On Love — And the One Who Stayed Anyway

A birthday reflection on attachment, authenticity, and the radical act of loving without possession

Let’s be honest. Most of what we call “love” is just a well-dressed hostage situation.

We say I love you, but what we mean is: I love how you make me feel. I love the version of myself that exists when you’re near. I love the security of knowing you’re not leaving. That’s not love. That’s a contract with feelings stapled to it.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth that Advaita Vedanta has been whispering (okay, shouting) for thousands of years: the one doing the loving, the one being loved, and love itself — are not three separate things. There is only one consciousness, appearing to itself in the costume of “me” and “you,” desperately trying to remember its own wholeness through the act of reaching toward another.

Which means the moment you try to own love, you’ve already lost the thread.

Attachment Is Not Love. It’s Love’s Anxious Cousin.

Attachment whispers: “I love you because you bring me joy.”

Authentic love says something entirely different — messier, less transactional, uncomfortably generous: “I love you and I yearn for your happiness. If my presence contributes to it, beautiful. But even in my absence, may you find peace. I love you anyway.”

Notice the difference? One is a mirror held up to the self. The other is a window thrown open.

Attachment is rooted in fear — the terror of loss, the ego’s desperate need to possess what it cannot control. It chains you to the idea that another person’s presence is the condition for your peace. And when that condition is threatened? Suffering. Every time.

Vedanta is not sentimental about this. The ego craves ownership. It conflates tightness of grip with depth of devotion. But that’s not love — that’s insecurity wearing love’s clothing.

I have seen what that kind of love looks like up close — the white-knuckled, boundary-obliterating, reality-distorting kind. A previous relationship that became, by the end, something closer to psychological warfare than partnership. The kind of attachment that doesn’t whisper I love you but screams you belong to me, and confuses the volume for sincerity. Lying, stealing, cheating — the full catastrophe. I am not going to detail it here because I have a blog to finish and a therapist’s number saved in my phone.

It took me a long time to understand that what I’d survived wasn’t love gone wrong. It was never love to begin with. It was a frightened ego in full possession mode.

The Ego’s Greatest Trick

Here’s where we go off track, collectively and spectacularly:

We believe the tighter we hold, the deeper our love. We treat possessiveness as proof. We call jealousy passion. We confuse control with care.

But Advaita doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. If there is ultimately only one undivided consciousness — call it Brahman, call it Awareness, call it the ground of being — then who exactly is possessing whom? You can’t truly own what is already, at the deepest level, yourself.

When you grasp, you’re not loving another. You’re panicking about losing a part of the story you’ve built about who you are.

Authentic love, then, is an act of radical un-grasping. It allows the other to grow, to change, to become — even if that becoming takes them somewhere you didn’t plan for. Even if it’s inconvenient. Even if it requires you to revise the story of yourself entirely.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

(And yes, this is the part where theory meets the very human, very unpoetic reality of loving a real, specific, occasionally bewildered person.)

His name is Konrad. And today is his birthday.

Konrad came into my life and, rather than running at the first sign of complexity — which would have been a completely defensible response — chose to stay. He stayed through the chaos of a separation that was not clean or dignified. He stayed through the fallout of that psychotic ex. He stayed through my hardline intersectional feminism, which I refuse to apologise for and which I’m certain has made for some very spirited dinner conversations.

He stayed. Not because I made it easy. I did not make it easy.

And then — this is the part that gets me — he vacuums. He does the shopping. Not because I asked, not because we negotiated it into some kind of domestic treaty, but because he noticed I hate both of these things with a passion that is frankly disproportionate to their importance, and he just… handles it. Quietly. Without martyrdom or mention. This is what love looks like when it gets out of bed in the morning: it picks up a vacuum cleaner and says nothing about it.

He shows up to protests with me. Some he agrees with wholeheartedly. Some — let’s be honest — he has questions about. But he comes anyway, because he understands that standing beside someone in the things that matter to them is the love, even when you’re not entirely sure about the chanting.

He also listens. And I want to be very clear about what that means, because it is not a small ask. It means patiently receiving, regularly, fully formed rants about racism, queer rights, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism — often in sequence, occasionally simultaneously. It means that “how was your day” can and does sometimes open into a forty-minute analysis of structural inequity that I personally would find exhausting if I were on the receiving end. I would be tired of me. I genuinely would.

And then there is travel. Oh, travel. Most people go on holiday and think about the food, the weather, the hotel WiFi. When I land somewhere, what Konrad gets is a running historical-political commentary on who colonised this place, when, why, who profited, whose labour built what we’re currently admiring, and what the long-term economic consequences were for the people who were already here. Every beautiful city has a story about how it got that rich. Every “charming” colonial building has a ledger behind it. I cannot simply look at a nice square and not say something about it. It is not in my body to do so.

Konrad listens. Takes it in. Sometimes asks questions. Has, to my knowledge, never once suggested I might enjoy the view more if I thought about it less. This is either profound love or extraordinary patience, and I suspect it is both.

And my work. Anyone who has watched me work knows it is not a linear, legible, nine-to-five kind of process. It is strange and cyclical and occasionally involves me being unreachable at odd hours because I am deep in a curriculum document or a philosophical rabbit hole or reorganising the entire studio schedule at 4 am for reasons that make complete sense to me. Konrad sees all of this. He doesn’t pathologise it, doesn’t try to manage it, doesn’t suggest I might benefit from a more conventional approach. He watches, and waits, and trusts that I’ll find my way. 

Loving someone well is not a credential you earn once and keep forever. It is a daily, unglamorous practice of choosing — to see, to stay present, to release the outcomes you’ve scripted. To support the becoming, even when the becoming is loud, politically opinionated, and fully committed to dismantling systems of oppression at the dinner table.

It requires something Vedanta points to but cannot deliver on your behalf: the willingness to witness without needing to fix. To stay close without gripping. To let the fire burn and trust it isn’t going to consume you — because you, too, are the fire.

Konrad does this. With a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a protest sign in the other. Which, as it turns out, is the whole practice.

The Selflessness That Isn’t Self-Erasure

One more thing, because this gets misunderstood constantly — especially when applied to women, and especially by spiritual communities that really should know better:

Unconditional love is not the same as self-abnegation. Advaita doesn’t ask you to dissolve your preferences, swallow your needs, or perform sainthood. That’s not non-attachment — that’s suppression wearing a spiritual label, and it has been deployed for centuries to keep women compliant, queer people invisible, and entire communities silent under the guise of devotion, surrender, or “just being positive.”

No. Absolutely not.

An intersectional feminist reading of love — and yes, we are doing that here, this is a yoga philosophy blog and we do not separate the personal from the political — insists that you cannot love authentically while benefiting from systems that dehumanise others. You cannot speak of the universal oneness of consciousness and then ignore racism. You cannot teach non-attachment while upholding patriarchy. You cannot invoke ahimsa and look away from queer people being legislated out of existence. You cannot preach abundance while defending the structures of capitalism and imperialism that manufacture scarcity for the majority, so a minority can perform wellness retreats on stolen land.

Love, real love, is political. It has to be. Because the personal is political, and always has been.

True love allows freedom — and freedom is not neutral. Freedom requires the active dismantling of everything that prevents it. For everyone. Not just the people who look like us, love like us, or move through the world with the same relative ease.

You can love fiercely, hold convictions that make people deeply uncomfortable at dinner, refuse the performance of docile partnership, show up at protests on a Tuesday in the rain — and love without conditions. These are not contradictions. They are, in fact, the whole point.

The Vedantic view of love isn’t passive or placid. It is the most ferocious, undefended thing a human being can do: to show up fully as yourself, allow another to show up fully as themselves, and refuse to call the inevitable friction anything other than the practice.

On Birthdays and Staying

We mark birthdays as beginnings. But in relationships, the real celebration isn’t the starting — it’s the staying. Not the staying-in-despite-everything-being-perfect, but the staying-in-because-you-understand-that-imperfection-is-not-a-problem-to-be-solved.

Konrad, you stayed through things that would have broken most people’s will to try. You built a studio with me, a life with me, a practice with me. You vacuum. You shop. You show up to protests for causes you’re still forming opinions about, because you understand that presence is the point. You have listened to more analysis of colonial history, late-stage capitalism, and queer liberation theory than any person should reasonably be expected to absorb on a weekend. You watched me work in ways that make no conventional sense and trusted me to find my way anyway.

You took me — with all my history, all my fire, all my deeply held positions on absolutely everything — and you loved the whole of it. Not despite it. The whole of it.

That is not a small thing. In Vedantic terms, you managed to love the Awareness beneath all the noise, even on the days when the noise included a detailed breakdown of which European empires are responsible for the architecture we were standing in front of on what was supposed to be a relaxing holiday.

So: happy birthday. This is my love letter, dressed up as philosophy, as it was always going to be.

Don’t squeeze the ones you love. That’s not love. That’s fear.

Open your hands. Let them be. Love them anyway.

That is how you practice