How I Fell in Love… Again

Recently, I watched The Materialist with Dakota Johnson. She plays a young, ambitious matchmaker on a mission to connect women with New York’s most eligible bachelor. The energy is very Sex and the City—which, believe it or not, I only just started watching myself.

Maybe that’s why it hit me: I’m back in these dating streets. But here’s the difference—this time, I’m showing up as a very different woman than I was even two years ago.

On one hand, I’m still the hopeless romantic who wants to believe that partnership will complete me. On the other, I feel deeply content in my solitude—laughing, crying, moving about my home without compromise.

So, how do I reconcile those two truths?

A New Definition of Love

That question echoed in Dené Logan’s book Sovereign Love. She challenges the scripts we’ve inherited—that love is only “real” if it comes wrapped in romance, or that partnership is the ultimate fulfillment. Instead, her work widens the lens. Love isn’t one road—it’s an endless landscape.

And maybe that’s the medicine I needed.

Because lately, I’ve been falling in love in places that have nothing to do with dating—in the way I dress up for a museum day with girlfriends, in the quiet grounding of feeling my feet in the grass on my front lawn, and in the sense of renewal that comes with traveling and shaking loose parts of myself that were waiting to breathe.

Maybe the reconciliation isn’t choosing between romance and solitude. Maybe it’s learning to hold both, while honoring all the other ways love flows into our lives—through friendship, creativity, beauty, and freedom.

The Myth of Completion

So much of how we see love is shaped by language and culture. Scroll through social media, and the images are almost always the same: couples, proposals, weddings, the “one.”

We’ve been conditioned to believe that love is about finding someone to complete us. But that story—while romantic—is also dangerous. It places an impossible burden on someone else to make us whole, when in truth, that work belongs to us.

Dené writes about how easily we blur the lines between needs and desires. That reflection was a lightbulb moment for me. She reminds us:

“We already have existing within us every single thing we could possibly ever need. Our cup is running over with nothing but love to give. And from that full cup, we’re able to let go of the false belief that we need anything outside of ourselves to be whole.”

Falling in Love With Life

So yes, I’m in love again. But this time, it’s not just about romance. It’s about life itself. About the friends who make me laugh until I cry. About the beauty and creativity that feed my soul. About my own sovereignty and the reminder that joy is not something to chase—it’s a practice of seeing old things through new eyes.

Love isn’t waiting for me out there. Love is already here.