Is This Love?

Most of us have never been taught how to love well.

We have been taught to love hard. To love loyally, unconditionally, without reservation. We have been shown love as a quantity, something measured in how much you give, how long you stay, how deeply you sacrifice. But rarely have we been taught to love freely. To love from a place of wholeness rather than need. To love in a way that nourishes the person giving it as much as the person receiving it.

And so we do the best we can. We love in the ways we were loved, absorbing the patterns of our childhoods and carrying them forward into our relationships without always realising we are doing so. We love from our wounds as much as from our wholeness. We love in the ways that feel safest, even when safe has stopped meaning good.

None of this is a moral failing. It is deeply, completely human.

But I think it is worth pausing sometimes and asking the question honestly, gently, no judgment: is this love? Or is this something else dressed up as love?

Because love has many faces. And not all of them are what they appear to be.

The parent who cannot stop worrying about their child, who tracks their movements and anticipates every danger, who is so consumed by fear for the person they love that the love itself has become something the child needs protecting from. Is this love? It is, it is also Red Chestnut, the remedy for the love that has become entangled with fear, that worries so hard it can no longer quite rest in the simple warmth of caring for someone.

The person who gives and gives and gives, who is always available, always accommodating, always last on their own list, who says yes when they mean no and calls it love. Who has given so much of themselves over so many years that they are no longer entirely sure what they themselves want, need, or feel. Is this love? It is. And it is also Centaury, the remedy for the love that has become self-erasure, that mistakes depletion for devotion, that needs to learn that you cannot pour endlessly from an empty vessel.

The lover who holds on long past the natural end of things, who cannot release a relationship or a person even when holding on causes more pain than letting go would. Who is so merged with the object of their love that they have lost the thread of where they end and the other begins. Who grieves deeply and holds tightly and calls it loyalty. Is this love? It is, it is also Bleeding Heart, the remedy for the love that has become attachment, that needs to learn the difference between loving freely and holding on for dear life.

The one who loves conditionally without quite knowing it. Who gives warmly and generously but keeps a quiet account. Who needs to be needed, who manoeuvres gently for the central position in the lives of those they love, who sulks or withdraws when attention goes elsewhere. Who would be horrified to be described this way, because they genuinely believe they are simply devoted. Is this love? It is. And it is also Chicory, the remedy for the love that has become entangled with need, that gives in order to receive, that controls disguised as caring.

And then there is the love that has curdled into something unrecognisable. The jealousy, the bitterness, the suspicion that poisons whatever it touches. The person who watches others with resentment, who cannot celebrate another’s joy, who has closed around something hard and cold where warmth used to be. This is the most difficult to speak about because it is the least sympathetic face of love. But it is still love, underneath. Love that has been hurt or deprived or disappointed so many times that it has turned in on itself. Is this love? It is Holly, and what it needs is not judgment but the gentle restoration of the capacity to love and be loved openly again.

We see these patterns often. Not because the people who carry them are doing anything wrong, but because they are suffering in ways that are quiet and private and rarely named for what they are. The chicory person does not think of themselves as controlling. The centaury person does not think of themselves as self-abandoning. The red chestnut person does not think of themselves as suffocating. They think of themselves as loving, which is true. They are simply loving from a place that needs tending.

This is where flower essences offer something quietly remarkable.

They do not ask you to love differently through willpower or discipline or a better understanding of attachment theory. They work beneath the level of the rational mind, at the place where the patterns actually live, where the old wounds shaped the old responses that became the habitual ways of loving. They do not judge what they find there. They simply tend it.

Chicory, given with care, does not make a person less devoted. It frees their love from the grip of need, allowing it to become genuinely generous rather than transactional.

Centaury does not make a person selfish. It restores the self that was always there beneath the giving, so that care comes from fullness rather than from depletion.

Bleeding Heart does not sever connection. It teaches the heart to love with open hands rather than clenched ones, which is the only kind of love that truly nourishes both people.

Red Chestnut does not diminish caring. It returns it to warmth rather than worry, to presence rather than vigilance.

And Holly, perhaps most profoundly of all, does not harden a person further. It opens something that has been closed for a long time, sometimes very gently and slowly, and lets love back in.

Is this love? The question is not an accusation. It is an invitation.

An invitation to look honestly at the ways we love and ask whether they are serving the people we love, and whether they are serving us. An invitation to consider that loving well might be something we can learn and grow into rather than something we either have or do not have. An invitation to be tender with ourselves about the places where our love has been shaped by fear or pain or old patterns we never chose.

The flowers have always understood the complexity of the human heart. They have always known that love, in all its distorted and wounded and complicated forms, is still love. Still worthy of care. Still capable of becoming something freer.

That is what they offer. Not a correction, but a restoration.

Flowers & Love ✌️ Jules