Love in All Its Forms
Love shows itself in so many more ways than I believed for a long time. I used to think there was only one single, perfect form of it. Today I know: love has countless faces – and learning self-love was the beginning of recognizing them all.
The many faces of love
The love for your own children. The love for your best friend. The love for a special person. The quiet love for a place you long for, one that feels like home long before you've arrived there. And, perhaps the hardest to learn, the love for myself.
For a long time I measured these forms against one another, as if there were a ranking with the one great love at the top. Today I see them side by side – each one real, each one precious in its own way. And I've learned to recognize other people's love, too. Everyone shows it differently, and noticing exactly that is a gift.
What no one could take from me
No matter how much lovelessness life has thrown at me – no one could take my ability to love away from me. That's one of the thoughts that carried me through the hard times. You can take a lot from a person. But the ability to feel affection and pass it on runs deeper than any wound.
When love was a condition
For a long time, love was tied to conditions for me. I learned it in connection with achievement, with fitting in, with submission. I was loved when I functioned, when I complied, when I was exactly the way I was expected to be. So I adapted – again and again. I became what others wanted to see in me.
Along the way, I never learned to simply be myself. I didn't even know who that was supposed to be, beyond all the expectations. I thought I had to bend myself out of shape to belong – and didn't notice that I was losing myself in the process. Today I know: love you first have to earn isn't love, it's a performance. Real love doesn't ask whether I'm enough. It stays.
Saying goodbye to storybook love
I so often longed for a storybook love. For flowers on my birthday, for grand words, for the really big feelings. I thought that's what love had to look like, or else it wasn't real.
Today I feel most loved and accepted by people around me who simply stay with me, steadily. Where we take each other as we are and are there for one another. I've come to understand that behind many a small or big gesture there's a form of love – often entirely without words. Simply through constancy, reliability, trust, and mutual acceptance. This quiet love holds when the loud promises have long since faded.
A place of longing that asks nothing of me
Maybe that's why Sweden is so much more to me than a beautiful country. In the stillness of the Småland forests, by the water, in front of the red wooden houses, I don't have to achieve anything. I don't have to function, don't have to fit in, don't have to be enough for anyone.
There, I'm allowed to simply be. This place of longing gave me the feeling of being accepted – unconditionally, by a landscape, long before I could learn it from myself. Sometimes I think my longing for the North was always also a longing for a place where I'm allowed to meet myself.
Learning self-love – the beginning of everything
My faith helped me a great deal along the way. It taught me self-love – and to me, learning self-love is the beginning of all other forms of love. Because whoever can accept themselves no longer has to bend out of shape to belong. And can pass that acceptance on to others.
I'm grateful that I still got to learn this, even if it came late. Grateful to see how inconspicuous and, at the same time, how wonderful love can sometimes be.
Only a person
who simply stays.
The images in this post are based on my own photos and pictures and were created with the help of artificial intelligence.