Love is in the air, or at least Valentine’s Day is.
It’s the time of year when the town is painted red, couples linger a little closer, and a different kind of warmth permeates despite the bitter chill of winter. The days are growing lighter. Spring is promised. Something soft waits patiently beneath the cover of snow.
And yet, Valentine’s Day carries a strange contradiction.
Did you know it is one of the most common days for breakups?
For a holiday brimming with sappy poems, fragrant flowers, and sweet chocolate, it has earned a surprisingly bitter reputation. Perhaps that is because a day devoted to love forces us to reflect on what love actually is… and sometimes, upon closer examination, we discover that what we thought was love… wasn’t.
Believe it or not, our culture, and often even our families, do a poor job of teaching us what real, authentic love looks like.
We talk about butterflies in our stomachs and feeling lightheaded from a kiss. In love songs, boundaries blur and two people fuse into one. In stories, love is intense and consuming. The hero protects the heroine, but also possesses her, sealing devotion with the words: “You are mine.”
Sometimes we are taught to view love through obligation and duty. Love becomes something we owe. Something we earn by fulfilling expectations and playing our roles correctly. Love becomes sacrifice at the expense of the self.
But is that love?
I would argue that these versions are infatuation at best, and unhealthy, even abusive, at worst. And yet, between cultural depictions and our own internal patterns, we often confuse what love is.
We learn from our earliest experiences what love looks like. As we grow older, we don’t always seek what is healthy, we seek what is familiar.
I could list a million examples of unhealthy love. I could write out endless red flags. But the problem with red flags is that if something doesn’t match them exactly, we may dismiss what we feel.
We tell ourselves, “Well, it’s not abusive.”
And yet, something can fall short of abuse while still falling far short of love.
That is why I want to focus instead on what healthy love actually looks like.
Across poems, philosophy, research, and human experience, certain themes arise again and again. Love is more than a feeling or an attachment. Healthy love is a consistent presence, the willingness to stay, not because one must, but because one chooses to.
And while love may cost us something at times, it should never come at the cost of ourselves.
Healthy love is not self-erasure. It is not martyrdom. It is a widening sense of us that still contains a me. Sacrifice in love should not diminish either partner, but strengthen both.
To love someone is also to truly see them.
Love recognizes the beloved as they are: flawed, human, singular, worthy. Love says, “You matter. You are not interchangeable. You cannot simply be replaced.”
Love is not possession. It is not fear disguised as devotion. Nor is it the merging of two souls into one entwined being, as popular as the fated-mate trope may be.
Love does not have chains.
It is choice and freedom.
Healthy love enhances rather than restricts. It fosters growth rather than suffocation. One person is not diminished so the other can shine. Both are made better, not because they complete one another, but because they support one another.
In short, healthy love is a relationship where both people feel emotionally safe, seen as they are, and free to grow without fear of punishment, abandonment, or control.
Love says:
“I won’t disappear when you’re inconvenient.”
“I won’t punish you for being human.”
“I won’t leave you alone in your pain.”
But healthy love does not say:
“I will erase my own needs.”
“I will surrender my boundaries.”
“I will make your suffering my identity.”
Love is safety for both.
It allows both partners to exist without feeling they must earn their right to be there.
And perhaps that is the quiet challenge of Valentine’s Day, beneath all the roses and romance. Love is not something waiting for us in some distant future, once we are finally healed, finally perfect, finally enough. It is something we practice in the present, in the relationships we choose, in the boundaries we hold, in the way we refuse to mistake survival for devotion. A life well lived is not built “someday.” It is built here, now, in the steady courage to believe that love can be both real and safe, and that we are worthy of it exactly where we are.
Budget Bliss: Bucket List 