What is love?

A soft girl’s survival guide to being loved on purpose.

Dear Reader,

whenever someone asks what is love?, my brain answers automatically:
"Baby, don’t hurt me… no more."

That song — loud, corny, immortal — has lived in the back of my mind longer than most lovers have.
It plays when I’m curled up in bed wondering if I imagined the whole thing. It plays when I text “no worries, it’s cool” and instantly regret it.
But I still don’t really know the answer to that question.

I know how love feels when it starts.
I know how it unravels.
I know the smell of it, the aftertaste of someone else’s perfume on your pillowcase.
But knowing isn’t the same as understanding.

I tried to rationalise it. Looking for patterns.

I asked myself:
Why would I fall for someone who only breadcrumbs me? Why would I spend years begging to be chosen or thinking that being obsessed over was the ultimate kind of romance?

There was a time I thought being wanted was the same as being loved.
When a man cheated on me and said it was my fault, I still clung to the idea that there was love in that mess somewhere. Almost like it was hiding under all the shattered glass. I thought maybe if I dug deep enough, I’d find it.

But all I ever found was me: hurt and confused.

RomComs made me believe in the power of a grand gesture and 2000s R&B music videos did even more damage. People getting “the one” back in the rain, with a hook so emotional it glued itself to your ribcage. That was love to me.
When Rihanna dropped We Found Love in a Hopeless Place, I was knee-deep in a situationship with a boy who moved to Spain right after things got “serious.” I played that song like it was gospel, as if the song could keep him closer.

He wanted a life full of movement. I wanted someone who stayed forever.
We were young and dumb and maybe in love, but definitely headed in opposite directions.
I didn’t understand why he left until I did the same thing myself, years later. Sometimes you have to leave a place to understand yourself, but the question of what love truely is still lingered with me.

The older I get, the more I see that most people were never taught how to love, only how to perform it.
We were taught to crave it, not create it.
To be wanted, not witnessed.
To be chosen, not truly known.

When I first read these words by bell hooks:

“Love is as love does,”

I flinched.
Because if love is action, not intention... Then most of what I called love wasn’t.

It was longing.
It was control.
It was absence dressed up in romance.
It was possession. It was performance.
It was someone calling me babe but never asking how my day really was.
It was someone showing up at my door when it was convenient and disappearing when I needed them most.
And it was me, accepting that, because I thought love was always supposed to hurt a little to be real.

I’ve seen people say I love you in the same breath they lied into my face.
I’ve watched lovers weaponise silence, withhold care like it was some prize you had to earn by being small and agreeable.
I’ve also watched myself stay. That’s the part that still makes me ache.

I used to think love was supposed to feel like drowning.
I thought that was love.
I thought love was the ache that follows you home. The kind that slips into your dreams and makes you write poems at 2am.
But maybe that’s just attachment issues wrapped up in a velvet dress.

There are days when I feel like Dostoevsky; that love is a kind of madness, the brutal, hopeless kind that drags your soul into the mud and dares you to crawl back out.
But even he believed in grace underneath all that mess.
And I’m still searching for it.

I keep thinking about how Neruda wrote,

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

There’s a version of me that still believes in that kind of love quiet, hidden, sacred.
Not loud. Not Instagram-official. Just two people holding space between their flaws.

And still… it’s not enough to feel love. You have to do it.
Love isn’t a vibe. It’s an action.
It’s not just being there when it’s easy, it’s staying when the person across from you is unraveling, unfiltered, undone.
It’s not falling in love with someone’s highlights; it’s choosing them, even when they’re ugly and anxious and not making sense.

I’ve made peace with the fact that love is not tidy. Not clean. Not always kind.
But it must be safe.
And it should make you more yourself, not less.

I think a lot about people I’ve loved and whether love ever really dies.
Sometimes it feels like the answer is no, like I’ll always have a little bit of them pressed into the veins of my being.
Other times, I think love just changes its facade. Becomes something else. Care. Distance. A kind of peace, that still feels strange to me.

There are ghosts in my chest.
Not haunting, just lingering.
Love never really leaves; it just leaves you changed.

Now when I try to imagine love, I imagine what Tagore meant when he said it’s a mystery with no explanation.
Love without conditions. Without proof. Without strategy.
Just warmth.
I think of Orwell too, how radical it is to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
That’s love, too.
Truth-telling. Without cruelty.
Clarity, without games.

And maybe Murakami was right when he said that maybe love needs imagination.
Maybe it’s the one thing in this world that isn’t meant to make sense.
It lives in the pauses, the in-betweens. It sneaks in while you’re washing dishes. Or when someone remembers how you take your tea.
It’s not a firework, it’s a repetitive pulse — always coming back.

So here’s where I am now:
I don’t want a love that arrives with a bang.
I want love that feels like a breath.
Steady. Unforced.
The kind of love that doesn’t demand a smaller version of me.
The kind that holds, not hides.

Because being soft in a world that is cruel is the most rebellious thing I can do.

And no, I don’t want to be chosen out of loneliness.
I’m not scared to die alone. People die alone all the time and it’s okay.
I want to be loved on purpose.

So yeah, I still don’t know exactly what love is.
But I know what it’s not.
And I know I still believe in it, even after all the heartbreaks, all the nights I wished I could be colder, less open, more nonchalant.

The truth is: I love like I bleed.
Too easily. Too deeply.
But I’m still here. Still soft. Still unlearning.

So I’m asking you:
What is love to you?

Let me know in the comments. Or don’t.
That can be love too.

With all of it always,
Jocelyne