We speak about love as though everyone means the same thing.
We don’t.
We use the same word while describing entirely different experiences. One person calls love freedom, while another calls it control. One experiences love as safety, another as sacrifice. One believes love welcomes authenticity, while another believes love demands performance.
Perhaps this is why so many relationships struggle before they have truly begun. We assume we are searching for the same thing, when in reality we are responding to entirely different definitions of love.
The greatest deception about love is not that we fail to find it. It is that we become so accustomed to counterfeits that we stop recognizing the real thing.
If love is the highest expression of our humanity, why do we so often mistake attachment, control, fear, possession, or self-abandonment for love?
I don’t believe we love according to what love truly is.
I believe we love according to what we have come to believe love is.
That distinction changes everything.
Long before we choose a partner, we have already begun defining love—not with words, but through experience. Every child enters the world believing they are worthy, simply because they exist. Then life begins to teach them lessons. Some are true. Some are devastatingly false.
Every interaction with the people entrusted to love us quietly answers a question we never knew we were asking:
What does love require of me?
Does it require honesty, or silence?
Authenticity, or performance?
Curiosity, or perfection?
Can I express my needs and still belong?
Can I disappoint someone and remain loved?
Can I be fully myself without losing my place in another person’s heart?
The answers become the architecture of our relationships long before we ever enter one.
Some people grow up believing love says, “Come exactly as you are.”
Others quietly conclude, “Come… but leave the parts of yourself that make people uncomfortable.”
Those conclusions rarely remain conscious. They become beliefs, and beliefs become the lenses through which we experience every relationship that follows.
We do not experience love as it is.
We experience love through the meanings we have assigned to it.
If love once meant criticism, honesty begins to feel dangerous. If love once meant control, closeness feels suffocating. If love once meant unpredictability, peace feels unfamiliar. If love once meant abandonment, commitment can feel like the beginning of loss.
The relationship is not creating those reactions.
It is revealing them.
Every relationship reveals two stories: the story of the other person, and the story we have been telling ourselves about love.
Many people believe they are searching for love.
I wonder if they are actually searching for the version of love they learned to survive.
Before many people leave relationships, they have already learned to leave themselves. They leave their opinions to avoid conflict, their emotions to avoid rejection, their needs because needing anything once felt dangerous, and their voice because silence once preserved belonging.
After years of practicing self-abandonment, they begin to mistake it for love itself.
Yet love has never asked us to disappear.
Perhaps that is why the description of love in Scripture feels so radical—not because it is poetic, but because it confronts nearly every counterfeit we have mistaken for love.
Love is patient—not because patience is passive, but because it refuses to let another person’s behaviour determine our character.
Love is kind—not because kindness is weakness, but because kindness never requires cruelty to express truth.
Love is not proud. It has nothing to prove.
Love does not seek to possess. It honours freedom because love that must be controlled is no longer love.
And perhaps the most overlooked description of all:
Love rejoices in the truth.
Love has never been threatened by truth.
Fear is.
Shame is.
Control is.
Manipulation is.
Love welcomes truth because only truth can create genuine intimacy. A relationship may survive on illusion for a season. It cannot flourish there.
One of the Hermetic Principles teaches that every cause has its effect, and every effect has its cause.
I see this reflected in every human relationship.
An experience becomes a belief.
A belief shapes perception.
Perception influences behaviour.
Behaviour creates consequences.
Until we examine the original belief, we spend years trying to change the effects while protecting the cause.
Perhaps this is why love becomes one of our greatest teachers.
Not because love is easy.
Love is rarely easy.
Anyone can love when they are admired, understood, and treated well. The deeper question is not whether love is difficult.
It is this:
Who do I become when loving another person becomes difficult?
Do I become controlling?
Do I withdraw?
Do I manipulate?
Do I punish?
Do I abandon myself?
Or do I remain rooted in truth, integrity, compassion, and freedom?
Love is not proven by how tightly we hold on to another person.
It is revealed by who we become while they are in our relationships.
Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question all along.
Instead of asking why relationships fail…
Instead of asking why people fear intimacy…
Instead of asking why love is so difficult…
Perhaps we should begin here:
What have I been calling love?
Because the quality of our relationships is never determined only by the people we choose.
It is determined by the definition of love we carry into them.
Healing begins when we allow every counterfeit to fall away—not so we can become better at loving, but so we can finally recognize love for what it has always been.
We do not love according to what love truly is. We love according to what we believe love to be. Every sacred unraveling begins when we have the courage to ask whether the two are the same.
Continue the Unraveling
What have you been calling love that, upon deeper reflection, may never have been love at all?
There are no right or wrong answers—only an invitation to look beneath the surface. If this essay stirred something in you, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
This is the first essay in The Sacred Unraveling of Love, a collection exploring how our beliefs shape the way we give, receive, and understand love. In the next essay, The Lies Love Never Told You, we’ll examine the false definitions of love many of us inherited long before we ever fell in love—and how those beliefs continue to shape our lives today.
If this essay resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone who may be questioning what love truly is. Sometimes a single conversation becomes the beginning of someone else’s sacred unraveling. Or visit me at www.unravelingwithgrace.com