My heart was asleep for a long time.
It tried to move.
It tried to follow the themes I thought I should write about.
But it stayed quiet.
I have always written about love—
how it heals, how it grows, how it transforms us.
Yet it was only this year, 2025, that I finally found space again to feel it.
And I’m proud of that.
Because feeling led me back to my pain.
And pain, when met gently, leads you back to truth.
Love is different when you have lived through many versions of it.
Different, each lover has shaped you in ways you did not fully understand at the time.
Every encounter carries its own lesson.
Each one is distinct.
The journey is not linear.
But when you look back and gently glue the pieces together,
You begin to see patterns.
Some lessons repeat until they are mastered.
Others arrive only to reveal something new—
about relationships,
about love,
about yourself.
This year, three truths about love stood out to me.
First:
Love asks you to fully immerse yourself in it.
To give it a real chance.
To allow yourself to experience it completely.
When love is overly regulated or controlled, it moves against its nature.
It wants to flow.
And yet—
love also needs structure.
It needs boundaries that protect it.
It needs containment so it can last.
Freedom and form must exist together.
Second:
Love is a dance.
No matter how well you know yourself,
you must also learn how your partner shows up.
Just as the world holds dualities—
yin and yang,
masculine and feminine,
high and low—
relationships do too.
The work is not to win your corner.
The work is to meet in the middle.
Voicing your needs is not selfish.
Silencing yourself is self-abandonment.
Love requires trust—
enough trust to speak honestly,
and enough trust to let your partner meet you
in the way they can,
not always in the way you imagined.
Third:
Love is something the body knows.
Even when the mind doubts.
Even when logic hesitates.
There is a quiet knowing—
a sense of being held,
a softness that allows surrender,
a relaxation that cannot be forced.
Love does not guarantee safety.
But when it is real, you feel it.
It finds its way through you
when you allow it.
These are only some of the things I learned about love.
I know there will be more.
For now, I want to record them.
To keep them.
To hold them gently—
like photographs,
like memories,
like moments shared with someone once loved.
Take care.
And I pray this piece sparks something in you, too.
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