Love isn’t a feeling
It’s a brave act of choosing
There’s a line in Fleabag that never really leaves you.
The priest says:
“Love is awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself. It’s all we want and it’s hell when we get there.”
I quote it because it feels true, but we rarely ask why.
For most of us, love hurts not because we’re doing it wrong, but because we’ve been taught the wrong things about what love is.
We grew up believing love was:
a feeling
a spark
a chemical collision
an inevitability
But healthy love - real love - is none of those things.
Real love isn’t self-sustaining.
It doesn’t run on infatuation.
It doesn’t grow on its own.
It isn’t designed to stay easy.
Real love is something you build with another person.
And building anything meaningful takes courage.
Love means choosing someone when your fear tells you to run
Healthy love isn’t “no red flags.”
Healthy love is:
conflict you learn to repair
attraction that deepens into respect
safety that grows through effort
hard conversations that don’t destroy you
two nervous systems learning to trust each other
Healthy love is not the absence of difficulty.
It’s the presence of willingness.
Willingness to:
look at yourself honestly
apologise without collapsing
stay when your childhood wounds tell you to disappear
hold someone without trying to fix them
let yourself be held without believing you’re weak
Love is not for the weak. It demands adulthood.
Avoidance is easy.
Numbing is easy.
Detachment is easy.
Performance is easy.
But love - actual, soul-level, grown-up love - requires something far rarer.
The bravery to let yourself be seen.
Love is the end of the performance
We spend years creating personas to survive:
the strong one
the good one
the funny one
the attractive one
the clever one
the one who never needs anything
But intimacy dismantles all of that.
It asks you to step into the room with no armour.
Just your trembling, imperfect humanity.
That is why love feels terrifying.
Not because love is dangerous but because being known is.
It requires you to surrender the version of yourself you’ve polished for decades and allow someone to meet the one you’ve kept hidden.
Being truly loved is confronting because it’s so rare.
“I think you know how to love better than any of us…”
There’s another line from Fleabag, spoken by her father:
“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.”
Some people feel love like an earthquake - big, consuming, terrifying in its honesty.
They don’t love lightly or half-heartedly.
These people aren’t weak.
They’re not “too much.”
They’re not dramatic.
They are the ones still capable of hope.
They’re the ones who choose to risk themselves again and again because they still believe in what love can be when two people actually show up.
This world humiliates tenderness and rewards detachment.
Of course loving deeply feels like suffering, you’re rebelling against the culture.
But nothing beautiful is built without risk.
What healthy love feels like (the grown-up version)
Not fireworks.
Not chaos.
Not butterflies that make you lose your appetite.
Healthy love feels like:
clarity - you’re not confused by their intentions
constancy - they don’t disappear when it’s inconvenient
accountability - repair comes quickly
softness - tenderness isn’t rationed
desire with safety - eroticism that doesn’t rely on instability
two people who choose each other on purpose
Healthy love isn’t dramatic - it’s devoted.
It’s not a high - it’s a home.
Love is hope, disguised as another human being
That’s what the priest really meant.
When you meet someone who feels like hope, it’s not because they’re perfect.
It’s because for a moment you glimpse the possibility that life could be warmer with another imperfect human being by your side.
That you could live without performing.
That you could be held instead of fixing or fawning.
That you could be chosen without auditioning.
That you could build something with someone who doesn’t fear depth.
Love isn’t a feeling.
It’s the daily, courageous act of choosing someone while staying true to yourself.
It’s painful.
It’s frightening.
It’s awful.
And it’s the bravest thing we’ll ever do.