Redefining Love: Why Presence Matters More than Perfection
*This is a long one and a definite work in progress. In short I’m attempting the herculean task of answering the age old question of “What is love?”. Ha! The arrogance to think I should even try! And yet I have… so here goes.
We are not short on ideas about love. We are saturated with them. They arrive early and often, through stories, films, songs, advertisements, and the cultural expectations we absorb without ever consenting to. By the time we are old enough to have language for our own inner lives, many of us already hold a fully formed belief about what love is meant to look like.
Love, we are told, is certainty. Love is safety. Love is the promise that if you choose correctly, you will be protected from loneliness, disappointment, and regret. Romantic love will make you whole. Family love will always be there. If something hurts badly enough or ends messily enough, then perhaps it was never really love at all. And my personal favourites: if they loved me they wouldn’t hurt me; true love wouldn’t be so hard; and, if they truly loved me they would just ‘know me’.
This is a reassuring story in the sense that it promises hope. However, it is also a disappointing story, one that leaves very little room for real humans.
Because real love, when it is actually lived, rarely resembles the version we were promised. It involves misattunement, frustration, longing, boredom, tenderness, rupture, repair, and grief. It involves people changing in ways we did not predict. It involves seasons where closeness is easy and seasons where it is effortful or impossible. It involves moments where love is present but not sufficient to bridge a gap. And it involves pain. Unimaginable and unbearable pain.
When our relationships fail to meet the ideal, many of us turn the disappointment inward. We assume we are deficient. That we chose badly. That we stayed too long, or didn’t try hard enough, or wanted the wrong things. We magnify the disappointment to catastrophic proportions where we have now failed at ‘life’, doomed to wander the planet distraught and alone like a group chat where everyone else has quietly left. What none of us seem to question is whether the definition of love we were handed was ever fit for purpose.
What if love was never meant to be a guarantee? What if love is not a state of permanent harmony, but a practice of presence? What if love is less about never hurting one another, and more about how we respond when we inevitably do? I often say to my clients that our loved ones are guaranteed to disappoint us in some way and it’s unrealistic (and unfair) to think that they wouldn’t.
Reframing love in this way does not make it smaller. It makes it more honest and I’m predicting as a result more durable.
The dominant cultural narrative around love places romantic partnership at the centre. This is the relationship we are encouraged to invest in above all others, the one expected to carry the weight of our deepest emotional needs. Romantic love is framed as transformative and redemptive. If it is “right”, it will feel natural, effortless, and it will endure. If it falters, the implication is that something fundamental has gone wrong.
Family love, by contrast, is often framed as unconditional and automatic. We are meant to love our families because they are ours. Conflict, distance, or estrangement are treated as aberrations rather than understandable responses to lived experience. The message is that if family relationships are hard, it is because someone has failed to be loving enough. Someone has failed at love.
Both of these narratives struggle under the complexity of real life.
Romantic relationships cannot survive indefinitely on the idea that one person can meet all of another’s emotional, relational, sexual, and practical needs across decades of change. Family relationships cannot thrive when loyalty is prioritised over safety, honesty, or mutual respect. When these relationships strain or break, we often conclude that love itself was absent, rather than acknowledging that love may have been present but overcome by circumstance, timing, trauma, or limitation.
A more useful definition of love is not perfection, but presence.
Presence is not a feeling. It is an orientation. It is the willingness to stay engaged with another person as they actually are, rather than as we wish them to be or expect them to be based on their role, status, gender, age, or other such defining category. It is the capacity to remain in relationship with reality, even when that reality is uncomfortable. This kind of love does not promise ease. It promises attention.
In romantic relationships, love as presence shifts the meaning of commitment. “I love you” becomes less of a lifelong contract and more of a present-tense truth. It means: I see you right now. I value you. I am choosing to show up with care and curiosity in this moment. Or maybe it simply means “I love our connection in this moment”, or “I admire how you’ve showed up for me today”, or perhaps “I love how your presence is making me feel right now”.
It does not mean: I will never disappoint you. It does not mean: I know exactly who we will be in ten years. It does not mean: this relationship will always feel safe, exciting, or reciprocal. It does not mean “Let’s move in together and open bank accounts”. It does not mean I will feel the same way tomorrow. It does not mean the other person has to feel the same way and it does not mean they are now responsible for any heart break that follows.
For many people, this reframing can feel destabilising. We are taught to equate love with certainty, and certainty with safety. But certainty is often an illusion, and clinging to it can create more anxiety, not less. When we expect relationships to guarantee our emotional security, every moment of distance or conflict feels threatening. This is where the previous point is crucial to understand. Saying “I love you” is often treated as a kind of contract, an unspoken agreement that the other person will now take responsibility for protecting our heart. But when love becomes a promise never to hurt, the weight of that expectation can be crushing, turning connection into pressure and intimacy into something fragile and destabilising rather than safe. It can begin to feel like an oath sworn in blood, morally binding us to a promise we sense, deep down, we will almost certainly break, not out of carelessness or malice, but simply because we are human.
Presence, by contrast, allows for fluctuation. It acknowledges that desire ebbs and flows, that people change, that closeness is not static. It creates space for repair, discussion, and communication rather than panic when things shift. This does not mean tolerating harm or abandoning boundaries. Love as presence is not synonymous with endurance at all costs. Sometimes the most loving act is to leave honestly rather than stay resentfully. I just want to say that last part again because as I wrote it, it felt poignant - it is better to leave honestly than to stay resentfully. Presence includes being truthful about what we can and cannot offer, and recognising when a relationship no longer supports growth or safety. And this takes courage and a commitment to practice being so emotionally candid.
In families, particularly in parenting, the myth of perfect love is especially corrosive. Modern parenting culture places extraordinary demands on caregivers. We are expected to be endlessly patient, emotionally attuned, regulated, and available, all while managing work, financial pressure, and our own psychological histories. When we fall short, which we inevitably do, the internal verdict is often harsh. We worry not just that we made a mistake, but that we have damaged our children in some irreversible way.
But children do not need perfect parents. They need present ones. Presence in parenting is built through consistency rather than intensity. Consistency doesn’t mean we need to be with our children 7 days a week, it means consistent and reliable presence when we are. It’s predictable quality over quantity. It lives in the ordinary, repetitive acts that communicate safety over time. The morning routines. The shared meals. Shared memes. The private jokes or long-running gags (think Dad jokes!). The bedtime rituals. The follow-through. The apologies when we get it wrong. The willingness to listen without immediately correcting or fixing.
Perhaps most importantly, presence teaches children what it means to be human in relationships. When a parent can acknowledge a mistake, repair a rupture, or name their own limits, they model a version of love that is flexible and resilient. They show that love is not withdrawn when someone fails, and that conflict does not signal abandonment. That having an imperfect parent doesn’t mean they are loved any less. This is especially vital in families shaped by divorce, separation, blending, or loss. These family forms are often experienced as “less than” in a culture still invested in a narrow ideal. Parents may carry guilt about not providing the version of family they imagined their children would have. I regularly see and sit with this particularly grief in the work I do with my clients.
But love in these families is not deficient. It is simply different. Presence here might mean maintaining routines across two households. It might mean tolerating discomfort for the sake of cooperation. It might mean holding grief alongside commitment, acknowledging that while things are not as planned, they are still meaningful and worth tending to.
Children learn from what is practised, not what is promised. When they experience love as something that shows up reliably, even in altered circumstances, they internalise a sense of safety that no idealised structure can guarantee.
Sibling relationships offer another place where the myth of perfect love often does harm. Siblings are assumed to be natural companions, bonded by shared history and blood. When this closeness exists, it can be profoundly grounding. When it doesn’t, the loss is rarely named or legitimised. Estrangement, ambivalence, or emotional distance between siblings is often treated as a personal or moral failure rather than a relational outcome shaped by context. Birth order, temperament, parental dynamics, competition, trauma, and geography all influence sibling relationships. Expecting them to be uniformly close ignores this complexity.
Redefining sibling love as presence rather than perfection allows for a wider range of realities. Love might look like deep emotional intimacy, or it might look like respectful distance. It might involve regular contact, or simply showing up in moments of significance. It might mean letting go of old narratives and allowing the relationship to be what it is now, rather than what it once was or what we think it should be. Presence here often involves grief. Grief for the sibling relationship we hoped for. Grief for the closeness that never quite formed. Allowing that grief without forcing reconciliation or performance can be an act of care in itself.
Across romantic, familial, and sibling relationships, one theme emerges repeatedly: love is not demonstrated by the absence of rupture, but by the capacity for repair. All sustained relationships involve moments of misattunement and hurt. What determines whether they endure is not whether these moments occur, but how they are navigated. Repair requires humility. It requires the ability to hold multiple truths at once: that we were hurt, and that the other person is human; that we caused pain, and that we are still capable of growth.
This is slow, inefficient work. It does not lend itself to slogans or neat conclusions. It often involves sitting with discomfort rather than resolving it quickly. In a culture that prizes optimisation and certainty, this kind of love can feel unsettling. It asks us to invest without guarantees. To remain open without knowing the outcome. To tolerate ambiguity rather than rushing to clarity. To have patience and tolerate pain and uncertainty.
But this is the only form of love that can survive contact with real life. This is love in action. Not love in fantasy. This isn’t theoretical or philosophical love, this is pragmatic and practical love. Real love in real life.
When love is defined as perfection, rupture feels catastrophic. When love is defined as presence, rupture becomes part of the landscape. Not something to seek, but something to expect and tend to with care.
This redefinition also reshapes how we relate to ourselves. Many people carry an implicit belief that they must earn love by being agreeable, competent, or low-maintenance. When relationships strain, they interpret it as evidence of personal failure. But if love is about presence rather than performance, then being lovable is not about being easy. It is about being real. This does not mean collapsing boundaries or oversharing indiscriminately. It means allowing ourselves to be known within safe relationships. It means acknowledging needs, limits, and change without assuming these make us unworthy of connection.
It also means recognising when love is no longer available in the way we need, and allowing ourselves to grieve that without turning it into a verdict on our worth. Grief is an inevitable companion to love. We grieve relationships that end, but also relationships that continue in altered forms. We grieve the family we imagined. The partner someone could not become. The closeness that faded quietly over time. Redefining love allows us to hold this grief without concluding that love itself was a lie. Sometimes love was real, and still could not carry everything we hoped it would.
Love, understood as presence, does not promise permanence. It promises honesty. It asks us to show up with curiosity rather than certainty. With care rather than control. With a willingness to try again, or to let go with integrity when trying again is no longer possible.
This is not a romantic definition of love in the cinematic sense. It is quieter, messier, and far more humane. Perfect love shatters under the weight of real life. Present love bends. It adapts. It sometimes breaks and is remade. It sometimes ends, not because it was false, but because it reached its limits.
And perhaps that is the kind of love worth teaching, practising, and trusting. Not the love that promises never to hurt, but the love that is willing to stay, notice, and respond honestly, again and again, for as long as it can.
Normally I end all my posts with a link to make an appointment if you think I can help. With this one I am not so sure I can! But if you want someone to listen and walk along side you as you navigate love in your own life then you can make a booking here.
