12/11/2025
Sometimes love feels like sunlight through a window, warm, beautiful, but not quite touching your skin. We all want to be loved, of course we do, but being known is something deeper. It’s when someone sees the parts of you that aren’t always easy to love, the messy, uncertain, complicated parts, and stays anyway.
Jeanette Winterson’s line hits like a quiet truth we’ve all felt but rarely name. Love, in its most common form, can be about projection. People often love the version of us that fits neatly into their story. They love how we make them feel, or what we represent. But being known? That’s riskier. That’s when someone looks past the performance and really sees you, your contradictions, your fears, your history, and doesn’t flinch.
Simone de Beauvoir once wrote about how women, in particular, are often loved as “the Other,” admired or desired but not truly understood as full, complex beings. That idea still resonates. It’s easy to be adored for fitting into someone’s idea of what you should be. It’s harder to be known for who you actually are, and still be chosen.
Virginia Woolf touched on this too, in her reflections on solitude and authenticity. She believed that to live truthfully, we have to be willing to exist beyond other people’s definitions of us. Maybe that’s what being known really means, allowing ourselves to be seen, even when it might change how others love us.
So maybe the real work isn’t just finding love, but finding the kind that doesn’t stop at the surface. The kind that listens, that asks questions, that stays curious. Because love without knowledge can be comforting, but love with knowledge, that’s where it becomes real.
