To love fiercely is to love fully.

Stirred by my own feelings and my self-reflection on those feelings as they swirled and moved through me, as I rode them like the waves of a giant storm and as I finally, in all that turbulence, found a sense of calmness and peace, I came to think of this expression “fierce love.”

What came to me is that to love fiercely is to love unapologetically, unconditionally and unwaveringly.

Love is something I experience in me as I imagine it is something you experience in yourself. Love is our experience, it moves through and out of us into the world. It loves… it can love ourself, it can love another, it can love us, it can love nature, it can love an experience.

Many things though can get in the way of this seemingly natural, and kind of effortless, when we are in it, state of love.

We may feel guilt for loving, or that our love is somehow wrong, or we shouldn’t have it. Perhaps we love someone who is already in a relationship. Perhaps we discover ourselves loving someone we have only just met. Perhaps we are in a relationship and we find we love someone else. Perhaps we feel aren’t good enough for the person we love and so we hide it and apologize for it, as if somehow our love is going to degrade them.

Perhaps we love someone our friends or family don’t approve of. There are many big, and small, ways we could repress, squash and mute our love as if somehow loving freely and fully is not ok. To love fiercely, though, is to love unapologetically. To stand up straight, our chest and heart open, and to love, just love. No shame, no guilt, no repression. To love just because we fucking love and there is nothing wrong with it whatsoever, in fact it’s amazing and beautiful and wonderful and fantastic and fills us with an intensity of sensation and desire and delicious wild emotion.

Perhaps though our love isn’t able to be reciprocated. Perhaps the person we love doesn’t love us back, or can’t love us back. Or perhaps they do but they can’t be with us, or choose not to be with us. Perhaps they don’t even know we love them, or they don’t even want to know.

Perhaps they do love us but they act in ways that don’t align with what we think of love to be. Perhaps they “misbehave” or “cheat” on us.

To love fiercely is to not care about any of that.

Fierce love is unconditional. Fierce love is open to the experience of love and doesn’t care about any conditions that need to be met before we are allowed to love. Fierce love just loves because it can, because it feels good. It comes out of us beautifully, wide and patient and soft. Like the stream flowing to the ocean, no obstacle can perturb it from it’s path. One way or another every drop of water makes it. The limiting thoughts, the thoughts that grasp and need and smother and want to be loved. The thoughts that when they say “I love you” really mean “do you love me?”…we remove them with our intense fierceness like the smashing of ugly dams obstructing the natural and beautiful flow of our gentle stream and we return to simple, gentle, patient love.

Perhaps though in all of this we are rejected by our love. Perhaps they tell us they don’t love us anymore, or never did love us or can’t love us, or do love us but can’t be with us. Perhaps we were together but now we are “breaking up” and moving in different directions in our lives. Perhaps they can’t return our love, at least the way we want it, right now because of complications in their own lives. None of that matters from a place of fierce love.

To love fiercely is to be unwavering in love. There is nothing that shakes it. Like a giant, thousand year old tree our love has deep deep roots. It stands, unwavering even in the wildest of winds. We love fully and that depth of love does not change. The landscape may change, and likely inevitably will during the unfolding of our life. Perhaps we find ourselves loving another and the love we once had for this person fades somewhat. Yet it only fades in the way the tree would as we waked away from it, it’s only a perception of fading and in truth it’s still the same, still massive and steadfast.

To be unwavering in love is to love for eternity. Once we love, nothing changes it. Nothing. Not ever.

Fierce love is to love because we love, because we can, because we choose to, because we want to, simply because. It does not matter how our lives flux and flow and change or how many people we might love in our life on this planet because for those of us who love fiercely, our hearts are big enough to love the universe itself.

Relephant favourite by Damien:

5 Ways to Make a Man Feel Really Loved.

Author: Damien Bohler 

Editor: Renée Picard

Image: Morgan Sessions at Unsplash