Last Updated on 28 January, 2026 by Cara Sutra
Riddle: What can you take for granted whilst not believing in it at all?
Answer: Their love for you.
It’s Valentine’s Day soon, but in my opinion the season of love is all year long. I understand Valentine’s is a reminder to show and to celebrate love, but love should remain genuinely felt and believed rather than merely a performance. I’ve been musing on the nature of love recently, and this Valentine’s Day, I’m looking past the rituals and romance to sit with something deeper. Not how to express the love you feel, but how to feel the love you’re given.
They say if you’re told something often enough, you’ll believe it. So how come, with love, that isn’t the case? Why don’t I feel deserving of love? And what can I do to change that?
If you’re in the enviable position of loving someone, you know how effortless that part is. You simply love them, fact. But being loved back is different. They tell you they love you, and you want to believe they mean it; but do you, really?
Thinking on this difficult question has been enlightening. It has revealed unhealthy views towards my own worth, how I soften and adapt for others but won’t do the same for myself. And how right from the start of my life, I learned that love was conditional, something earned and tenuous. I have a lot of work to do to unlearn this damaging lie.
Love Now, Vs “Love” in the Past
I’ve been with my husband since 2010, and we married in 2021. We had an unusual start to our relationship; I first got with his wife at the time, and she had another boyfriend as well as her husband, and we all lived together as a poly quad. This situation ended in December 2013, leading to my husband and I living separately with our family from then on. After a divorce, my husband and I were able to legally unite in marriage after being together 11 years. This summer we will celebrate 15 years together, and our 5-year wedding anniversary.
To say we had a rocky start is an understatement. It isn’t usual to share an ex with your husband, I suppose, but ironically it has been incredibly bonding for us, helping us move past the relationship turbulence of the first few years into a deeper, settled love.
Before him, my relationships were a cavalcade of trauma and abuse. The one exception being my ex-husband, whom I married under the influence of prescribed mind-altering drugs. Despite him being a nice enough guy, I came to realise in increasing moments of clarity that I didn’t actually love him, and we parted ways.
My eldest child is unfortunately shared with someone I hesitate to describe as a man. During that 7-year relationship I was subjected to emotional and physical abuse at the hands of an alcoholic with anger issues and will continue to suffer the effects for the rest of my life. The miscarriage memories, broken bones and recurrent nightmares, as well as the complexities of sharing a child.
Beyond romantic love, I have come to realise that even as a child I wasn’t loved by my parents. Or that love, when given, was conditional and measured and meted out as reward for compliance and acceptable behaviour. I had to smile, keep quiet and obey, disregarding my own feelings because I was told they didn’t matter. And so I came to truly believe they didn’t matter. My own feelings weren’t to be trusted. I was to trust what my behaviour and presence reflected in others, and only through others could I learn how to feel about myself, the true measure of my worth and if I was loved.
Chasing Love
I feel like I’ve been chasing the feeling of being deserving of love my whole life, like a cartoon character sprinting in an effort to catch the carrot dangling just beyond their nose.
Maybe if I work hard enough. If I’m a good enough partner, a good enough woman, a good enough mother. If I look the best I can, don’t ‘let myself go’. If I make myself available for sex. Perhaps if I’m interesting enough, intelligent enough, generous enough, simply enough… then, I might feel like I deserve love.
But now I wonder, do I simply deserve his love? Without needing any of that, without chasing, performance or conditions. Do I deserve to be loved as I am, without changing, without trying?
That’s the question I’ve been sitting with as I face so many changes in my life, changes that were mostly thrust upon me rather than chosen. Perimenopause. Chronic illness. Progressive deafness. The inevitability of my sobriety. Changes to my appearance. The crashing out of my libido. Ageing as a woman, in this world, in this culture.
Just as I’ve been forced to stop distracting myself with performative activity, I’ve also been forced to sit and properly consider the questions which keep surfacing. Can I stop chasing his love? Can I simply be, and feel deserving of it?
Letting Myself Receive Love
Learning to accept love and letting myself believe that I deserve it is hard work. And this year, I’m doing the work. It started three years ago, in fact, when I reached a fork in the road and took the path of sobriety rather than the one with total self-destruction on the horizon. This cleared the way for my decision to begin trauma-informed therapy last year. This year, all of that continues, with a renewed conscious effort to be kind to myself rather than continuing my conditioned brutality with myself.
The start of 2026 heralded a few deep shifts in my thinking, attitude and, hopefully, behaviours. I’m nourishing rather than starving myself. I’m resting without guilt or needing to earn it. I’m recognising my insecurities when it comes to my writing work, and the links to coping with my current lack of libido. I’m honouring my complex life history, allowing it to be witnessed, and working on forgiving and integrating my past selves.
Above all, I’m being kind to myself. It’s the only way I can ever hope to feel deserving of love and let myself accept it. He already loves me; and as I am now, not a future, better version of me. I just need to do the work to believe it.
Love Accepts All Our Versions
“Love means loving someone for who they are, who they were, and who they will be.”
I’ve been ten different people in my life, but I’ve always been me. That’s one of the complexities of being human, I guess. If I knew then what I know now, I would have done differently, been different. But I also wouldn’t be who I am now, with learned, lived experience. Every iteration matters. Every regret is tempered with knowing that every decision brought me to this point. To this version of me.
Just as I have to accept all my past decisions, I want to accept all the past versions of myself. And there have been plenty. The neglected child. The religious zealot. The blinkered and ignorant. The arrogant and vain. The people pleaser. The addict. The brutal self-punisher. The exhausted shell.
I say I want to accept them, not that I have. It takes a lot to face backwards, to rifle through my past selves as each one ignited a different flavour of guilt and pain. It hurts; it’s tiring. The work isn’t done.
Why I Don’t Feel Deserving of Love Right Now
My most recent ‘past self’ felt that love received was conditional upon me maintaining a high level of productivity, looking a certain way, meeting conditioned and self-imposed terms rather than feeling deserving simply as the person I am.
Being forced to live with various huge life changes has had a dramatic impact on my relationship with accepting love or feeling like I deserve it. I can’t stay busy with endless business commitments or housework. I can’t diet or exercise through the anxiety. I don’t soften the world with alcohol. I don’t want another baby, but there’s an unspoken deep grief that comes with that choice being ripped away from you, on top of the emotional and physical trials of menopause. The end of the reproductive era sees the dawn of a new age, and one which the world generally doesn’t value or treat with kindness. That attitude is easily absorbed. Where does my worth lie now?
Combine this period of life where not only is my reproductive cycle ending, but the children I have are reaching adulthood and leaving the nest, plus the onset of chronic illness which removes my ability to distract with activity, and it isn’t surprising that I’m feeling shaky about declarations of love. This isn’t just physical. My mental health is experiencing some serious turbulence.
Love Isn’t a Reward
What I have come to realise (or at least, what I’ve identified as something I desperately want to realise), is that love isn’t something you earn for being a good enough person. It isn’t a reward for ticking all the boxes on some imaginary good behaviour chart. Get a gold star in every section to redeem true love, absolutely free!
I don’t hold my husband up to the same standards I set for myself. I love him whilst acknowledging his flaws (if you’re reading this, husband, I’m sorry you had to find out that you do in fact have some); I love all the people he’s been, the person he is today, and the person he will grow into over the years. I do this for him, whilst not extending the same compassion to myself. I love him completely and not as a reward, whilst imagining that he will only love me back if I can prove I deserve it.
It doesn’t make any sense.
Life Bracing for the Fall, And Letting Go
I pride myself on being a quick learner, and so far, life has taught me to expect disappointment. My childhood was spent in a terror-filled anticipation of imminent fiery and corpse-filled Armageddon, complete with distressing imagery and constant doom prepping. As I moved into adulthood, an existential crisis awaited as I realised that I wouldn’t be living forever on a paradise earth after all. I was faced with mortality just like everyone else. This collided with a string of toxic, damaging and violent relationships, one after the other, until hopeful love morphing into crushing betrayal felt like the normal cycle of things.
After 15 years of steady love and patient reassurance from my husband, as well as the privilege of having physical stability in our home for over 10 years, I should feel completely secure. I am resisting the temptation to be highly self-critical about the fact that I am not.
I acknowledge that I have been bracing for the ‘inevitable’ fall, metaphorically holding my breath through the good times until it all comes crashing down around me through the long, wailing exhale. There is undoubtedly trauma hypervigilance, even in this secure love. I am working on letting go. On going easy with myself, understanding the reasons behind my defences and gently dismantling them. I am safe now.
Learning A New Way
He loves me, and I deserve his love, and I accept it. Until this point in my life, discomfort has been my comfort zone, but I’m starting a revolution. A gentle, quiet, personal revolution. I’m choosing comfort.
It’s comforting to believe that he loves me, and that I’m deserving of his love. Exactly as I am now; ageing, illness, disability, lower libido and all. So that’s what I’m going to do my best to believe.
All he has ever shown me is that he loves me and that I am a person worthy of his love. That he won’t stop loving me, he won’t measure out or withdraw his love. Fully believing this isn’t easy, natural or comfortable for me. Postponing love until some day which never actually comes is learnt self-cruelty. I’m rejecting self-cruelty and embracing self-kindness.
How will I go about fully believing in his love for me? I don’t have all the answers, but I know I have to do the work dismantling my old belief systems. It will mean continuing to heal my nervous system which has been trained by a lifetime of pain and trauma. It’s a monumental, and to be honest, intimidating task.
I just hope he remains by my side as I give it my best shot.
Actually, let’s start now.
I know he will.
