Love Beyond Valentine’s Day

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, it feels like a good moment to pause and reflect on something important — and often misunderstood — that we call love. 

As I’ve shared before, we as humans are built for attachment. We come into the world completely dependent, needing another person to help us survive. Connection isn’t optional for us; it’s wired into our biology. 

And yet, the way we go about building and maintaining attachment is sometimes… questionable. 

Think about a baby’s very first communication — a cry. When is a cry ever a pleasant sound for a new parent? More often than not, it creates panic: How do I make this stop? It’s uncomfortable, disruptive, and exhausting. But it works. It brings someone close. 

So is this how we form attachments — by being irritating? 

Probably not exactly. But it does teach us something important: attachment isn’t neat or easy. It doesn’t always feel good. It requires effort, patience, and persistence. Love, from the very beginning, is work. 

And we will get it wrong. 

We will mess up. We will misunderstand each other. We will rupture connections. But rupture doesn’t mean the end. There is always the possibility of repair. 

As a therapist, I get it wrong sometimes with my clients. I misjudge, miss something, or say the wrong thing — and then we repair. And almost always, the relationship is stronger afterwards. We’ve both learned something. But naming the elephant in the room takes courage. Repair is rarely comfortable or straightforward, yet it’s where so much growth happens. 

Our own experiences of attachment shape how we show up in relationships. Without shame or blame, those early days, weeks, months, and years become the building blocks of our attachment style — and perhaps of how we understand love itself. 

No one gets it perfect. But we don’t need perfection. 

We only need to be good enough — good enough to meet a baby’s physical and emotional needs most of the time. And even then, we will miss things. We will fail at things. 

But isn’t that part of love too? 

Picking up the pieces and saying: I’m going to try again. You matter. 

For so many of us, that is the message we most need to receive. 

You are important. 

All of us are. 

And I want to pause here to acknowledge the many caring adults I work alongside — foster carers, adoptive parents, kinship carers, teachers, therapists, and support workers — who do this relentless, often invisible work every day with children whose early experiences have made attachment feel unsafe. 

These children don’t always respond with warmth or trust. Sometimes they respond with anger, withdrawal, or push-back. Yet these adults keep showing up. They co-regulate. They repair. They hold boundaries with compassion. They sit with distress. They offer safety again and again, even when it isn’t returned. 

That too is love. 

Love isn’t just flowers and romance and grand gestures. It’s staying when things are hard. It’s repairing after rupture. It’s learning each other’s wounds and choosing kindness anyway. It’s showing up again and again, even when we feel tired, misunderstood, or overwhelmed. 

Perhaps that’s what “in sickness and in health” really means. 

Not just in physical illness, but in emotional messiness too. In dysregulation. In past trauma. In the parts of ourselves that feel unlovable. 

Love says: I’m here. Even now. Especially now. 

And that might be the most powerful kind of love there is. 

Where is the love?

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