Overview
In my work as a therapist, I ask a lot of questions.
Some are practical. Some are difficult. Some open doors that have been closed for a long time.
But there is one question I return to again and again, particularly when someone is struggling with a relationship — whether that relationship is with a partner, family member, friend, or someone they have lost.
The question is simple: how do you define love?
What happens next no longer surprises me, but it used to. Most people pause. Sometimes for a long time. Then they say something like: "I don't know. I've never really thought about it."
Others talk about caring, commitment, loyalty, support, sacrifice, or being there for someone. A few mention unconditional love without being entirely sure what that means in practice.
Almost everyone finds the question harder than expected.
That tells me something important. Many of us have spent years loving people — and being hurt by love, confused by love, disappointed by love, or grieving people we love — without ever forming a clear working definition of what love actually means.
I think that gap creates a great deal of unnecessary pain.
A Working Definition
I am, by nature, a reductionist. I tend to look for the simplest explanation that still accounts for what I am observing.
When it comes to love, I have arrived at a working definition built around three intentions: wellbeing, acceptance, and freedom.
More specifically:
You genuinely want the person you love to experience wellbeing and fulfilment. You accept the reality of who they are, rather than only who you hope they will become. You respect their freedom to make their own choices.
At first glance, this may seem straightforward. Perhaps even obvious. But the implications are more challenging than they appear.
You Want the Person to Experience Wellbeing and Fulfilment
You want their life to go well. You want them to feel safe, connected, healthy, purposeful, and able to become more fully themselves.
That does not necessarily mean wanting them to feel happy in every moment. Short-term happiness and long-term wellbeing are not always the same thing.
A person may feel temporarily happy while avoiding responsibility, misusing substances, behaving dishonestly, or making decisions that will later cause harm.
To love someone is not simply to approve of whatever makes them feel good in the moment. It is to hold a deeper wish for their wellbeing, growth, dignity, and fulfilment.
Sometimes that may mean accepting that their happiness or future does not lie with you. That can be painful. It can still be love.
You Accept the Reality of Who They Are
Acceptance does not mean approval.
It does not mean pretending harmful behaviour is acceptable. It does not mean ignoring dishonesty, betrayal, addiction, abuse, manipulation, or repeated disregard for your wellbeing.
Acceptance means seeing the person as they are. Not only as they were at their best. Not only as you hope they may become. Not only as the person they promise they will be.
It means allowing reality to matter.
You may accept that someone is dishonest without accepting dishonesty in your life. You may accept that someone is unwilling to change without continuing to wait for change. You may accept that someone has been harmed without allowing that harm to become an excuse for how they treat you.
Acceptance can sound like: this is who this person is showing themselves to be right now.
That clarity can be painful, but it is often kinder than continuing to love only the person's potential.
You Respect Their Freedom to Make Their Own Choices
Loving someone does not give us ownership over them.
They are free to make decisions we disagree with. They are free to choose a different path. They are free to remain the same. They are free to leave.
But freedom works in both directions. They are free to choose. You are also free to decide what you will participate in, tolerate, trust, or remain close to.
Respecting someone's freedom does not mean protecting them from consequences. It does not mean continuing to provide access to your life regardless of what they do.
You can say: you are free to make that choice, and I am free to decide what that choice means for my relationship with you.
Love does not remove accountability.
Love Is Not the Same as a Healthy Relationship
This distinction matters.
Love can exist in a relationship that is unhealthy, unsafe, incompatible, or no longer sustainable.
A healthy relationship requires more than love. It also requires things such as mutual care, honesty, respect, emotional and physical safety, responsibility, trust, repair after harm, compatible values, and willingness from both people to participate.
Love may be present even when those things are not. That is why someone can genuinely love another person and still be unable to build a healthy life with them.
Love may explain why leaving hurts. It does not automatically mean staying is wise.
Love Is About What We Offer, But Relationships Are Mutual
I often say that love is less about what we receive and more about the orientation we bring toward another person.
Do we genuinely want their wellbeing? Can we see them clearly? Can we respect their freedom?
But that does not mean healthy love is entirely one-sided. A healthy shared relationship depends on what happens between two people. It requires some degree of mutual care, responsiveness, responsibility, and respect.
You can continue to love someone who does not treat you well. But you do not have to call the relationship healthy. You do not have to remain available. You do not have to keep proving your love through endurance.
Love may be something you continue to feel. A relationship is something both people must help create.
The Hope, and the Reality
Of course, we usually hope for something in return.
We hope that the person we love finds happiness in being with us. We hope they act in ways we can respect. We hope they care about our wellbeing as we care about theirs. We hope their freedom does not come at the cost of our safety, values, or dignity.
When those things are present, love and a shared life can fit together naturally. But they are not always present. This is where a clear definition becomes most useful.
Without one, people often confuse love with obligation, loyalty at any cost, tolerance, rescue, forgiveness without change, self-sacrifice, staying, or continued access.
Those are not the same thing.
The Most Important Caveat
Loving someone does not mean that person is someone you should be sharing your life with.
In my experience, this is the sentence that often does the most work.
Many people remain in harmful relationships not because they are confused about how much pain they are in, but because they are confused about what love requires. They believe that if they truly love someone, they owe that person their presence. They believe leaving means the love was never real. They believe that love requires endless patience, forgiveness, sacrifice, or hope.
It does not.
You can love a parent who harmed you and still choose not to have a relationship with them. You can love a partner and recognise that the relationship is damaging to you both. You can love a friend and accept that the friendship no longer has the honesty or mutual care needed to continue. You can love someone and still need them to be absent from your daily life.
Love and proximity are not the same thing. Love and trust are not the same thing. Love and compatibility are not the same thing. Love and tolerance are not the same thing. Love and self-sacrifice are not the same thing.
Love never requires you to remain in a relationship where you are being abused, threatened, controlled, repeatedly betrayed, or made unsafe.
In situations involving abuse or coercive control, creating distance may require professional, legal, or specialist safety support. Leaving is not always simple, and safety should come before confrontation.
You Can Love Someone and Still Say No
A boundary does not necessarily mean: I do not love you.
It may mean: I love you, but I will not continue participating in this. Or: I care about you, but I cannot keep abandoning myself. Or: I accept that this is your choice, and I also accept that I cannot remain close to it.
A boundary is not an attempt to control another person. It is a decision about your own participation.
You may not be able to stop someone from drinking, lying, gambling, becoming aggressive, avoiding treatment, or repeatedly breaking agreements. You can decide what you will do in response.
That is not punishment. It is responsibility.
What This Definition Can Change
When people sit with this definition, a few things often begin to shift.
There can be relief. A quiet release comes when someone realises they do not have to choose between loving another person and protecting themselves. Both can be true. They can care deeply and still leave. They can wish someone well and still block contact. They can forgive without rebuilding trust. They can accept a person without accepting their behaviour.
There can also be grief. Clarity does not remove pain. Accepting that you love someone and still cannot build a life with them is genuinely painful. Sometimes the most difficult grief is not losing love. It is losing the future you hoped love would create. A clear definition does not make that grief disappear. It helps you understand what you are grieving.
And there can be freedom. When love is no longer defined only by whether another person chooses us, treats us as hoped, or remains close, we can ask better questions: am I loving this person honestly? Am I seeing them as they are? Am I respecting their freedom? Am I also protecting my own wellbeing, values, and dignity? Those questions can coexist. In healthy relationships, they must.
Meaningful Love Does Not Require Self-Erasure
There is a version of love that sounds generous but gradually removes the self. It says: their needs always come first, their pain matters more than mine, if I set a boundary I am selfish, if I leave I have failed, if I stop rescuing them I do not care, if they are upset with me I must have done something wrong.
That is not healthy love.
Love does not require you to become smaller. It does not require you to ignore your needs, abandon your values, or tolerate repeated harm.
You can be compassionate without becoming responsible for another adult's entire life. You can care without rescuing. You can support without controlling. You can remain kind without remaining close. You can matter to someone without becoming their only source of stability.
Healthy love allows two people to remain whole.
The Work Comes Back to You
There is a truth I return to with many clients, regardless of what brings them into therapy.
The quality of our relationships is shaped by who we are when we enter them. Not because every relationship problem is our fault. Not because changing ourselves guarantees that another person will change. But because self-awareness affects what we notice, what we tolerate, what we ask for, what we offer, and what we choose.
The clearer you are about your values, the more naturally your boundaries begin to follow. The better you understand your needs, the more honestly you can communicate them. The more emotionally regulated you become, the less likely you are to react impulsively, remain in situations that harm you, or harm others in return. The more you understand your patterns, the more carefully you can choose relationships.
This is especially visible in recovery work. As people begin to understand their values, needs, wounds, triggers, and coping patterns, their relationships often change. Sometimes the people around them change. Often, they do not. What changes is the person's willingness to continue participating in the same dynamic.
They stop tolerating what they once accepted. They begin asking for what they actually need. They become more honest about what a relationship is costing them. They choose people more carefully. And, often, they become capable of loving more freely because love is no longer confused with fear, dependency, control, or obligation.
The work on yourself is not separate from the work on your relationships. It is part of the foundation.
A Note on Support
Love does not require you to stay in a relationship that is abusive, threatening, or unsafe. If you are experiencing abuse or coercive control, specialised support can help you plan safely — in the U.S., the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233, any time, day or night.
This article is not a substitute for professional mental health care, legal advice, or crisis support. If you are in immediate danger, or having thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, contact your local emergency services or an appropriate crisis service immediately. In the U.S., you can also call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
A Question Worth Sitting With
I want to leave you with the same question I ask many clients: how do you define love?
Not because there is one perfect answer. The value is in noticing what your definition asks of you — and what it permits you to stop doing.
You might also ask: do I want the wellbeing of the people I love, or do I mainly want them to behave in ways that reduce my discomfort? Am I accepting this person as they are, or am I attached to who I hope they will become? Can I respect their freedom without abandoning my own? Have I confused love with obligation, tolerance, rescue, or staying? Is there someone I love but cannot remain close to without losing something important in myself? Have I distanced myself from someone and felt guilty, even though the love itself has not disappeared? Does this relationship contain mutual care, honesty, safety, and responsibility — or only strong feeling? What would it look like to love this person honestly while also caring for myself?
You do not have to answer all of those questions today. But they are worth returning to.
How we define love shapes what we tolerate, what we grieve, what we protect, and how we move through every relationship in our lives.
Love matters. So do safety, dignity, freedom, responsibility, and truth. A mature definition of love must be able to hold all of them.
Tony Lyda is a psychotherapist and co-founder of Jenora, a personal wellbeing and recovery system designed to support the daily work of self-understanding, reflection, planning, and meaningful change.