22/09/2025
'The greatest gift we can bring to any relationship is our own wholeness'
Many grow up believing that love means finding someone to “complete” them. Someone to fill the hollow spaces, smooth over the rough edges, and overlook flaws. This view frames love as something external, something granted by another person’s acceptance or blindness.
Yet, there’s a deeper understanding of love.
One that begins not in the spark of attraction, but in the quiet, often difficult moments of self-recognition. Mature love emerges when we notice our patterns: the ways we deflect intimacy just as closeness appears, the ways we chase validation in the wrong places, or the ways we carry wounds our younger selves never learned to heal.
This kind of love begins with a mirror, not a window. To practice it is to engage in the hard, generous work of seeing oneself clearly:
• To recognize protective habits that no longer serve.
• To acknowledge fears and walls without judgment.
• To extend compassion to the imperfect, still-learning self.
Unlike the stories told in romance novels, this love is not marked by fancy gestures or sweeping declarations. It is marked by the daily courage of choosing growth over comfort, of breaking cycles instead of perpetuating them, of meeting one’s own pain with compassion instead of criticism.
When we learn to hold contradictions without rushing to resolve them, when we embrace the person we are today while still working toward who we are becoming, we create the conditions for authentic connection. From this place, love does not demand a saviour, a therapist, or a solution. Instead, it declares: I am whole and still healing. I want to know you in your wholeness too.
This form of love is underrated precisely because it does not require another person to exist. It is the love affair between who we are and who we are becoming, and it makes every other love deeper, freer, and more honest.
Ultimately, the greatest gift we can bring to any relationship is our own wholeness: a willingness to meet life and love from a place of abundance rather than lack. To love in this way is to move beyond possession, beyond conditions, into a courageous, conscious aliveness.