When we talk about love, I am not entirely sure why we so often assume it is the same thing as romance. While the two can certainly go hand in hand, they do not depend on each other. In fact, many times the opposite is true. When we are younger, we tend to feel things with an intensity that later becomes difficult to explain even to ourselves. We experience love with overwhelming passion but very little emotional intelligence. Looking back, I do not think those emotions were any less real than they are in adulthood. They were simply less balanced. We felt deeply, but we lacked the experience needed to understand what those feelings were asking of us, or where they might eventually lead.
In simpler terms, there is no balance. From a minimalist perspective, love is closely connected to learning and personal growth. It is not about deprivation or scarcity. It is about understanding that even an emotion as powerful as love must be built from the most basic foundations of self-awareness. Think back to your teenage years. How many times did it feel as though the world was ending simply because a relationship had come to an end? I am not saying that being young means doing everything wrong. What I mean is that we often do not fully understand what is happening to us. We confuse intensity with permanence and passion with understanding. Love has stages, and each of them teaches something different.
The most obvious stage, yet perhaps the most overlooked, is self-love. As strange as it may sound, it is difficult to truly love someone else if you do not feel genuine appreciation, care, and connection with yourself first. That is what I mean when I speak about a minimalist perspective. Everything begins with you. Without that foundation, it becomes much harder to understand your emotions, your limits, your desires, and the things that give meaning to your life. Those lessons eventually become the same ones we are expected to apply in adulthood, when we are supposedly wiser and more capable.
Love, my friends, is a whole. It often begins as a fire that feels impossible to extinguish, yet it can burn itself out far more quickly than we expect. It is much more like a marathon than a sprint. It demands endurance, patience, setbacks, and perseverance. Personally, it took me years to find a balance between the woman driven by passion and the woman who needed to learn how to use that fire wisely. The older I become, the more convinced I am that maturity is not the absence of passion but the ability to direct it. There is nothing wrong with intensity. What matters is learning how to keep it from consuming everything around it.
I was never, or at least I would like to believe I was never, unkind toward others. If there was someone I consistently neglected, it was myself. For a long time, I treated my own needs and well-being as secondary concerns. Eventually, I realized that this was not generosity. It was neglect disguised as virtue. That is where minimalism began to make sense to me. Not as an aesthetic choice, but as a way of focusing on what truly matters. We often speak about love as though it belongs exclusively to romance, yet some of its most meaningful expressions exist far beyond it. Love can be found in self-respect, patience, growth, forgiveness, and in the quiet decision to keep showing up for yourself and for others. The older I get, the more convinced I become that understanding love has very little to do with finding someone else and much more to do with understanding who we are beneath all the noise, expectations, and fears we accumulate throughout life.
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