The Feminine Urge to Choose Love

The best way I’ve come to understand love is this: 

Imagine you are floating in a lake – no bottom, no shore, just endless, lovely water holding you. There’s no need to swim or breathe. You are simply sustained.

 You can try to clutch it in your hands, clinging tightly, but it slips through. You can attempt to dive deeper in search of the bottom, the root of it. You can swim away toward some imagined shore, trying to escape it – but there’s no end, no edge.

That is love, to me.

I hesitated to write this article because I thought I needed to offer a conclusion. Some shiny truth. I thought I had to find the lakebed and bring back a pearl that would simply explain love. Instead, I revisited moments in my life when love was not something to define, but something I simply knew.

When I was a child, I had a small ritual. Every night before sleep, I’d whisper the world ‘love’ to myself. I believed it would protect me from the monsters under my bed waiting to grab my ankles if my feet dared to peek out from under the duvet.

Back then, I didn’t feel a need to understand or intellectualise love – I just knew it. I didn’t have a relationship with love. I just trusted it. I was within it.

But as we grow up, love changes. Or rather, our perception of it does. Love starts to wear different costumes – shaped by our experiences of family, friendships, relationships, pets, passions, and pain. These very sources of love can also distort our understanding of it. Suddenly, we are not always floating. That’s when we might feel the need to swim to its depths in search of answers, try to clutch it tightly, or swim away from it entirely. Sometimes, we try all three at once.

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Love in the Age of Competition

As young humans in a world full of curated advice about how to ‘do’ love, hundreds of different definitions and exhibitions of what it ‘should’ be enter our consciousness on a daily basis. It can feel like you are never quite doing it right.

You might hear:

-       ‘We’re in our 20s – why be in a relationship? This is the time to love yourself!’

-       ‘Why can’t I stop caring about a friend who often makes me feel terrible?’

-       ‘Why am I the only one not in a relationship? I am happy as I am but is there something wrong with me?’

-       ‘Why can’t I just love myself like everyone else seems to?’

These questions often appear personal, even intimate. But they’re shaped by much larger forces. They don’t arise in a vacuum – they’re the echoes of a culture that constantly broadcasts ideas of what love is supposed to look like, how it should be timed, and who deserves it. Even the idea of ‘self-love’ is no longer just a feeling – it’s a benchmark. Another metric to assess your adequacy.

We live in a world that claims to offer endless choice – in love, in life, in identity – and yet, beneath that promise lies a persistent standardisation. The linear script persists: achieve the grades, land the job, find the partner, build the family, retire in peace. It presents itself as one story among many, but it is still treated as the most legitimate one.

Yes, the world is changing! Many of us have the privilege to choose from a thousand different lifestyles. But in practice, some choices are more culturally palatable than others. Choice becomes conditional – shaped by class, race, gender, location – and constrained by the ingrained fear of being judged for choosing ‘wrong’. So, what looks like freedom is often a more sophisticated form of conformity.

And that’s where the fracture begins. When you’re constantly exposed to templates of how life and love should look, what your choices should be, it is easy to internalise those as the right ones. You begin to compare your pace, your relationships, your desires to those around you. You might even distrust what actually feels right - because it doesn’t look right.

We live in a world afraid of deviation from the norm. One that rewards placing faith not in yourself, but perhaps in the abstract idea of what you’re supposed to be - so that you keep striving, keep achieving. And in doing so, you can begin to fracture your connection to your inner compass – the one that floats, and is simply sustained.

As Alfie Kohn writers in No Contest: The Case Against Competition,

‘Life for us has become an endless succession of contests… from the moment the alarm clock rings until sleep overtakes us again’.

Competition replaces unconditional love with conditional worth.

Historically, this didn’t happen by accident. As capitalism replaced feudalism, competition was built into the systems of many countries. Workers were encouraged to outdo each other – to innovate, work harder, produce more. Not to nourish community, but to win over their neighbour.

That mindset didn’t stay in the market place. It crept into everything we consume - including the idea of love.

Take self-love, for example. The idea that self-improvement equals self-love, that constantly ‘bettering’ yourself is the solution to all your self-esteem issues, all your anxieties. Whether it be forcing yourself into a rigid yoga schedule, making yourself feel guilty for not having a ‘side-hustle’ at 21, or feeling like you must always be productive - because if you stop you are behind.

Kohn cites a study by Robert Helmreich, who examined the output of 103 scientists. The most successful – the ones with the most cited papers – were those who scored the lowest on competitiveness. Helmreich was so surprised by these results that he repeated the study with students, business people, and psychologists. Same result. Competition does not fuel excellence, as is so often believed. It undercuts it.

What Helmreich observed was that competition disconnects us from ourselves and from each other. It makes our self-worth conditional, shaky, and approval based. We look outward for meaning, instead of inward. And when that inner sense of love begins to waver, we don’t float anymore. We flail. We grasp. We forget how to hold ourselves – let alone others.

Furthermore, it attaches us to outcomes, removing us from the present, from our bodies. Because we are consistently trying to be the fastest, the most efficient, the most productive. It can lead to us missing out on life because we are tethered to the end goal rather than to ourselves in the very moment we are living.

Love as Wholeness, Not Self

As Yuri Kochiyama puts it, ‘life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.’

The reason I am saying all of this is to emphasise that we are not separate. Competition - if not created with care - separates us. How we show up in the world – how we respond, how we carry ourselves, how we treat others – is never just a personal act. It’s always relational. Every choice is shaped by what came before and leaves a trace of what’s to come. We are both products and producers of the world we live in.

And real love isn’t a product. It’s not a trophy, just something between two people, or a performance, and it is not in scarcity. Love is the current that reminds us we belong to something larger. It is the glue that connects us to the whole. And when we enter competition – with others, with ourselves, with the impossible ideal of who we think we should be – we sever that connection. We no longer see others as part of us and we no longer see love as abundant but rather something we might give ourselves at the end of the day…if we have achieved enough.

This isn’t about escape. It’s not about abandoning society, becoming a monastic or going to find ourselves in Bali. It’s about being in the world – but consciously. Not by opting out, but by opting in differently.

We can hold ourselves accountable and those we love accountable for how we show up in the world. We know deeply when we are acting out of love and when we are not.

An exceptionally dear friend of mine put it into words for me, she is and does as best she can for her children every day. Even though they don’t exist quite yet – she chooses what she would want them to learn from her.

Not that they must earn rest. Not that love is a reward.

But that it is part of their very beings. Practice acting for your future (or current) children too.  

You get to choose what ripples you create in the lake, whether you struggle or you float.