French Pressed

Well, it was just Valentine’s Day, so of course I am writing about love.

I am no expert on the topic. I am a novice, an apprentice. I think I may always remain so. I may always be learning and growing in the art of love. And isn’t that how we all should remain? Unrigid and forgiving, striving to be more generous, more responsive, more available to listen to our hearts and to others?

Recently, after a struggling relationship, I have been thinking a lot about love. About how to love better. About the ways I can become a better partner. How should I give love? How should I receive it? And I realized there is a fault in that narrowed focus. I should not seek to better give and receive love to a partner, alone, but to all my relationships. Because love belongs in all relationships and shares the same foundation for family, friends, community, strangers… Love is what makes the world go around. It is what makes life sweet and worth living. It is light, and it is all around us if we nurture and foster it. That light can grow and beget more light, and that light can fade, too, if we aren’t intentional.

I have always loved love. My friends know me as the one who proclaims, “I love love!” especially after a glass or two of wine.

For a long time, I also soberly spoke about finding a soulmate. But I no longer believe in soulmates the way I once did. I enjoy the romance of the idea in novels and films, but I now see that it removes agency. Love is not simply a feeling. It is an action, or at least it should be. It is a choice, an act of will, an intention. Saying we “fall” in love can deny responsibility. Feelings come and go. You may feel less in love one day than another, and so it is the choice to love, and to act lovingly, that remains. It is work to foster and cherish love, and it does not, unfortunately, just “fall” into place.

A soulmate, to me now, is someone you choose and someone who chooses you back, consistently and with constancy.

My breakup happened three weeks ago, and I spent time grappling with what I might have done wrong, what I could have done differently. I lost not only my partner, but a future we had imagined together. The life we had constructed suddenly felt like dust and memory. I was devastated, wondering how we got there and whether I was destined to ruin all good things.

But I did not stay in that place long. I realized I was not crazy, not too much, and not destined for destruction. Those were identities I had begun to internalize in the relationship.

I read All About Love by Bell Hooks the week after the breakup. I spoke with spiritual mentors at church. I saw a therapist who helped me see that reactions I had in the relationship were normal and human. I prayed. I reflected. I leaned on friends and family. I realized that playing the blame game would not help, and that I had lost parts of myself trying to keep someone else. I also realized I did not know, fully, how to receive nor give love in a romantic relationship.

In that season, I leaned heavily on God and poured into my community. I revisited relationships I had unintentionally neglected while living in an anxious, isolated bubble with my partner. I saw how many beautiful people surrounded me, how quickly they showed up for me, how deeply they cared. Connections I had left untended reminded me who I was. All the scattered pieces of me slowly knit back together.

And as I began speaking more openly about the relationship, I realized I had allowed certain dynamics I would never have accepted in friendships. And the truth is, the foundation for love is the same in every relationship. The level of commitment and behaviors may differ, but the foundation remains.

This applies to how we love others and how we love ourselves. Knowing and learning how to give and receive love is essential.

The Bible defines love in 1 Corinthians 13:4–7:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Erich Fromm defines love as: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

Bell Hooks speaks about learning love and reminds us that those of us raised in dysfunctional “schools of love” must devote ourselves to relearning it:
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them, that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them… Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.”

Love, again, is not merely a feeling, rather an action and a choice. And how to be loving is not instinctual but learned. 

Keeping these definitions in mind, it becomes important to examine what love actually looks like in practice. When we begin to view love as a verb rather than a dependable, inconstant emotion, we can approach others with a truer and constant heart.

After the breakup, my partner reached out the next day; calling, texting, wanting to try again. I asked for two weeks to think, reflect, and pray. He respected that space. And after those two weeks, I realized I wanted to try again too. Because I love him. And I choose him.

I choose him as long as I see the effort and his willingness to learn the art of love, to grow, to show up differently, together. I see him pursuing that, and I am willing to work alongside him. It would be an act of self-love to walk away if that effort disappeared, if growth stopped being a shared commitment. But for now, it is there. And I am here, growing too.

We all carry baggage, patterns and wounds that keep us from loving perfectly. What matters is how we face them. This breakup was a wake-up call for both of us. There are boundaries to build, wounds to tend, habits to unlearn, and healing to pursue. Both together and separately.

But as long as we continue choosing each other, and choosing to pursue hearts that look more like the heart of love itself, I believe something resilient and beautiful is possible.

Because love isn’t something I find, but learn to live. It is the light we tend, even in the dark, and the prayer we return to again and again.

Book Recommendation: All About Love by Bell Hooks. I think everyone should read this gem.