What Is Love, Really? For Those Who Stopped Believing.

We throw the word around so easily.

Love will save the world.

Love is all you need.

Love yourself first.

And yet… most of us are walking around with armor so thick, we shield ourselves from the very things that could heal us. We distrust the word love because it’s been used to manipulate, to sell things, to cover up control, to avoid pain. We think of it as fragile, romantic, naive — or worse, a luxury for those who have time to chase butterflies and poetry.

But what if we’ve misunderstood love entirely?

What if real love isn’t soft — but searing?

What if love isn’t a transaction, or a feeling, or a vow — but a force? One that breaks illusions, rips us from the need to dominate or please, and lays bare the truth of who we are?

Love is not safe.

It will shatter your identity.

It will expose everything in you that is fake.

It will ask you to open where you have closed,

to feel where you have numbed,

to forgive where your ego wants revenge.

This is why most people are afraid of it.

They want comfort, not transformation.

They want validation, not truth.

They want to be seen, but only in their most curated version.

But love — real love — sees right through the mask.

And if it’s true love, it will not let you lie to yourself any longer.

Love is not a transaction.

Not a checklist.

Not a promise you wring out of someone so you can finally feel safe.

It’s not something you earn by being good enough, or something you owe when someone treats you well.

Love is not a bargain struck between two half-trusting hearts.

Love is a state of being.

A field we return to when we finally let go.

Love is presence.

It is responsibility.

It is meeting another human being in their entirety — not just their beauty, but their shadow, their fear, their history, their chaos — and saying:

“I won’t run.”

Even when that person is yourself.

Because love, at its core, is inclusion.

It includes pain.

It includes contradiction.

It includes the terrifying fact that everything is temporary — and yet, worth giving yourself to anyway.

We say we want love, but then we cling to our conditions:

Only if it feels safe.

Only if they never leave.

Only if I stay in control.

Only if I don’t have to feel too much.

But love will ask you to feel.

It will ask you to sit with your shame and not run.

It will ask you to stop pretending you don’t care when you do.

It will ask you to melt, and maybe even fall apart, before you feel whole again.

Love won’t always look like romance.

Sometimes, it looks like silence.

Sometimes, it sounds like “no.”

Sometimes, it comes disguised as grief — as the goodbye you didn’t want but needed in order to grow.

Everyone carries their own idea of love — shaped by their parents, culture, first heartbreaks, and quiet hopes they barely dare to admit.

So when two people meet, they don’t just meet.

They meet each other’s definitions.

Each other’s fears.

Each other’s stories.

Real love begins not when someone fits your mold, but when you both become brave enough to drop the molds completely.

To meet in the wild middle.

Not needing.

Not proving.

Just being.

And no, love is not the cure for everything.

But it is the soil from which everything real can grow.

It’s what makes healing possible.

It’s what reminds us — over and over again — that no matter how many pieces we’ve been shattered into, something inside us still glows.

Rumi once wrote: "Keep breaking your heart until it opens."

And perhaps that’s what love truly is — an invitation to break, heal, and grow over and over again, until our hearts are wide enough to hold all the possibilities of what love can be.