What Is Love, Really?

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately.

Not the version sold in films or sung about in glossy pop songs. Not the kind you fall into or out of. Not the one wrapped up in expectation, transaction, or fantasy.

I’m talking about love as the original pulse of life.

The ancient rhythm that connects breath to breath, being to being, across space and time.

But somewhere along the way, we seem to have gotten it all tangled up.

Love now comes with checklists.

With rules and roles.

With barriers to entry and reasons to withhold.

We confuse love with possession. With sex. With obligation.

We’ve built gates around it, when really—it was meant to be the gate itself.

The opening.

The way in.

Love Isn’t Owed. And It Isn’t Earned.

It simply is.

It’s the warmth in your chest when a stranger smiles.

The instinct to protect, to nourish, to reach out and say: I see you. You matter.

So why is it so hard to give?

Why do so many of us find it difficult to receive?

Because we’ve learned to fear love.

Not because love hurts—but because we’ve tried to build love on top of everything that isn’t it.

Control.

Approval.

Need.

Security.

Projection.

Performance.

Love Beyond the System

In dominant Western culture, love has become a kind of currency.

Earned through achievement.

Measured in gestures.

Withheld as punishment.

Traded like a contract.

We inherited fantasies:

That one person will save us.

That love makes pain disappear.

That happily ever after is the point.

But in many Indigenous and ancestral cultures, love was never just about two people.

It was a way of being in relationship—to the land, to the ancestors, to community, to Spirit.

In Māori culture, aroha is not just love—it’s compassion, empathy, and deep connection to all living things.

In many African traditions, love is woven into ubuntu: I am because we are.

In Cree teachings, love (sâkihitowin) is one of the seven sacred teachings. It is paired with respect, and is rooted in truth.

No flowers. No fireworks. No flawless skin or dramatic sacrifice.

Just love as a sacred responsibility.

As presence.

As life-giving force.

What If Love Is a Way of Remembering?

What if love isn’t something to find, but something to remember?

Remember how we once held each other without needing to own.

Remember the songs sung to babies not because they’d done anything, but because they existed.

Remember the feeling of being safe in someone’s gaze—no mask, no performance, no transaction.

What Makes Love So Vital?

Because love is the condition in which human beings thrive.

Not love as romance.

But love as recognition.

To be seen.

To be known.

To belong.

When we are loved in this way, our nervous systems calm.

Our creativity blooms.

Our capacity to extend love to others multiplies.

Love, in this way, isn’t a feeling or an action.

It is a field.

A remembering of who we are.

An Invitation

Let’s put down the scripts.

Let’s lay aside the fairytales and pick up the thread of ancestral truth.

Love is not a destination.

Love is the path.

It’s the soft place where difference meets without the need to be made the same.

it’s the fierce commitment to see the humanity in another—again and again.

Maybe the question isn’t: “Who do you love?”

Maybe it’s: “Who are you willing to love without condition?”

“And are you willing to be loved in return—even when you feel unworthy?”

Let’s remember.

Love is not lost.

It is simply waiting—beneath the noise, the fear, the forgetting.

And we can return to it. Together.