What is real love? This honest blog explores what love truly is, what it isn’t, and how it shows up in relationships, boundaries, faith, and self-worth.
We hear the word love so often that I think sometimes we forget just how much weight it carries. We use it for everything.
We say we love coffee, love summer nights, love a good book, love a favorite song, love our children, love our friends, love our partners, love our families, love God.
While all of those things may be true, I think somewhere along the way, we started shrinking love into something far too small. We made it about romance, chemistry, butterflies, attraction, and happy endings wrapped in neat little bows. We made it about what makes us feel good in the moment instead of what remains when life gets messy.
But love is not small. And love is not one thing.
Love is all things.
It shows up in motherhood, friendship, marriage, grief, leadership, faith, forgiveness, sacrifice, boundaries, and healing. It lives in the quiet moments, the inconvenient moments, the heartbreaking moments, and the beautiful ones too. And if I have learned anything about love, it is this: Love is grace.
Love is allowing someone to be authentically themselves. It is seeing the difficult, messy, imperfect pieces of a person and choosing to show up anyway. It is seeing the human underneath the mistakes, the labels, the walls, the wounds, and the version of them the world would like you to believe is all they are.
Love is not pretending people are perfect. Love is seeing them clearly and loving them with compassion anyway. Real love does not require someone to perform for your comfort. It does not ask them to shrink, to become more digestible, or to hide the parts of themselves that are still healing. Real love gives room for growth. It gives space for truth. It offers understanding without excusing harm.
Because love is not just tenderness it is also honesty.
Real love is not constantly agreeing with someone or telling them what they want to hear. Sometimes love looks like saying the hard thing with compassion and leaving someone’s dignity intact. Sometimes love looks like correction, accountability, and truth spoken with care. Real love should make you feel safe. It should make you feel seen. It should make you feel valued, heard, and appreciated. If it doesn’t, then maybe what you are calling love deserves a second look.
Because if we are being honest, many of us did not first learn what love was.
We first learned what it wasn’t.
Some of the hardest lessons about love came from the very places it should have been the safest.
For some, it is family.
For others, it is friendship.
For others, it is marriage.
Sometimes the people who are supposed to love you the most are the very people who teach you what love should never look like.
Love is not hurtful words used over and over until someone begins to believe they deserve them. It is not criticism disguised as honesty. It is not manipulation dressed up as concern. It is not control pretending to be protection. It is not emotional teardown, humiliation, betrayal, or cruelty. No, I am not talking about human imperfection. People are human. People get tired, triggered, stressed, hungry, emotional, and messy. We all have moments we wish we could take back. That is not what I mean.
I am talking about repeated behavior that destroys someone from the inside out.
That is not love.
You cannot tell me you love someone while simultaneously working to control them, silence them, embarrass them, diminish them, or break their spirit. That is not love, that is harm. Just because someone had access to you does not mean they loved you well. That truth applies to family, friendships, marriage… it applies to anyone who was close enough to know your heart and still chose to mishandle it. Love should never be a weapon.
Love is not just one relationship. That is what makes it so sacred and so complicated. Love takes on many forms, and each one asks something different of us.
As a mother, love looks like protection and sacrifice. It is saying no when safety is at risk, even when your child does not understand it. It is allowing them to learn difficult lessons because you know growth sometimes requires discomfort. It is showing up to the school play, the game, the last-minute project store run the night before something is due. It is sitting up all night with your sick child knowing you still have to function in the morning. Motherhood love is exhausting and holy. It is often unseen. It is fierce and soft all at once.
As a partner, love looks like choosing someone in the ordinary. It shows up in forgiveness. It shows up in staying, not out of obligation, but because you want to be there. It looks like going to a movie you have zero interest in because they love it. It looks like taking care of them when they are sick, watching a sport you do not care about, making room for their interests, their quirks, and their humanity. It is cuddling at night, kisses before bed, missing them during the day. Choosing them when they are imperfect and human. Love in partnership is both messy and beautiful. It is not a Disney story. It is real life. And real life requires grace.
As a friend, love looks like showing up. Period. It is helping someone move. Planning a party. Sitting in the aftermath of a breakup. Bringing comfort after job loss. Celebrating a new baby. Helping clean a house when life has become too heavy. Planning a lake day because your soul needs a reset. Knowing through a single text that your person is not okay. Friendship love is sacred. It is like having a sibling that God knew your parents could not handle at once, so He allowed you to meet later in life. And if you have one or two people in your life who love you like that, thank God for them.
As a leader, love looks like stewardship. It looks like showing up on a weekend to finish a project because your people matter. It looks like compassion for your staff, your team, or your community when life is hard. It looks like sacrifice no one sees. It looks like carrying responsibility because others are depending on you. Love professionally is not weakness. It is care with structure. Compassion with accountability. Service with intention.
Love is everywhere, but so is the misunderstanding of it.
I think a lot of people settle for less than love because they genuinely do not know what real love feels like.
If you grew up in chaos, you may think love is chaos.
If you grew up around screaming, you may think love is loud and hurtful.
If you grew up unseen, you may believe love must be earned.
If you were abused, manipulated, or emotionally starved, you may confuse control with care and intensity with intimacy.
And if your self-worth has been broken down enough, you may settle for whatever looks close enough to love because you do not yet believe you deserve the real thing. That is the heartbreaking part. A lot of people are not choosing love. They are choosing what feels familiar. But familiar is not always safe. Sometimes familiar is dysfunction. Sometimes familiar is survival. Sometimes familiar is the very thing that wounded you in the first place.
And that is why what our children see matters so much.
Children learn what love is and is not from a very young age. They see more than we think. They hear more than we realize. And they remember more than most adults want to admit. They are watching us. If they watch the adults in their life fight with chaos, they may believe love is chaos. If they hear cruel words thrown back and forth, they may believe love sounds like pain. If they are left alone, dismissed, or unnurtured in the moments they need connection the most, they may begin to believe they are not worth loving at all. And while we know that is not true, a child does not always know that.
Children do not learn love from what we say they learn it from what we model.
That is why love requires more than feelings.
Love requires something from us.
It requires compromise.
It requires humility.
It requires sacrifice.
It requires compassion.
It requires understanding.
It requires honesty.
Love requires saying the hard things without destroying the person hearing them. It requires accountability. It requires us to leave people better than we found them.
And that means love also requires boundaries.
Now if I am being honest, boundaries did not come naturally to me. For a long time, I did not really have them. I overextended, overexplained, overgave, over-tolerated, and over-accommodated. When I finally found my voice… when I finally figured out what I was and was not willing to tolerate, I lost people. I walked away from friendships. I stepped away from relatives. I disappointed people who had become very comfortable with the version of me that did not require much.
That hurt.
But here is what I know now:
Boundaries do not destroy love. They reveal where love never existed.
Healthy love understands a boundary. And if it accidentally crosses one, it takes accountability for it. Not just with an apology, but with changed behavior.
Healthy love does not just say, “I’m sorry.” Healthy love says, “I see how I hurt you, and I am going to do better.”
There is a difference between someone asking for forgiveness and someone actually changing.
The same is true with trust. You cannot fully love someone you do not trust.
Trust is one of the foundational pillars of love. Once it is broken, it may be repaired depending on the situation but it will cost something. Trust can be destroyed in a millisecond and take years to rebuild. And if someone is not willing to do the work to repair what they broke, then what they are asking for is not reconciliation. It is access and those are not the same thing.
The same goes for forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not pretending something did not happen. It is not immediate restoration. It is not automatic access. It is not saying, “What you did was okay.” Forgiveness is the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. It is choosing not to carry bitterness like a second skin. It is understanding someone’s flaws without handing them the same keys to hurt you again.
You can love someone and know they are not good for your life. You can love someone and let them go. You can love someone and walk away because you know that is what is best for both of you. That is still love. In fact, sometimes that is one of the purest forms of it.
And then there is the love we do not talk about enough:
Self-love.
Not the performative version. Not the Instagram version. Not the bubble baths and face masks version, although those things are lovely. I mean the real version. Self-love is walking away from people, habits, environments, and experiences that do not serve the life you are trying to build. Self-love is getting up and taking a shower even when you do not feel like it. It is cleaning the house. Eating healthy. Journaling. Going to therapy. Being honest with yourself. Asking for help. Admitting you have a problem. Making a plan to change it. Self-love is not allowing pride to take the front row seat. It is not always glamorous. Sometimes it looks like discipline. Sometimes it looks like grief. Sometimes it looks like saying no. Sometimes it looks like starting over.
If you do not know how to love yourself, you will keep confusing attention for love, access for love, and survival for love. For me, none of this became clearer until my relationship with Christ deepened because human love is flawed. Our society is broken. People fail us. People misunderstand us. People mishandle us. But God’s love is different.
My relationship with Christ has changed me in ways I never imagined. I am calmer. I feel peace. I am learning to love the parts of myself I once thought were unlovable. And maybe the most healing thing I have come to understand is this: The same God who made the mountains and the oceans, the flowers and the creatures, the sunsets and the stars… also felt like the world needed one of me. And one of you too. Once you know your worth was decided by God and not by how humans handled you, you start loving differently.
You stop begging for crumbs.
You stop romanticizing pain.
You stop confusing brokenness with depth.
You stop calling chaos “chemistry.”
You stop believing love has to hurt in order to be real.
And you start expecting better. Not perfection. But better.
Because love is not a feeling… at least, not just a feeling.
Love should make people feel: seen, valued, heard, and appreciated.
Love is action.
It is language.
It is choices.
It is consistency.
It is sacrifice.
It is repair.
It is presence.
It is how people feel when they leave your existence.
If your version of love consistently leaves people smaller, more anxious, more ashamed, more fearful, or more broken… then it is worth asking whether it was ever love at all. Love is not defined by what we say. It is defined by what we do.
The truth is, love is not just one thing.
It is motherhood and friendship.
It is faith and forgiveness.
It is truth and tenderness.
It is boundaries and sacrifice.
It is laughter and grief.
It is staying.
It is leaving when you must.
It is choosing what is right, even when it is hard.
Love is not just one thing.
It is all things.
XO – Lish