Welcome to the February Love Series: Love, Self-Honor, and Sustainable Connection

February tends to hand us one narrow definition of love—romance, intensity, grand gestures, and being chosen. But for many of us, love has not been that simple. Love has been complicated by family dynamics, childhood neglect, emotional immaturity, betrayal, codependence, and the quiet ways we learned to abandon ourselves to keep connection—or just survive.

So this month, we’re widening the lens.

This is a Live Well Live Whole™ series about love as a practice—not a performance. Love as a verb, not a feeling. Love as stewardship, not self-erasure. We’ll explore what love is, what it isn’t, and how to build relationships that are mutual, safe, and sustainable—including the relationship you have with your own body, time, gifts, and life.

Running underneath it all is this truth: we are each responsible for our own happiness, our own joy, and our own life fulfillment. Life comes at us all. We don’t start the same, but we do end the same. The “in between”—the middle—is where we choose, manage, and recover. Even in our brokenness—often wounds we did not cause—we are still responsible for our own restoration.

In this series, we’ll name what many people feel but rarely say out loud:

• Sometimes we call survival “love.”

• Sometimes we confuse longing with alignment.

• Sometimes we tolerate breadcrumbs and call it enough.

• Sometimes we over-function, over-give, and over-explain—then wonder why we feel depleted, dismissed, and diminished.

• Sometimes we expect someone to love us more deeply than they know how to love themselves.

• Sometimes we expect others to love us more than we love ourselves.

• Sometimes we wait for others to validate us and deem us worthy.

• Sometimes we beg for seats at tables and in rooms—then feel dejected when we’re not accepted.

• Sometimes we hang our happiness on wishes and dreams we’ve outgrown—or that were never our destination to begin with.

• Sometimes we forget that nothing outside of us can create the inner home we’re longing for.

This isn’t about blaming ourselves or shaming our past. It’s about getting free—free from fantasy, free from one-sided devotion, free from old scripts that taught us to shrink in order to be chosen.

Because yes, we are wired for connection and companionship. And it is also true that connection should never require the abdication of your agency, autonomy, creativity, freedom, or expression. You are not meant to be someone’s emotional rehabilitation project. You are not meant to gamble your heart because you’re lonely. You are precious cargo.

Each post in this February series will offer a blend of reflection and practical tools—trauma-informed, mindfulness-inspired, and grounded in real life. The goal is simple: to help you recognize love that nourishes, and to release what drains. To redefine what love is. To develop healthy, healing, nourishing self-giving practices—and to stop waiting for someone else to give you what they are not capable of giving themselves.

We begin with the foundation:

Love is a verb (an action word): the anatomy of sustainable and self-honoring love. 

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