Many people reading this have been hurt by love or, more precisely, by something they’ve called love. I want to begin there because beginning anywhere else would be dishonest.
Perhaps you’ve experienced the distance between what love promised and what it delivered, or a situation where the relationship that started with genuine warmth slowly became a place of silence and low-grade disappointment. Equally disappointing is the friendship that once felt effortless and then, without any single dramatic event, quietly faded. And sometimes there’s the family bond that carries as much weight as it does tenderness.
Such experiences are real, and the pain of them is real. But, if I’d opened this talk by suggesting that love is the answer, or that you simply need to open your heart more fully, I’d be placing a soft-focus platitude on top of a real wound. That’s one of the things I most want to avoid in this series.
So let me say something that took me years of working with people in real difficulty to understand clearly.
The love that hurt you was probably not love at all.
That’s not intended to be a cruel statement, but one of the most compassionate and liberating things I know how to say. Stay with me.
The Woman Who Was Trying to Be Worth It
Some years ago I worked with a woman in her mid-forties who’d spent most of her adult life trying, in her own words, to become someone worth loving. She’d been in three significant relationships and all three had ended in broadly the same way with her partner gradually withdrawing, and with her doing more and more to try to prevent that from happening. By the time we met she’d arrived at a conclusion that felt entirely reasonable to her. She said: “I’m simply not someone who gets to have lasting love”.
I asked her to describe what love felt like when it was working.
She said: “It’s like being safe, being chosen, and being enough”.
After a moment of silence I then asked: “And when does it stop working?”
She knew the answer immediately. “When I start to feel like they might leave”.
I want to stay with that statement for a moment because what she was describing wasn’t love, but a transaction -- the exchange of performance for approval, the trading of her authentic self for the temporary sensation of being safe.
Love as Transaction
Here’s what most of us have never been clearly told: what we call love is, very often, a negotiation between two incomplete identities, each hoping that the other will supply what they feel is missing within themselves.
This isn’t cynicism; it’s one of the most honest things I know how to say about the subject. Understanding it is the beginning of actual love -- the kind that holds, the kind that doesn’t collapse when circumstances shift.
When we love from incompleteness, from a place of needing another person to complete us, or provide us with the feeling that we’re enough, we’re not truly loving them, we’re using them! Sure, it may be an unconscious action on our part, and it may be gentle. But the truth is, we’re using them to manage our own internal experience. And here’s the difficulty: those we try to hold in this way will eventually pull away. And that’s not because they’re unkind, but because they’ve a healthy instinct toward their own freedom.
Love that clings isn’t love. Love that tests isn’t love. Love that withholds itself until the other person has proven they deserve it, isn’t love. They’re all forms of fear, dressed in love’s vocabulary.
Love as a State of Consciousness
Now I want to offer a distinction that I believe changes everything about how we relate to this subject.
There’s a difference between loving someone and being in the state of love.
Most of us have been taught that love is object-directed: you love a particular person, and when that person changes, disappoints, or leaves, the love goes with them. Under this model, love is always at the mercy of circumstances. At its deepest level, it’s a form of dependency.
But consider an alternative: love as a quality of consciousness that you either inhabit, or you don’t. Not love for a specific person only, but love as the atmosphere within which you encounter all persons.
The psychologist Carl Rogers called it unconditional positive regard. The great spiritual traditions call it something older and wider. I call it the space from which genuine human contact becomes possible.
When love is your starting point and not your destination, everything changes.
You no longer need to withhold yourself, waiting to see whether the other person has earned your openness. You no longer love conditionally, offering warmth in exchange for the right behaviour. You’re no longer at the mercy of whether you’re loved in return because the love you’re expressing isn’t dependent on what returns to you. It’s an expression of what you genuinely are.
What Emotional Pain Is Actually Telling You
This is where the question of healing enters the picture.
The emotional pain that follows a broken relationship, a betrayal, or a loss of connection, is real. I’m not suggesting it isn’t. What I’m suggesting is that the pain is almost never caused by what we think it’s caused by.
We tell ourselves the pain is caused by the other person’s behaviour, by what they did, what they failed to give, or what they took away. And even though the behaviour was real and its effects were real, the depth of the suffering is almost always proportional to one thing: how dependent our sense of self had become on that person continuing to show up in a particular way.
The heartbreak that feels unsurvivable isn’t evidence that you loved too much, but evidence that you’d placed the source of your completeness outside of yourself. And when that external source disappeared, it felt as though you’d disappeared with it.
That’s the wound worth addressing. Not whether you loved correctly, but whether you were living from the recognition of your own wholeness.
On Forgiveness
This is also where forgiveness becomes something genuinely interesting, as opposed to a virtuous practice that you try to force yourself into.
True forgiveness isn’t the decision to be bigger than your grievance; it’s the recognition that the harm you experienced was an expression of someone else’s incomplete understanding of themselves and of love. It doesn’t oblige you to minimise what happened, it simply wants you to stop carrying the story of the wound as the central fact of who you are.
You can’t truly be diminished by someone else’s fear. You can only be diminished if you respond to their fear with your own. That’s the moment love becomes a transaction, and the moment pain becomes something that’s stored.
Four Practical Steps
The first step is to notice honestly and without self-criticism, where in your relationships you’re operating from incompleteness. Where do you measure how much love you’re receiving and adjust your behaviour accordingly? Where do you feel the need to manage how someone sees you? These patterns don’t make you broken; they make you human. They’re worth seeing clearly.
The second step is to ask yourself if, in any relationship that feels strained or contracted, “Am I withholding something here?” Love expressed freely, without requiring a guaranteed return, is one of the most quietly powerful things a human being can offer. When you choose to be warm toward someone who hasn’t earned it in that moment, you’re not being naive. Rather, you’re refusing to let their limitation become yours.
The third step is to begin practising love toward yourself with the same generosity you’re willing to extend to others. This isn’t an instruction to become self-absorbed, it’s the recognition that you can’t give from depletion. Although the inner life of love flows outward, it’s got to start somewhere, and that somewhere is within the person doing the loving.
The fourth step is to let yourself laugh at how seriously you’ve been taking all of this. I mean that genuinely. One of the surest signs that love is becoming conscious and not merely reactive is a growing lightness about the whole enterprise. Not indifference, but ease. It’s the willingness to be wrong, to begin again, to try without insisting on a particular result. Love, when it’s working, has a quality of play in it. If yours has lost that quality, that’s the most useful thing to notice.
Where This Leads
There’s a longer conversation to be had about all of this -- about the early patterns that shaped our understanding of love before we had any conscious say in the matter, about the neuroscience of attachment and what it tells us about why these habits are so persistent, and about the specific practices that genuinely shift the quality of how we relate, not just how we think about relating.
That’s the conversation I’m inviting you into in the podcast this week. The written word can open a door. The conversation is where we walk through it together.
What I want to leave you with here is simpler than any of that.
Love isn’t something that will arrive one day and complete you, it’s something you’re already carrying. It becomes available the moment you stop making it conditional.
You’re not waiting to be loved; you’re learning to be love. And that, it turns out, is a very different kind of journey altogether.
Where in your life have you noticed that what you called love was actually a request? And what would it look and feel like to love from a different place entirely?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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