Love is beautiful when it’s pure. In every way that it can exist, nothing can beat it.

The deeper your connection with someone, the more the two of you can choose where your affections can and will meet. You can even decide who is allowed into your circle of friendship and/or romance.

It’s great when love is unbound to the traumatic definitions that many will abide by to their graves. When that’s done, none of them can tell you how your heart should be managed, not when they’re struggling with their own.

Pure love doesn’t judge you for who you were in the past, not when it has known you as a better person than the one you may feel doesn’t deserve it. It’s even less judgmental when it knew you in that time, and stayed because you chose to be better.

What does love mean to you? Have you felt it in a way that’s removed from those that abuse it for their selfish needs? Were you ever someone like that, and learned how to break the cycle?

As far as the second question goes, I have. In hindsight to the third, I was, without realizing it until I made enough distance and committed to healing from that former self.

So now, any declaration of love towards me needs to match how I see it. Not to the letter, especially since this is only talking about the short list, but just enough to provide a mutual safe space with anyone I share it with.

If you’re still in your discovery period, or what some circles would consider your “training arc,” don’t stop. You’ll know more than anyone how your heart works, and who you want around you that respects it in full.

The path towards this is worth it. More than you know now, and perhaps even when you receive and feel it.

All you have to do is not stop growing towards it.

D.F.