I Still Believe in Love

There are things a woman can see that change the architecture of her faith.

Not merely her faith in men.

Her faith in sex.

In intimacy.

In marriage.

In her own judgment.

In the stories she once told herself about what love was supposed to feel like.

Sometimes the thing that breaks you is not simply what someone did.

It is discovering what you were willing to believe about it while it was happening.

That is a different kind of wound.

Because eventually you have to reckon not only with the person who deceived you, but with the woman who trusted.

You begin asking questions that have teeth.

How did I not see it?

Why did I stay?

Why did I believe him?

Why did my body say yes when something deeper in me was screaming no?

Why did I mistake intensity for intimacy?

Why did I call possession passion?

Why did I call attention love?

Why did I call being wanted the same thing as being cherished?

And if I was wrong about that—

what else was I wrong about?

This is where cynicism comes knocking.

And frankly?

I understand why some women answer the door.

After enough betrayal, cynicism can feel like intelligence.

It can dress itself up beautifully.

It says:

You finally know how the world works.

Men are all the same.

Love is just chemistry and projection.

Sex is a transaction.

Trust is stupidity.

Romance is marketing.

Spirituality is escapism.

Your intuition failed you.

Never again.

Never again.

There is tremendous seduction in those words.

They promise safety.

They promise that if you become sufficiently hard, sufficiently clever, sufficiently self-contained, sufficiently suspicious, nothing will ever get through again.

But there is a price.

The fortress that keeps the wolves out also keeps the light out.

And I have no interest in spending the rest of my life in a fortress.

So let me be very clear.

Fuck the predators.

Fuck coercion.

Fuck degradation.

Fuck manipulation disguised as seduction.

Fuck the people who turn vulnerability into leverage.

Fuck anyone who confuses access with entitlement.

Fuck anyone who treats another human being like a body with a pulse instead of a soul with a history.

But I am not giving up on beauty.

I am not giving up on tenderness.

I am not giving up on sexuality.

I am not giving up on masculine courage.

I am not giving up on feminine softness.

I am not giving up on divine union.

I am not giving up on God.

And I am not giving up on great love.

Not because I am naïve.

That part matters.

Naivety says:

Nothing bad will happen to me.

Defiance says:

I know exactly what exists in the darkness, and I refuse to let it determine what I believe is possible in the light.

Those are not the same thing.

The naïve woman thinks the forest is safe because she has never seen the wolf.

The discerning woman has seen the wolf.

She has learned its tracks.

She knows what its teeth look like.

She knows what happens when you mistake hunger for affection.

And she walks back into the forest anyway.

Not carelessly.

With a fucking lantern.

That is the woman I want to become.

Not untouched.

Honed.

There is a difference.

The woman who has descended into the underworld and returned is not the same woman who entered it.

She has lost illusions.

Good.

Some illusions deserve to die.

She has buried the fantasy that everyone means well.

Good.

She has learned that attraction is not evidence of safety.

That chemistry is not character.

That desire is not devotion.

That being pursued is not the same as being respected.

That someone wanting your body does not mean they can see your humanity.

That intensity can be manufactured.

That charm can be weaponized.

That apologies can become choreography.

That some people know exactly how to imitate tenderness because tenderness is the easiest door through which to enter.

She knows these things now.

She knows them in her bones.

But discernment is not the same thing as suspicion.

That distinction may be one of the great spiritual tasks of adulthood.

To become wiser without becoming colder.

To develop boundaries without building walls around the entire heart.

To recognize danger without declaring the whole world dangerous.

To stop believing everyone is good without deciding nobody is.

To stop trusting blindly without becoming incapable of trust.

That is difficult work.

It requires something more sophisticated than innocence.

It requires judgment.

And perhaps this is where we have misunderstood the wounded woman.

We imagine healing means becoming fearless.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes healing means becoming capable of fear without surrendering your entire life to it.

I can know predators exist without believing every man is one.

I can reject pornography, degradation, coercion and sexual exploitation without rejecting sexuality.

I can understand that relationships can become prisons without believing relationship itself is a prison.

I can acknowledge that I have made choices I would not make now without deciding that the woman I was was stupid.

She wasn’t stupid.

She was learning.

And perhaps the most important thing I can reclaim is not my innocence.

It is my discernment.

My intuition was not necessarily broken because someone deceived me.

Sometimes intuition speaks quietly beneath a mountain of hope.

Sometimes we hear it and bargain with it.

Sometimes we sense the fracture and explain it away because we desperately want the beautiful thing to be beautiful.

That doesn’t mean the instrument is broken.

It means the instrument needs tuning.

The Crone understands this.

She does not throw away the compass because she once got lost.

She learns how to read it.

She learns the difference between the voice of fear and the voice of knowing.

She learns that her body remembers things her rational mind wants to negotiate.

She learns that discomfort is information.

That hesitation is information.

That peace is information too.

And eventually she becomes dangerous in an entirely different way.

Not because she is harder.

Because she is harder to fool.

I still believe in the masculine.

Not the cartoon version.

Not the chest-thumping caricature of manhood that mistakes aggression for strength.

Not the wounded little tyrant who needs everyone around him smaller so he can feel tall.

I mean something older.

Something quieter.

The masculine as courage.

As integrity.

As restraint.

As the ability to hold enormous strength without needing to use it against someone.

Protection without possession.

Power without domination.

Leadership without ownership.

Desire without entitlement.

Strength without cruelty.

Tenderness without shame.

A man who can enter a room and make it safer rather than smaller.

A man who can look at a woman and see not a collection of desirable parts, but an entire sovereign human being.

A mind.

A history.

A body.

A mystery.

A soul.

A woman who does not exist to validate his masculinity.

A woman he does not need to conquer in order to feel powerful.

A woman whose autonomy does not threaten his strength.

That man is not a fantasy.

He may be rare.

But rare is not the same thing as imaginary.

And I refuse to let the existence of counterfeit masculinity convince me that the real thing does not exist.

Likewise, I refuse to believe that feminine power requires us to become replicas of the things that hurt us.

I don’t want a femininity that has amputated every soft part of itself and called the resulting numbness independence.

I don’t want women to believe that being invulnerable is the highest form of strength.

I don’t want us to become so afraid of needing anyone that we mistake isolation for sovereignty.

The feminine does not become powerful by becoming hard enough to survive anything.

She becomes powerful when she knows what she will and will not allow into the sacred territory of her life.

She can be soft and discerning.

Sensual and sovereign.

Tender and terrifying.

Open and boundaried.

She can say yes because she means yes.

She can say no because no is sacred.

She can desire without surrendering her dignity.

She can love without abandoning herself.

She can receive without becoming possessed.

She can remain feminine without becoming prey.

That is not weakness.

That is mastery.

There is an image I keep returning to.

A woman coming out of the underworld.

Her clothes are burned.

Her hair smells of smoke.

There is ash beneath her fingernails.

She has seen things down there that she will never be able to explain to people who have lived their whole lives in sunlight.

She has learned what hunger looks like.

She has learned what cruelty looks like.

She has learned that monsters do not always have monstrous faces.

Sometimes they have beautiful voices.

Sometimes they know exactly what to say.

Sometimes they tell you they love you.

And she knows this now.

God help her, she knows.

But in her hands she carries something.

A tiny flame.

Almost nothing.

A little ember cupped between scarred palms.

And someone asks her:

What is that?

She looks down.

My faith.

In what?

And perhaps she doesn’t answer immediately.

Because she has spent years having the word love used against her.

She has watched people cheapen it.

Weaponize it.

Perform it.

Twist it.

She has watched lust masquerade as devotion.

Control masquerade as protection.

Dependency masquerade as destiny.

Possession masquerade as passion.

She has watched people invoke God while behaving like wolves.

She has watched beautiful words conceal ugly intentions.

So she is careful now.

She has every reason to be.

But eventually she lifts the little flame.

And says:

Love.

Not the imitation.

The real thing.

The thing underneath all the theater.

The thing that does not require humiliation.

The thing that does not feed on fear.

The thing that does not need to make another person smaller.

The thing that can survive the word no.

The thing that becomes more itself in freedom.

The thing that does not consume the beloved but reveres them.

The thing that does not say,

You are mine.

but rather,

I see you.

I choose you.

I will not harm what I claim to love.

That is the kind of love I still believe in.

Not because I have never encountered its opposite.

Because I have.

Because I know the difference now.

And knowing the difference changes everything.

There is a strange arrogance in assuming that suffering has the final word.

That because something beautiful was corrupted, beauty itself must be a lie.

That because someone betrayed trust, trust is foolish.

That because someone used sex as a weapon, sexuality is inherently dirty.

That because someone invoked God while behaving monstrously, God must not exist.

That because we once misjudged someone, our capacity for judgment is permanently ruined.

No.

I will not give the darkness that much credit.

It does not get to define the light simply because I have seen what happens when the light is absent.

I have seen enough darkness.

I don’t need to worship it.

I don’t need to become it.

And I certainly don’t need to spend the rest of my life proving that I have learned its lessons by becoming incapable of tenderness.

The dragon does not defeat the princess by consuming her.

Sometimes the dragon guards the gate.

Sometimes the woman becomes the dragon.

Sometimes the fire that nearly destroyed her becomes the fire she carries home.

And sometimes the deepest rebellion is not becoming cruel after cruelty.

It is remaining capable of love.

Not stupid love.

Not blind love.

Not love that begs to be chosen.

Not love that tolerates degradation in exchange for scraps of affection.

Not love that requires self-abandonment.

I mean the kind of love that has teeth.

The kind with boundaries.

The kind that can walk away.

The kind that can say:

I love you.

And no.

Both can be true.

That is grown love.

That is sacred love.

That is love after the fall.

I have seen what people can do to one another.

I know what darkness looks like.

I know that love can be faked.

I know that some people will call possession passion and coercion intimacy.

I know that attention can be mistaken for reverence.

I know that chemistry can burn without creating warmth.

I know that desire can exist without safety.

I know that a beautiful promise can come from an ugly mouth.

I know that some wounds are made by the very hands that once promised to protect you.

I know all of this now.

And I still believe in love.

Not because I don’t know better.

Because I do.

I believe in tenderness precisely because I know what cruelty costs.

I believe in courage because I know what cowardice does when given power.

I believe in sexuality because I know the difference between eroticism and degradation.

I believe in intimacy because I know the difference between being consumed and being known.

I believe in the possibility of a good man because I know exactly what a bad one can do.

I believe in the divine because I have seen what happens when human beings pretend they are gods.

I believe in my own intuition because I have learned to listen to it more carefully.

And I believe in love because I refuse to let the people who betrayed it define it for me.

I came back from the underworld with my heart intact.

Not untouched.

Not innocent.

Not naïve.

Honed.

And this little flame?

I guarded it with my life.

The darkness did not get to have it.

That is not naïvety.

That is defiance.