The word “love” does a lot of heavy lifting. It stretches across romance and grief, devotion and desire, habit and hope.
We love our partners, our children, our dogs, our yoga class, and a really good cup of coffee. Somehow, we expect the same word to hold it all.
Perhaps that’s why love can feel so confusing. We sense its many textures, but don’t always have the language to describe them — the language of the heart.
There’s a quiet irony in the way we associate the heart with love. The heart never rests. It pumps blood relentlessly. And yet emotionally, many of us rarely access it.
We live from the neck up, thinking, analysing, coping, managing. We rely on our hearts biologically, but forget how to listen to them emotionally.
Feeling becomes something we postpone, intellectualise, or contain. The problem isn’t that the heart stops working. It’s that we stop visiting it.
Love isn’t about activating something dormant. It’s about reconnecting to something that’s been working all along.
When we think of love, we often default to the ‘big’ versions. Romantic partners, lifelong bonds, dramatic gestures. But much of our capacity for love is trained in the ordinary.
The love of a dog is unconditional and non-judgemental. The love of a parent for a child is enduring, growth-oriented, and willing to let go.
The love of community could be a yoga class you attend every week. A shared practice, a wise teacher, and familiar faces you come to know through breath, effort and commitment.
These loves don’t announce themselves loudly. But they’re formative. They teach us how to show up and pay attention.
I think of reading bedtime stories to my son when he was young, not rushing to the end but lingering over illustrations, sharing delight in small details. Nothing remarkable, yet deeply loving.
Those moments trained patience, presence, and mutual attunement far more than any grand declaration ever could.
Perhaps love is less about the person or object itself, and more about what we practise with them.
This idea is captured beautifully in The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers. In the story, a young girl loses her beloved grandfather and, to protect herself from pain, places her heart in a bottle.
It keeps her safe, but it also dulls her curiosity, her joy, her sense of wonder. She grows up competent and accomplished, yet oddly disconnected.
What’s striking is that her heart never disappears. It remains intact, preserved, still very much there.
Many of us learn early that feeling deeply comes at a cost. So we manage our emotions. We contain them. We keep them at arm’s length.
Over time, we become functional but emotionally muted. The heart keeps beating, but we stop consulting it.
Our sense of self is shaped by our relationships. Across the continuum of care – being cared for, caring for others, belonging to communities, committing to shared practices – love edits our identity over time.
Just as important as what we feel, is how we feel about our feelings. Do I judge myself for being tender? Do I distrust joy? Do I feel embarrassed by longing, or impatient with grief?
These reactions determine how much access we allow ourselves to the heart that never stops working.
Learning, unlearning, and relearning love isn’t about perfect relationships. It’s about widening our inner vocabulary, and giving ourselves permission to notice what’s already there.
The three small practices of love
If love is something we practise, not possess, a few small rituals can help reopen the bottle:
1. Name the love. At the end of each day, note one moment of connection. Don’t just call it ‘love’ – be specific. Was it care? Warmth? Loyalty? Shared effort? Precision builds awareness.
2. Notice your reaction. When a feeling arises, ask, how do I feel about feeling this? Curiosity, rather than judgment, often restores access.
3. Romance the ordinary. Choose one small, repeatable act – walking the dog, making tea, greeting a colleague – and do it with full attention. Love grows where attention goes.
Love is not something we master once. We learn it, mess it up, unlearn it, relearn it and practise it again, across friendships, families, communities and within ourselves.
Perhaps the art of love is not about protecting the heart from breaking, but about remembering to return to it. Like the heart itself, love is already there. We just need to learn to listen to it.