Understanding True Love: What True Love is and What it is Not

True love is like a freight train. It doesn’t sneak up on you subtly, or grow slowly as most people like to tell you.

It knocks you over with full force – streaming and howling into your life with no notice, no warning and no preparation for the upheaval your life is about to experience.

There is an intensity about it that you cannot avoid or ignore (even if you attempt to stay in denial or brush it off as just a little crush), and you cannot run from it. 

True love is finding the ability within yourself to love again after countless heartbreaks, and after vowing to yourself that you’ll never love like this again. In fact, it is only through the countless heartbreaks (the brushing yourself off and picking yourself up after hours, days, weeks spent in the bathtub listening to Bon Iver and crying into your glass of red wine), that true love is able to appear.

When your heart is mature enough, it has experienced enough of the contrast to recognise and appreciate true love when it finally appears.