I was doing an interview about “love” with my friend Joanna B., (check out herinstagram here @_lvmvmnt) who is starting an outreach mission about love in our world, and it got me thinking about love and what it means. Love is not a single feeling; it is a landscape with bright plains and shadowed valleys, sudden storms and long seasons of quiet weather. There are times when love feels like sunlight on the skin—warm, unmistakable, and life-giving. There are times when love is ravaged, or hidden, or lost. And there are the long stretches in between, where love is less a spectacle and more a steady, subterranean presence shaping who we are. Brianna Wiest’s reminder echoes here: “sometimes the love that saves you doesn’t feel like love at all until you look back and realize it never left. Love’s constancy is often invisible in real time. It moves like groundwater — quiet, persistent, shaping us from below.”

The Wonderful Parts

When love is at its most radiant, it makes everything feel possible. It is the light that frames ordinary moments as precious—the way coffee tastes better across from someone who listens, the ease of a shared silence, the thrill of discovering a new side of someone you thought you already knew. Love in this season feels expansive. It encourages generosity: we write more, create more, take more risks because there is a steady tether to our heart that returns us from the edge.

Examples of what you can do in this season:

• Invest in rituals: morning texts, shared playlists, weekly date nights, or regular walks. Rituals anchor joy and expand it into habit.
• Practice gratitude together: verbalizing appreciation for small things (a dinner cooked, a laugh shared) deepens mutual warmth and models mindful, intentional love. When I had pancreatitis recently, Lynette stayed by my side night and day and literally waited on me with consistent love. I was in terrible pain, but I remembered to say “Thank you” every day because I knew what love looked like in those moments.
• Create memories mindfully: take photographs, keep a journal, or collect small mementos. These tangible traces of good seasons soften memory’s edges and make warmth more retrievable later.
• Support each other’s growth: celebrate each other’s accomplishments and take an active role in helping each other pursue dreams. Love that encourages independence and growth is often the most resilient.

The Wonderful parts are not naïve bliss; they are built on attention and work. They reward presence. When we lean into the practices that keep connection alive—curiosity, listening, curiosity with compassion—the brilliant parts of love endure longer and deepen.

The Sad Parts

Love’s shadow is unavoidable. Grief, betrayal, loss, or mismatch between partners’ needs can make love feel like an instrument of pain. A beloved’s departure, the quiet vanishing of affection, or a relationship that no longer nourishes either person—these are seasons where love seems absent, and the heart feels raw.

But sadness also clarifies. Pain strips away illusions and reveals what matters. It has a way of interrogating attachment, boundaries, and the stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes the sadness is clean and finite—mourning a loss then gradually integrating it. Other times it is a slow corrosion—trust eroding over months or years until the shape of the relationship has fundamentally changed.

Examples of what you can do in the sad season:

• Practice grief rituals: write letters you don’t have to send, hold a small ceremony, or create a playlist that helps you move through feeling. Rituals mark transitions and make loss feel respected rather than ignored.
• Set compassionate boundaries: sadness often clarifies limits. If a relationship is harmful, be clear with yourself and others about what you will and will not accept and act kindly but firmly.
• Seek community and therapy: grief isolates, but connection heals. Join a support group, talk to trusted friends, or seek a therapist. External perspective can help you navigate the thicket of feelings without becoming lost.
• Care for your body: eat well, sleep, move. Emotional pain is embodied; tending to physical needs gives resilience and reduces reactivity.

It’s crucial to remember that sadness does not mean you failed at love. Often, letting sorrow be present is precisely the brave work love asks of us—acknowledging that some versions of love cannot be forced, and that letting go can be an act of care.

The In-Between

Between the brightness and the ache lies a long, often underappreciated middle ground: the quietly persistent. This is where Wiest’s image of groundwater matters most. Love’s true architecture is often carved here. It is in the mornings when one person gets coffee for the other without being asked, in the groceries bought the phone calls that check in, the willingness to sit with someone’s small irritations, and the patient, tedious labor of sustaining a life together.

This middle ground is where constancy lives: the slow accumulation of kindnesses and apologies, the patterning of attention across months and years. It’s not dramatic, but it’s the substrate of trust. Often, we don’t notice it in real time because love’s steady acts are ordinary. Yet later, when we look back, these small things reveal themselves as the strands that held everything together.

Examples of what you can do in the in-between:

• Practice micro-care: small intentional acts—phone calls, a hug, a thoughtful note—keep relational wells filled. They require little time but accumulate significance.
• Negotiate responsibility openly: distribute chores, emotional labor, and other tasks transparently. Unspoken imbalances corrode goodwill over time.
• Keep curiosity alive: ask questions about daily life, dreams, fears. Even in long relationships, people change, and remaining curious is a major counterweight to stagnation.
• Hold repair rituals: when things go wrong, have a language and process for apology and repair. Small reconciliations prevent resentments from calcifying.

The in-between is where steady presence becomes extraordinary precisely because it’s ordinary. To labor quietly for someone else’s wellbeing is one of the purest forms of love.

An Integrated View

The arc of love is rarely linear. We move between light, shadow, and steady ground—sometimes within days, sometimes across decades. Joanna’s outreach aims to hold these truths openly: to celebrate the joy without denying the pain, and to honor the steady labor that often goes unseen. That’s radical in a culture that markets only the spectacular parts of love. The real work—the work that saves you, as Wiest suggests—sometimes looks more like bookkeeping than poetry. It looks like showing up.

Love’s constancy can be invisible in the moment, and that can make it easy to overlook the ways we are already cared for. One practical step is inventory: make a list of small consistent things in your life that indicate care—texts, dinners, the weekly call from a friend, the neighbor who shovels snow. Seeing these items on paper can shift perspective and reveal how much love is at work even when feeling absent.

Conversely, when love is actively harming, the same visibility can prompt action. If patterns are abusive, neglectful, or demeaning, then love must include the courage to remove oneself, or insist on change. Self-love and protection are just as important as devotion.

A Few Concrete Promises

For anyone navigating these seasons, here are a few practical promises to try on:

• Promise to name what you need: clarity reduces reliance on guesswork and resentment.
• Promise to listen without fixing sometimes presence matters more than problem-solving.
• Promise to apologize and to accept apology: repair is a skill that strengthens bonds.
• Promise to cultivate independent joy: don’t outsource your happiness. Partnerships thrive when each person brings their own light.
• Promise to seek help when overwhelmed: love is not a solo project; bring in friends, family, or professionals.

Ending with Hope

Love’s many faces teach patience and courage. The joyful parts teach us how vast the heart can expand; the sad parts teach us how deeply it can feel and how resilient it can be; the in-between teaches that quiet, consistent acts are often the truest keepers of connection. Joanna’s outreach is a timely reminder that we need language and practices for all these seasons—celebration without shaming sadness, steadiness without romanticizing labor, and courage without losing compassion.

If love is groundwater, then our task is to tend the channels that allow it to flow: to build rituals that support tenderness, practices that help us grieve well, and habits that keep small acts of care from vanishing into the ordinary. In doing so we honor the full spectrum of love—the luminous, the heartbreaking, and the quietly sustaining—and we make space for it to continue reshaping us from below.