What is love?
Agape
I do not know when you’ll be reading this but I wrote it in 2025, a year where it feels like we’re back to pre-romance era, a time where your uncle/friends are probably connecting you to your ideal partner, your local or international matchmaker has your list of criteria, and yet, with all this access, vetting, assessment, love becomes scarcity, luxury, the epitome of winning, reserved for a few who have taken the less traveled path.
Before I tell you what I KNOW love is, I will share what I thought it was: I thought it was the compatibility, or the result of impeccable courtship from a man, I thought it was fires and desire, and most recently, I even thought it could be the checklist.
And here is what it really is, expressed in imperfect words, love can’t be captured so we will have to dance around it:
When love decides to find you (because most likely you won’t be the one looking for it), you will know it by the challenge it represents: love asks you to change. Love demands that you are the (wo)man in the arena, standing up against all of your shadows, self sabotage, negative beliefs, worn out habits…
Love feels like a battlefield where you absolutely have to sacrifice something to get a foot in the door: pride or judgement, status or emotional presence, love will simply not have you walk in half present, half asleep.
In a rare book I found in the palace, I do remember reading something like this:
“men have been encoded for that one woman, and they will sabotage everything that is not her.”
I will add that when they find her, they remember the highest version of her they have seen in their soul, and they will unconsciously guide her forward confidently, like they know her better than she knows herself, I have lived this state and being lead towards your highest self when you can’t even see it but you can feel it is the right direction, is the closest definition of true love I have found.
Men nowadays talk about submission, the red pill guys, the podcasters, not knowing submission is a state a woman enters only with the man in the arena: the man that starts guiding her, shaping her, because she is encoded within him with absolute clarity.
The woman also finds herself guiding and guarding the man’s heart, he will not understand it logically, why she can’t relax, why she notices things nobody else mentions?
It is because similarly, her job as a servant of this love, is to get the highest version of that man out into existence, this makes her a woman in the arena, fighting against all the past selves of a man, and showing him unconsciously all the things she knows he IS inside.
No amount of checklists, dating apps, “get to know each other” calls, co-habitation or therapy will turn any man or woman into the warriors in the arena.
The arena comes inevitably with love
Society is tired, worn out, people are out in bars and art museums looking for peace, people have invested in the wrong battles, they’re on anti-depressants to forget
The modern woman is in wellness retreats with a strong circle of feminists who have gotten so good at stating why they are high value.
The warrior woman is neither in the bar, nor in your circle of friends, nor in the local matchmaking agency. She is guarded by God, prepared intentionally in life for this moment of destiny she feels will happen.
And when it happens,
Not you, or her, or the arena, will be the same
See, that is love.