“I’m not sure I really love my partner, I care about them, and I like being around them, but maybe i’m not sure i even know what love is. my parents and past partners told me they loved me, but they also really hurt me so sometimes it feels like it doesnt really compute.... is love just staying regardless of what happens?”
This question is not confusion—it is clarity beginning to speak.
When love has been paired with harm, the word itself becomes unstable. It no longer points to safety or care, but to endurance. To loyalty at all costs. To staying. So when you ask, “Is love just staying regardless of what happens?” you are really asking something more honest: Is love supposed to hurt this much—and if it does, what does that say about me?Many of us were taught love through contradiction. We were told “I love you” by people who dismissed us, frightened us, abandoned us emotionally, or crossed our boundaries. Over time, the nervous system learns a devastating lesson: love is proximity to pain. Love is attachment without protection. Love is something you survive. bell hooks wrote with radical clarity about this confusion. She said that “most people do not know how to love,” and that what we often call love is actually dependency, attachment, or possession. In All About Love, she defines love not as a feeling, but as an action: the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. That definition alone disqualifies so many relationships we’ve been taught to romanticize. Love, in this framing, is not endurance. It is not self-erasure. It is not staying while shrinking. It does not require you to override your intuition or make peace with harm to prove your devotion.
Care and comfort are real. Enjoyment is real. Attachment is real. But love—as hooks insists—includes care, yes, and also respect, trust, responsibility, knowledge, and commitment. Not intensity without safety. Not loyalty without dignity. Not passion without accountability. So when you say, “I care about them. I like being around them. But I’m not sure I love them,” you are not confessing a failure—you are noticing nuance. You are separating affection from devotion. Attachment from reverence. Familiarity from mutual becoming.
And perhaps the deeper truth is this: you may not yet trust love because love has never been trustworthy to you.
When love has been paired with injury, the psyche adapts by redefining love as tolerance. If I can stay, if I can understand, if I can endure, then it must be love. But hooks warns us against this myth directly—love does not require self-betrayal. Love does not flourish where domination, neglect, or fear are present. Love is incompatible with abuse, even when abuse insists it is love. Real love, when encountered, often feels unfamiliar. Quieter. Less chaotic. It does not demand proof through suffering. It does not ask you to abandon yourself to be chosen. It invites you to grow, not disappear. So no—love is not staying regardless of what happens. Love is staying present—to truth, to impact, to responsibility, to repair. And sometimes, loving yourself means leaving what cannot love you back in ways that are life-giving.
If you don’t yet know what love is, you are not behind. You are honest. And honesty is often the first act of love we were never taught how to receive.
You are allowed to learn love slowly. You are allowed to redefine it.
That, too, is part of the education.
— Paula Santos, LP
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