Understanding True Love: What True Love is and What it is Not

True love is like a freight train. It doesn’t sneak up on you subtly, or grow slowly as most people like to tell you.

It knocks you over with full force – streaming and howling into your life with no notice, no warning and no preparation for the upheaval your life is about to experience.

There is an intensity about it that you cannot avoid or ignore (even if you attempt to stay in denial or brush it off as just a little crush), and you cannot run from it. 

True love is finding the ability within yourself to love again after countless heartbreaks, and after vowing to yourself that you’ll never love like this again. In fact, it is only through the countless heartbreaks (the brushing yourself off and picking yourself up after hours, days, weeks spent in the bathtub listening to Bon Iver and crying into your glass of red wine), that true love is able to appear.

When your heart is mature enough, it has experienced enough of the contrast to recognise and appreciate true love when it finally appears. 

Related post: The Difference Between Aloneness and Loneliness

True love will bring all of your deepest wounds to the surface

It is usually when you have sworn off love (where you have turned your focus inwards and directed your full attention towards self-love) and you are not looking for it, that it appears miraculously into your life, unannounced, unexpected and (often) unwelcomed. 

True love will bring all of your deepest wounds to the surface. It will illuminate all of your ugly bits, traumas, and insecurities so you are forced to deal with them. True love is like looking into a mirror, everything you have been avoiding about yourself is made evident in this human reflection standing in front of you. Pushing all the buttons, highlighting all the insecurities, exposing all of the cracks and the flaws within you in the form of this other person. Triggering you to deal with yourself, and face everything that you have tried to gloss over or avoid in your previous relationships or on your self-healing journey. 

True love will force you to grow in ways that you never thought possible. It will crack your heart open time and time again until you feel there is no way you could open any further. And sometimes, true love hurts. The thought about being apart from this window to your soul, the thought about living without them by your side seems unfathomable at times. The thought of something so pure and beautiful existing in your soul, yet at times being so unattainable in physical existence is almost too much to bear. You may find yourself cursing God for bringing these feelings (or this person) into your life, begging them to be taken away. Begging God to help you to stop loving them so intensely. 

True love can be so intense that it scares you

It causes your little human to want to retreat, run, hide, and cut this person out of your life forever. It causes you to act irrationally, find yourself spending countless nights holding yourself and crying yourself to sleep because no matter how hard you’ve tried you simply cannot walk away from this connection.

And of course, it can feel like torture when on the surface this love seems unreciprocated – when your counterpart is still wounded and has some healing to do, when you were brought together too soon, or when they are holding their feelings close to their chest, too afraid to express them to you. It feels like torture that you can engage in this battle of the ego with this person you love so intensely – that you find yourselves in this loop of push and pull, run and chase, triggering each other’s deepest, darkest fears. Unintentionally hurting each other with cruel or careless words that you later realise were just a product of your own triggering. 

Related post: Why The Healing Process Makes No Sense – And What You Can Do About It

True love is never intentionally hurting one another

True love is never intentionally hurting one another, it is never toxic, it is never abusive, gas lighting, controlling, or purposefully hurtful. You will know the difference between a toxic relationship and a healthy one by tuning into your heart, by whether you are able to acknowledge and forgive, to work through your triggers transparently together, by whether you feel safe to express your truth with this person – regardless of whether you are romantically together, or not.

Acknowledging these triggers from a place of transparency and love is ultimately bringing you closer, helping you both to grow and making your union stronger. 

True love is knowing deep down that this person loves and accepts you unconditionally, in the same way you do them. You can feel it deep in your body. And although you may find it hard to trust, you will not allow yourself to believe that such a pure love exists. It is around this point that you may begin to question your sanity. You will question whether you are truly honoring yourself by staying in this connection or whether the most respectful decision you can make for yourself would be thing to walk away for good. Your ego will try to convince you that the love you feel is not real and that sticking around is only going to hurt you. You ego will try to convince you that the most loving thing for you to do is to cut all ties and run. And while separation is sometimes needed to release attachments and do healing independent of each other, running away from true love seldom fixes your problems.

True love is feeling the fear and wanting to run

True love is the earth-shattering effect that this love has on you, while bringing all of your past heartbreaks and wounds to the surface and being able to recognise the higher perspective above your limited human perspective. It is trusting that your soul is strong enough to handle it. It is meeting your edges, it is honoring and expressing how you feel without expectation that your counterpart is ready to receive it. 

True love is unconditional. It is understanding that perhaps they have their own healing to do, their own triggers to deal with before they are able to receive this love – and that it is not a reflection on whether your love is pure or true. It is understanding that how you feel is always true, to you. And the act of honoring that in itself is love.  

True love is a deep knowing that to truly walk away from this connection and this person forever is impossible. That, like magnets, you’ll be drawn back to each other time and time again – no matter how much time, how many fights get in the way and no matter how much life happens in between. It is trusting that if it is meant for you, it will return to you. It is knowing that eventually you will be brought together, and surrendering control of the ‘how’ and the ‘when’. It is about cultivating that feeling of wholeness and love within you, regardless of what your external reality looks like. Regardless of whether your love is presently in your life or not. 

True love, at its core is about re-learning how to love yourself

It is about loving and accepting unconditionally all of the parts of yourself you have rejected and cast away – to fill yourself up with so much love that whether you come together with this other human becomes irrelevant. Of course, you desire it. That’s the human aspect. But the actual union of two souls cannot occur until each individual has healed their wounds of separation from within, first. They are able to come to a place of desire, not necessity, for their ‘other half’. 

True love forces yourself to practice a level of self-love so deep, that nothing can shatter it. That you are forced to come home to yourself, to hold yourself through all of the ups and downs, the evolution, the upheaval it brings into your life. 

True love is learning to honor you, honor your truth, honor your boundaries, honor your needs, honor your darkness and your light. It is finding all of the things you are looking for from this other person, within. It is the union of your own inner masculine and feminine – it is the integration of the polarities of dark and light within you. 

True love heals you

True love forces you to transcend your fears and fight for what you want – it is this unshakeable feeling within you that suddenly something is worth fighting for. That this feeling of unconditional love and acceptance within you, this warmth and homecoming that seeps into every fiber of your being makes all of the pain of fighting, all of this discomfort seem worth it. 

The irony of true love is finally coming to the recognition that true love is not really about coming together with another person at all. It is not about ownership or conditions or attaining the union that you desire to attain outside of yourself. True love is finding within another a deep recognition and feeling of coming home to your soul, which guides you to find and cultivate that feeling within yourself. The feeling of being completely whole, complete and accepted. Of finally understanding why until now you felt like something was missing – that you were searching for something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. 

That your search for true love is finally over – you are complete, you no longer need to continue to look for something outside of you because it’s been here all along. 

Resting in your heartbeat. And that kind of love can never be taken away. 

It is, always has been, and always will be. 

Eternally, unconditionally yours.