Love Is Not What We Were Taught

Most of us learned love by watching it — not by understanding it.

Some people grew up surrounded by chaos: emotional volatility, silence, control, or unpredictability. Love felt unsafe, confusing, or conditional.

Others, like me, grew up watching something that looked remarkably solid. My parents’ marriage appeared stable, committed, and close to ideal.

Both experiences shape us — and both leave gaps.

Those who grew up in chaos often learned love through pain rather than connection.

When love hurts early, the body confuses attachment with endurance.

Staying becomes proof. Surviving becomes devotion.

Those who grew up watching something near-perfect often learned what love should look like — without seeing the machinery underneath it. I didn’t see the effort, the conflict, the repair, the emotional regulation, or the compromises that made that marriage work. So love became an outcome to obtain, not a skill to practice.

Without realizing it, many of us carry a checklist — how love should show up, how it should sound, how it should feel, how long it should last. And when relationships don’t meet that standard, disappointment sets in. Judgment often follows.

Here’s the truth most people don’t want to admit:

When love becomes an ideal, people become performances.

Whether love was modeled as harmful or idealized, the result is often the same — unrealistic expectations and quiet self-betrayal. We expect others to love us correctly, consistently, and seamlessly, according to rules they were never given.

February tends to reinforce these ideals. It celebrates romance, gestures, and certainty, while skipping over the emotional skills that actually sustain connection: repair, accountability, regulation, and safety.

Instead of repeating what love is supposed to look like, I want to name what love actually requires — especially when what we learned early on was incomplete, distorted, or impossible to replicate.

Below are four truths about love we don’t talk about enough.

Being Chosen vs. Choosing Yourself

Many people don’t realize how much of their life has been shaped by the desire to be chosen.

Chosen by a parent who was inconsistent.
Chosen by a partner whose approval felt conditional. Chosen by someone who finally made them feel seen.

When being chosen becomes the goal, love quietly turns into a question that runs in the background:

Am I good enough?

That question shows up in subtle ways. You scan for reassurance. You adjust your tone. You replay conversations. You wonder if you said too much, asked for too much, or needed too much.

And underneath it all sits a deeper question:

Will you ever love me the way I need to be loved?

When love is organized around these questions, it stops being mutual and starts being evaluative. You perform instead of participate. You stay alert instead of relaxed. You work harder instead of being known.

Choosing yourself isn’t dramatic. It’s often quiet and deeply uncomfortable. It looks like tolerating disappointment, allowing others to have reactions, and resisting the urge to prove your worth through endurance.

Choosing yourself doesn’t mean you stop wanting love. It means you stop negotiating your value to receive it.

Love that requires you to question your worth is not intimacy — it’s survival dressed up as devotion.

How much of your energy has gone into being chosen — and what has it cost you?

Love Letters We Never Got (And Still Grieve)

Not all grief comes from loss.

Some of it comes from what never happened.
What was never said.
What was never offered — even though it was needed.

For some, the letter would have said, I see you. For others, You’re safe here.
For others, You don’t have to earn love.

When those messages aren’t given early, the body doesn’t forget. It keeps looking for them — quietly, sometimes desperately — in places they were never meant to come from.

So we work harder in relationships.
We explain ourselves more than necessary.
We stay in situations that almost give us what we needed.

Almost feels close enough when you’ve been waiting a long time.

And then the questions show up — the ones people don’t always admit they’re asking:

Why can’t they love me?
Why won’t they change?
If they loved me, wouldn’t they want to change?

It doesn’t always feel comfortable — but it feels familiar.

As humans, we gravitate toward what’s familiar, even when it hurts. We know how to survive there. So we live there longer than we should, not because it’s healthy, but because it’s known.

This isn’t about blaming the past. It’s about being honest about impact. You can love your family and still grieve what was missing. Both can be true.

When that grief is named, the chase slows down.
The pressure eases.
Relationships stop carrying weight they were never meant to hold.

What words are you still hoping someone else will finally say — and what would it mean to stop waiting for them?

The Valentine’s Day No One Talks About: When Love Feels One-Sided

There’s a version of Valentine’s Day that doesn’t get talked about.

It isn’t dramatic.
It isn’t explosive.
It’s just quietly uneven.

One person carries the relationship.
They remember. They initiate. They adjust. They notice.
The other shows up — when they feel like it — and assumes that’s enough.

From the outside, everything looks fine. Inside, one person is constantly recalibrating:

Did I ask for too much? Should I let this go? Am I being unreasonable?

This is what one-sided love usually looks like. Not cruelty.
Not abuse.
Just imbalance.

One person holds the emotional weight. They manage the temperature of the relationship, anticipate reactions, soften conversations, and protect the connection from discomfort. Over time, love stops feeling mutual and starts feeling managed.

Many people stay because nothing is “wrong enough” to justify leaving. There’s no big moment — just a growing sense of I’m doing this alone.

Love isn’t always equal in effort, but it should feel shared. When one person is always reaching and the other is always receiving, something fundamental is missing.

Valentine’s Day celebrates gestures. It rarely asks who is still showing up when there’s nothing to perform.

If you stopped compensating, what would actually be left of this relationship?

What If February Was About Belonging Instead of Romance?

February is loud about love.

It tells us love should be visible, expressive, and proven. It celebrates gestures and intensity — the parts of love that can be pointed to. What it rarely talks about is the kind of love that actually allows people to exhale.

Healing love is quieter.

It doesn’t rush to prove itself. It doesn’t create urgency.
It doesn’t keep you guessing.

What’s often missing isn’t love. It’s intensity.

For people who grew up around chaos or emotional unpredictability, intensity feels familiar. Calm can feel empty. Quiet can feel wrong. So belonging gets questioned instead of trusted.

Belonging is not the absence of depth. It’s the presence of safety.

It’s being able to show up without bracing. Without managing. Without performing.

The love that heals isn’t loud. It doesn’t compete.
It doesn’t keep score.

It creates room.
It allows regulation. It stays.

Maybe February doesn’t need more romance.
Maybe it needs more places where people feel they belong.

What if the love you’re overlooking is the one that doesn’t require you to brace?

If this landed in a way you didn’t expect, pay attention.

People don’t come into my office because they “can’t do relationships.”
They come in because they’re tired of carrying them alone, surviving them, or questioning themselves inside of them.

Insight helps — but it doesn’t change patterns by itself.
Patterns shift when we slow them down, look at them honestly, and practice something different in real time.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t push through — it’s sit down with someone and actually look at what’s been driving the pattern.