Love

Wed Jul 16 2025

When I first read Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, two things happened.

First, it gave me permission to reframe the religious conditioning I grew up with — to see “God” not as a judgmental figure, but as something spacious, kind, and resonant.

Second, and more significantly, it rewired how I understand love.

What this book called “God’s love” struck me not as divine in the religious sense, but as radically human in the best possible way.

It changed everything.

Love, as I now see it, is not possession. It’s not control. It’s not performance or sacrifice.

It is this:

Love is wanting, for a person, everything they want for themselves and aligning yourself to make that real in any way you can.

You can read that again if you need to.

If both people do this, honestly and fully, it creates a recursive generative loop. Not a dependency, but an engine. An energy system. A creative field with no known ceiling. It creates more than it consumes.

It’s not two people holding each other hostage with their needs, it’s two people becoming engines for each other’s becoming.

Love like this is rare. Not because it’s impossible but because most of us are too afraid to let someone go free, even in our minds. We confuse closeness with control. We call it care, but what we really mean is: don’t change without me.

This kind of love doesn’t chase or beg. It doesn’t tether. It watches the person you love walk into the life they choose and still says, Yes. Go. Not because it doesn’t ache. But because it honours their becoming more than it fears your exclusion.

And that’s where love becomes real.

No more martyrdom masquerading as devotion.

Just the brutal honesty of wanting someone to have everything they want, even when it doesn’t include you.

I’ve failed at this kind of love more times than I’d like to admit. It’s easier to write than to live. But I’m trying. Every time, I try.

The Ache of Real Love

Love like this doesn’t stop hurting. It just stops needing. When she walks into something beautiful without me there to witness it, there’s an ache. But that ache isn’t bitterness or loss. It’s the ache of abundance unreceived. It’s the cost of loving someone without insisting on being the centre of their joy.

I still want to be chosen. Of course I do. But I won’t tether her just to silence my own fear. If I say I love her, then I don’t get to shut the door the moment her path curves away from mine, even slightly, even temporarily.

That’s the contract. Not for open relationships. Not for spiritual flex. But for real fucking love. The kind that expands, lets go without flinching. That stays, even when it’s not held.

Because love doesn’t ask, “Will you stay?”.
It asks, “Are you free?”

And then it listens to the answer, without turning away.

The cost of love is not absence. It’s the inability to witness the joy you helped make possible.

The Burn

Here’s what they don’t tell you about loving without possession: You still bleed. Not because something broke, but because something opened and stayed open.

This kind of love doesn’t just expand you, it exposes you. It forces you to watch the person you love walk into another room, another connection, another moment that you don’t get to touch and still, you stay turned toward them. Not chasing or folding or flinching.

Just, present. Burning.

And that burn is real. It’s not poetic or noble. Not transcendental. Just cellular ache. The chest tightening at 2:43 a.m. The way your name doesn’t appear in their story that day. The flicker of jealousy you won’t name because it’s not who you are anymore.

This is where people retreat back into control. Back into needing to be the one or the only. Back into shrinking love down until it can’t hurt them anymore.

People think spiritual love means transcending jealousy, transcending want, transcending the human messiness. But that’s just spiritual bypassing. Real love means feeling all of that and not weaponizing it. Not using your pain to control them. Not making your discomfort their problem to solve.

But if you don’t retreat, if you keep standing there, naked and calm, you become something else entirely. Not superhuman or enlightened.

Just real.

A person who can hold their own ache without turning it into a cage.

That’s the burn. And if you survive it you don’t just come out cleaner.

You come out honest.

And free.