A Rising in Love

There was a time when love felt like falling.

A rush.
A reaching.
A beautiful undoing.

But after loss, after rupture, after the long and quiet labour of healing, I am no longer sure that love is best understood that way.

To fall can sometimes mean losing your footing.
Mistaking longing for safety.
Handing yourself over before trust has had time to grow.

And for those of us who have known abandonment, rejection, or the slow ache of being met only halfway, the language of falling can carry too much shadow.

It can sound too much like disappearing.
Too much like standing in a doorway, phone in hand, rehearsing how to stay calm if the message never comes.
Too much like calling self-loss romance because we have not yet learned another word for it.

And yet, even after all of that, something in us still stirs.

Not because we are naïve.
Not because we have forgotten the cost.
Not because we imagine ourselves finished.

But because something steadier begins to rise.

Not a falling in love.
A rising in love.

A quieter courage.
A more honest hope.
A willingness to remain open without handing away the self.

There is dignity in that.

Not the fantasy of fearlessness.
Not some polished version of healing where the past no longer brushes against the skin.
But something truer.

Your stomach still tightens when the reply takes too long,
but you no longer confuse delay with disappearance.
Your heart still remembers old endings,
but it does not drag every new beginning into the grave with them.

What returns is not innocence.
It is discernment.
It is tenderness with boundaries.
It is the quiet bravery of saying:
Let’s talk.

Maybe that is the real shift.

Not that we become untouched,
but that after sorrow, disappointment, and misunderstanding,
we still find the strength to wonder again.

To lean in.
To ask.
To risk.
To stay present long enough to see what is actually here,
rather than rushing to survive what has not yet happened.

To me, that is where love becomes real.

Not in the falling.
In the rising.

In the moment we notice the old fear and do not let it choose for us.
In the moment hope arrives and we do not punish it for being late.
In the moment we realise that healing was never about becoming fearless,
but about staying with ourselves when tenderness returns.

So no, I do not think it is about falling in love anymore.

I think it is about rising toward it —
with your history beside you,
your feet still on the ground,
and enough trust in yourself
not to disappear
just because your heart has opened.

A. J. Ashé
Being Human