presence simply feels like home.

Who do you become when you're with them?

Don't rush to answer. Just notice. Notice how your body feels. Notice whether you soften or brace. Notice whether you laugh more easily. Notice whether you feel the need to perform… or whether you simply get to be.

And as you move through the rest of your day, see if you can notice the quieter forms of love too. A friend's encouragement. A shared laugh. Someone remembering something important to you. An unexpected kindness from a stranger.

Maybe love has been around you all along.

Maybe healing simply helps you recognize it.