About a month ago, I reflected on six years since I left my first husband. A few days ago, I had the most peculiar feeling. I realized that my second husband and I are approaching our one year anniversary, and I have something else to reflect on—one year of a happy marriage. I realized the journey towards him started with a path of self-love.

It’s funny. There is so much to say and nothing. People ask Carlos and I our story of how we met, and immediately after, how we dared to get married five months later, all the time. It feels like nothing new and something I don’t want to recount due to how mundane it is. And yet, I get it. To many people, it is not.

We don’t find ourselves fascinating. But it does feel like many people find our relationship peculiar. And the primary reason for that is we seem happy. Because we are.

This doesn’t mean we have a perfect marriage. In fact, I would say much of the time, when we do have conflict, it is ugly, loud—though rarely openly nasty or mean-spirited. It has a lot of emotion to it, but that’s because it usually is the expression of a great deal of feeling. This relationship means a great deal to us—yes we feel it when things are good and we feel it when things are bad. Which means for as high as our highs are—our lows are low.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Most importantly, I am glad this relationship makes me feel.

It would likely be impossible to share everything this relationship has taught me. Always fight fair. Let the other person know how you feel by showing them your emotions, not just describing them. Acknowledge that men and women are built a bit different and communicate accordingly. A man isn’t just utilitarian—a man inherently wants to perform, protect, create, and care for you—but if you don’t nourish, care, support, and give him a safe place, you will deplete him and destroy your relationship. A man wants to be seen for what he provides but not valued exclusively for it.

I could go on and on.

Most of all, on the day I started writing this, two days after the one year anniversary of when I parted ways with my last job and two days before my one year marriage anniversary, I felt full of love, pride, joy, and admiration—of Carlos but also me.

One thing I have learned over the years is you need to be able to verbalize what you want in order to get it. Strawberry ice cream or mint? Mexico or the USA?  Love or a stable but boring relationship? What do you want? 

What do you really want? Because whatever it is, you will have to commit to it, and whatever that means. It simply amazes me how many people can easily say what they don’t want but struggle with completing the sentence “I want ____.”

After my first marriage fell apart, through a lot of self work which I didn’t do unaided, I got really clear on what I wanted in life. It was less a checklist of material and more about how I wanted to feel. And then I relentlessly pursued it through living a life in alignment with that, a life of integrity. 

I wanted to be loved. That I knew for sure. I wanted to feel like my life was a never-ending love story between not just me and my partner but me and the whole world. I also wanted to feel the kind of peace, excitement, and fulfillment I got when I traveled all the time in my life, no matter where I was. I wanted adventures in love and on the earth. I had no idea how at the time but the unknown—the real unknown, not the known unknown—was what I wanted. I didn’t want to get everything on my checklist but I wanted to genuinely be surprised and excited by life. And verbalizing it was the first part.

It was through my drive to constantly desire to and strive to be open to life and its twists and turns, that I ended up coming to Mexico. It was in that way that I moved into UX design and it was in that way I was willing to part ways with it. And it was in that way I met Carlos.

I love Carlos. He is literally everything I never imagined I could have in a partner. He is not without faults and I love him for them. But most of all, what I love about him is that he is constantly surprising me. There is always something new to learn about him, because he is constantly learning. Loving Carlos is a kind of adventure in love, peace, excitement, and fulfillment, and gives me a similar feeling to travel. I love him less for being what I wanted my partner to be and more because he is who he is, whole, full, flawed. I love him not because he fit my ideal—I love him not because he is an idea of a person. I love him because he is a person.

And that is what love is about.

Most people want love but don’t realize that love is a noun and a verb. The noun version is a state of being, which means the flip side is you can not be in it. But love is an action verb too. And actions are one of the few things in life you can control. They matter.

People sometimes are so focused on being in love that they forget to be loving. If you really think about the action verb “love,” it does not mean to receive it. In an almost paradoxical, ironic way, most people are far more interested in receiving love than they are in giving it away, unconditionally, with no strings attached. And yet “to love” is defined only by giving it away.

If I love you because you love me and vice versa this is a transaction, not love. 

It is a hard pill to swallow but nothing about being in the state of love or loving someone as a verb is defined by having them love you back. 

You love because you love. That is it. You do it because you are a loving person. You do it knowing love can never run out even if you constantly give it away. Love is a well.

In fact, ideally this love should spill out everywhere and onto everyone. I am not without my shadow self too, and I don’t like everyone, but I do try to hold every person I meet in a lens of loving kindness.

When you love because you love—when you love because you are loving—you might be surprised at how many people want to love you back. You might even have options as to who your romantic partners are, and find that your whole life is love.

But Carlos wasn’t someone I picked as an option of many. Feeling so embodied and full of love at the time, I knew how I wanted to be experienced when loved. I wanted a love that was an unfolding adventure, with someone who loved me beyond my fit into their ideal as well. With Carlos, I found everything I wanted to feel and more—and his love for me is just a byproduct of him being a loving person as well.

Carlos is my best friend. I think we have fans of our relationship, but we also have critics. You would be surprised—we have more critics than probably anything—for a variety of reasons, but it seems like the main one is that our relationship from an exterior-level looks so nice and steeped in admiration and genuine friendship, that it triggers people.

I have found in life that most people have a certain way of seeing the world and then they look for things that validate what they already believe. Since most people are wounded, especially by love, most see our relationship and feel discombobulated. Like a short circuit, or an error. People actually want to believe it isn’t real. They want to believe it isn’t real, I think, because it shatters their illusions that a love like ours is not possible, and makes them come face to face with the fact that if real love exists, there must be a reason it doesn’t exist for them where they are. They seek it elsewhere.

As long as you believe that love exists wherever you are not, you will continue to chase it. The more you chase it, the more you won’t find it. For you to find love, you’ve got to believe it exists where you already are.

To find love, love yourself.

I genuinely adored and enjoyed my own company at the time I met Carlos. I spent the vast majority of my time by myself doing whatever I pleased, from reading in cafes, having brunch alone, visiting new towns, or being at home. I was lavish in the way I spent time, money, effort, praise, kindness, and everything I had on myself. It was something I did not in a way that was meant to garner attention, but in a way that was perhaps meant to mirror a lover and how they treat their beloved. The more I loved myself, the more I met men who wanted to know me, drawn to me like a moth fluttering towards a candle, sometimes to both of our detriment.

I found that by loving, respecting, enjoying, and cherishing myself, I taught the person in front of me how I wanted to be loved, respected, enjoyed, and cherished. The standard of how to treat me had been set—by me. It honestly boggles my mind how many people do not respect themselves and then treat themselves lowly, without noticing it, and then are surprised to not find the kind of love they want in others. If you treat yourself as a sexual object, don’t be surprised if other people do too. If you are willing to disrespect yourself, don’t be surprised if other people don’t respect you.

The more you love yourself, the more you shine a light for your partner. It helps them find you, like a romantic bat signal that only they can see. Loving and respecting yourself is putting up a sign for people who want to be with partners they love and respect.

That was me and Carlos, and again, we are not perfect, but individually and as a couple, we are in a constant state of improving and loving ourselves and our relationship. 

I view us as painting a great masterpiece together, thousands of brush strokes coming together to create a work of art so robust, beautiful, and unknown that even we don’t know what we’re painting. But we do it with so much love, attention, affection, and unwavering energy, we know that eventually the piece will be painted. Every day is a new chapter, a new brush stroke, a new stroke of luck or a lot of work. No matter what the individual days look like, we know even the ugly ones make a part of the larger painting of our lives too. At the end of the day, like two workers who just finished a shift and close out the day with beers at a bar, we also sit back and laugh together at the makings of the day, not taking things too seriously, in a way that I really like.

The Turks have a saying I love and go back to a lot, which is “What you see in me is a reflection of you.” What people see in us is a reflection of them. It’s not in our control to worry about what people think of us, and even if it were, it would be a big waste of time. If people look at our love and see something there other than what we two know to be true, that quite literally is their problem and not ours. I only even address it because, reflecting on one year of marriage, this is something to reflect on too. 

Jealousy is a funny thing. It is low vibrational and an irritating thing for anyone who has to deal with being on the receiving end of it. It’s also an important thing to understand why people do it. No one is jealous of someone who has nothing.

Part of what makes my husband and this relationship so great is me. I can say this with confidence, definitively, and ease because I love myself. Quite frankly, I am one hell of a woman. I don’t need to flex on other women as a result so I don’t, and this is sometimes taken for weakness, but it is kindness—in almost every way I am 10x more woman than the next. Only a very specific kind of person sees kindness as weakness, and they are usually not good. Remember that.

Sometimes I feel like people think we so easily function and so happily because Carlos is a good man and I got lucky. This is partially true, because Carlos is a good man, and he is so because I am a good woman. I brought out the best in him, as he did me, and held his worst parts in loving kindness. I was his place of peace and nourishment and he was mine. That’s why we work so well. We are a team, a unit. I am a part of this team too, and I am a big part of why it works and why it is so great. And I was only able to be a place of peace because I already had done the work to not just provide that to myself, but have something to share.

This is all to say that this relationship is not an accident. A significant part of why this relationship works is because I am one of the people in it. That’s not to give myself airs, but acknowledgement. The confidence you are reading that may be giving you feelings is a result of the self-love I am talking about.

People are not jealous of nothing. This is a recent learning of mine. They are jealous of those who have something. And something—something is what we have. It is not perfect. That stopped being the aim a while ago, mostly because everything contains a little bit of its opposite. Like the dots in a yin yang, the most perfect thing must contain a little bit of imperfection to be truly beautiful. That, we do have.

I share all of this less as a reflection but more as a bit of big sisterly advice, something I have been doing more of lately. I do it out of love. The whole point of this website, of my writing, of ideally everything I do, is hopefully to shine a little more love into the world for those who need it, even if it sometimes if tough love. Even if people aren’t ready for it. Even if people don’t deserve it.

The more Carlos and I move in a positive trajectory in our relationship, the more I see what a positive relationship can do. The point is to create a safe space, outside in the world but also internally, in us each separately but also in us both together. In this safe space, there is a clearing, a sort of neutrality that is the ideal result of a happy, healthy relationship. And that is the space to create, again, individually and together.

In “The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well,” a book by Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins, who are married to each other, they put the point of being a loving person so well. However you want to define it, the point is to reach a place of optimum centeredness in yourself, which will naturally help you find someone similar. Loving couples make loving families. Loving families make loving communities. Loving communities make a loving world.

“‘He asked how was my love life.’ I said ‘it’s great, my whole life is love,’” Maryam Hasnaa once wrote on Twitter, a quote that sticks with me all the time.

What is the point of romantic love? What would you do with yourself, with your life, if you finally got it, it was “perfect,” and it was “stable?” For many of us the end goal is love itself. Why do we want it so bad? I like to ask this question because I don’t think people ponder this enough.

Most people want love because they think it feels good. Plain and simple, they think it’ll make them feel good, which means that they are coming from a place of feeling bad. If they struggle to feel seen, appreciated, enjoyed, and cherished, finding someone who loves them seems like a good way to negate that. Most people want love because they like the idea of how it feels.

But one can feel seen, appreciated, enjoyed, and cherished without a romantic partner. They can offer this to themselves, and that can lead to a romantic love, but it also can just lead to a more full, loving life. 

“A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western…Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”¹

If you want to find the love of your life, you need to first embody love in everything you do, with everyone. The first place to do that is in how you see yourself. Then expand your love to encompass everything. You will feel a collective hug from the world, and you will feel like you are constantly giving one back. When your partner appears, it will not surprise you, not even a little. Your whole life will be love.

There is only one kind of love. 

Have you ever thought of the definition of love? For myself, I have found it nearly impossible to define the word love without using the word love. It is incredibly hard to describe this intangible thing we all yearn for and many of us have experienced in some capacity or another. Most dictionary definitions use the word “affection” to describe it, some describe it as a “strong like.” We all know these words barely begin to capture qualities of love, and yet, this is the best anyone has been able to do.

Love is love, plain and simple. It encompasses everything, nothing more, and nothing less. We all know what it is, despite the drawbacks of language, because we have all felt it.

To get love, one must stop chasing love. One must stop looking for it outside of oneself. One must realize it can exist at all times, exactly where you are, in yourself. Like a geyser, it must come gushing out of you—to experience it in the world, paradoxically, one must experience it within rushing out of themselves.

1. Shafak, E. (2009). The Forty Rules of Love (p. [page number]). Viking.