For the longest time, I didn’t think I had an issue with love. When I was single, I felt fine. I wasn’t out there desperately searching for “the one” or feeling incomplete without a partner. I told myself I was independent, self-sufficient. 

But the moment I entered a relationship, something inside me flipped. Love stopped being something I enjoyed and became something I needed. I would either cling, overanalyze, and anxiously try to keep the connection alive, or I would pour so much of myself into the relationship that I lost who I was. I wouldn’t just love, I would merge. Their emotions became my emotions. Their distance felt like a threat. Their reassurance was my oxygen. 

That’s why breakups never felt like just heartbreak. They felt like withdrawal. Like a part of me was being ripped away. I wasn’t just grieving a person, I was grieving the version of me that only felt okay when they were there. 

For years, I thought this was just how love worked. That I loved “too deeply,” that I just felt things more intensely. But what I learned is that this wasn’t love. It was survival. It was my nervous system trying to keep me safe by attaching, by making someone else my anchor. 

The truth? Love isn’t meant to feel like a high you get lost in or a lifeline you cling to. It’s not meant to consume you or leave you constantly second-guessing yourself. It’s meant to be a dance, passionate, intimate, but steady. Love is only as secure as the foundation you build within yourself. 

That’s the alchemy. How to shift from anxious, consuming love to secure, magnetic intimacy. How to hold yourself so deeply that love doesn’t feel like a threat, but like a gift. How to stop losing yourself in love and start leading yourself in it. 

Because love isn’t something you hold onto for dear life. It’s something you stand in, fully, deeply, and securely.