Love in your 20s feels like standing in a room engulfed in flames, while everyone keeps asking you which way you’re going to walk. Their tone carries a sense of urgency that’s subtle at first, but gets louder with every soft launch on Instagram, every Hinge date that falls through, and every question about who you’re seeing. Love begins to feel like something you’re constantly late for, like something you need to catch up to before the door closes.
But love, I’m beginning to learn, doesn’t have a deadline; it lingers. Sometimes, it quietly takes the backseat, while we’re too busy looking ahead to even notice.
In your 20s, love is messy. It’s passion, fear, infatuation, hope, and grief all thrown together into the mixing bowl. We are conditioned to seek love outwards, in the arms of a stranger, on apps, at bars, as if it’s some missing piece to the puzzle. And while finding love in others can ground us and build lasting connections for us to hold onto, it can also operate as a distraction to avoid sitting with ourselves.
There is a far quieter kind of love we rarely have the chance to celebrate; the love we build with ourselves. Make the conscious decision to love yourself deeply, even with the parts of the puzzle which feel uncertain or not yet whole. It’s honouring your boundaries, learning the rhythm in which you operate, and finding forgiveness in the versions of yourself that were too young to know any better.
When you start recognizing love in yourself, you begin to recognize it everywhere. In friendships that feel like home, in passing connections — love stops being something you’re chasing after and becomes something you’re in tandem with.
When we learn to love ourselves, the kind of love we find changes. It teaches us what care truly feels like and what respect looks like actively in practice. When you know yourself, you quit mistaking attention for affection, and recognize the behaviours you no longer want to shrink yourself to accept. You choose people who meet you where you are, people who listen to you. It opens the right door to people who see us without us having to perform.
Loving yourself first doesn’t mean closing the door to others; it means being able to open the door without trepidation. That way, when love makes its way over, it doesn’t ask you to change yourself or water yourself down. It leaves space for you to be exactly who you are.
