I first wrote this reflection in 2013 and revised it substantially in 2018. This 2026 edition keeps its central concern while reconsidering some of the absolutes through which I expressed it.
At Notre-Dame in Paris. The photograph accompanied the earlier version of this reflection.
In 2013, I was trying to understand why something as natural as love could become entangled with fear, compliance, and control.
I saw families, communities, and societies placing rules around whom a person could love and what that love was allowed to look like. My response was to place love on the side of freedom. If a relationship required one person to surrender to another person's rules, I questioned whether love was still the right name for it.
I still recognize the truth inside that position. I would express it differently now.
Love does not require the absence of every rule. A relationship may need agreements, commitments, and boundaries. These can protect trust and make shared life possible. The problem begins when an agreement becomes a claim of ownership, or when a boundary is used to control another person's life.
Love makes room for another person to flourish. Possession asks them to become smaller so that we can feel secure.
Freedom is not indifference
To set someone free does not mean becoming indifferent to what they do.
Choices have consequences. Trust can be damaged. Commitments can be broken. Two people may care for each other and still discover that they cannot live well together.
Freedom does not require us to accept dishonesty, disrespect, manipulation, or harm. We can love someone and refuse what is happening. We can wish for their flourishing and still leave. We can care without making continued access to us unconditional.
This is one place where my earlier formulation was too absolute. Love may reach beyond conditions, but relationships cannot always do so. A relationship needs consent, honesty, respect, and enough reciprocity to remain inhabitable.
Giving without disappearing
The earlier essay described love as giving and lust as taking. That distinction helped me name the generosity I associated with love, but it compressed too much human experience into a moral binary.
Desire is not automatically the enemy of love. Receiving is not a lesser human act. A person who only gives can disappear inside the relationship, just as a person who only takes can consume it.
Giving becomes loving when it is freely chosen, attentive to what the other person actually needs, and does not carry a hidden invoice. It does not require self-erasure. Receiving can also be an act of trust when it allows another person's care to arrive.
Love is not proved by how much pain we can absorb or how completely we can neglect ourselves.
The wish beneath love
One sentence from the earlier versions still holds for me:
When you love someone, you want them to flourish.
Even this needs care. We do not always know what another person's flourishing should look like. Wanting the best for someone can quietly become deciding what is best for them.
Love therefore asks for attention as much as intention. It asks us to see the person who is present, not only the person we want them to become. It asks us to listen, to speak honestly, and to recognize where our fear is trying to turn closeness into control.
The difficult question is not whether I feel love. It is what my love permits the other person to be.
Can they disagree with me without being punished? Can they grow in a direction I did not design? Can I respect their agency while remaining honest about my own needs? Can we make commitments without turning them into ownership?
There will not be one answer for every relationship. Love does not remove the need for judgment. It makes judgment more demanding because another person's freedom and our own dignity are both present.
To let love happen is not to become passive. It is to stop forcing love into possession, compliance, or sacrifice without limit.
It is to make room for care, truth, desire, boundaries, and freedom to coexist.
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