Reclaiming the Magic of Love
Holidays are portals—doorways into time suspended, where the rhythms of routine pause and something softer, something shimmering beneath the surface, has space to be felt. As a child, you knew this instinctively. A holiday wasn’t just a marked date; it was an invitation to step outside of ordinary life, to engage with the world through wonder, to believe in something unseen but deeply known.
But adulthood complicates things. The machinery of capitalism seizes these days, repackaging them as transactions. Gifts and expectations. Loneliness sharpened by comparison. The sense that you are either doing it right or failing entirely.
But what if you could reclaim the essence hidden underneath?
What if you allowed holidays to be what they once were—thresholds of feeling, of presence, of connection to something more than just another day?
Take today, for example—Valentine’s Day.
For so many, it holds as much ache as it does enchantment. It can feel like a day of comparison and concern. Do I have love? Is it the right kind? Is it enough? It’s easy to believe that love is something external—bestowed upon you by another human being. Something to be proven through grand gestures, further validated by the appreciation or attention of others.
Was the date really that incredible if it doesn't garner accolades from your friends when you recount it? If it doesn’t collect likes from the people who follow you online?
When Valentine’s Day comes around each year, I often find myself reminding my clients that love—real love—is not found in a box of chocolates, in grand gestures, in big gifts, or in the approval of someone else’s affection when you recount the way your beloved adorned you. Instead, I tell them the truth—the truth that the marketing around today intentionally tries to make us forget.
The truth that love is a state of being, a frequency, a presence.
It exists whether or not it is witnessed.
It exists whether or not it is given a name.
It exists in the quiet knowing that you are connected to something vast.
It exists in the way your body softens at the memory of being held.
It exists in the way your heart swells at the sight of an old couple still choosing each other, still reaching for each other’s hands.
It exists in the deep exhale of safety, in the laughter that catches you off guard, in the wordless moments that remind you—you belong.
As a somatic psychologist, trained first in traditional psychotherapy modalities, I have worked with countless people whose bodies hold the residue of this day in longing, sadness, envy, resentment, grief, even numbness.
The woman who spent decades believing she was unworthy of love unless someone else confirmed it. The man who learned to equate gifts with the proof of his devotion, struggling to express love in any way that wasn’t transactional. The mother who quietly aches each year, remembering a love that is no longer here, unsure if she is allowed to feel sorrow on a day meant to celebrate love.
Maybe you feel like the woman who has spent her life waiting to be chosen or the man who gives endlessly but never quite feels like he receives or the mother who remembers a tenderness that the hands of time have taken away. Or just maybe there is a part of you that pulls away from today—not out of indifference, but out of protection. Maybe you cringe at the sight of pink and red in storefronts—not because you do not believe in love, but because you have been hurt by it. A part of you that has been let down too many times. A part of you that doesn’t trust love when it shows up. A part of you that wonders if you are even worthy of it at all.
Even if all of those parts of you do exist, I am curious to know if there is still—maybe, even a small part of you in there, that still believes.
Believes that love can exist outside of expectation. That it does not need to be performed. That it does not need to be proven. That love—real love—was never meant to be something only shown once a year.
It isn’t something to be performed. It is something to be felt.
Love does not require evidence. Love does not shrink in solitude. Love does not disappear simply because it does not look the way the world insists it should.
This is why I invite you, like I often invite my clients, to consider that today—a holiday centered on love—is not about expectation, but about feeling.
What if it was about the magic of love itself—the way it moves through you when you listen to music that makes you ache in the best way, the way it rises when you hold a friend’s hand, the way it expands when you witness beauty without needing to possess it?
Love as a practice. Love as a force. Love as an energy you allow to soften you.
What if you took this day back?
Not in protest, but in quiet reclamation.
What if you stripped away the wounds, the pressure, the old narratives that tell you love must look a certain way? What if you let yourself feel what was always there—underneath the noise, underneath the commerce, underneath the shoulds?
Because if you close your eyes and listen carefully, you’ll hear something familiar—something that has been waiting for you all along.
The child within you still believes in love.
Not the kind that comes wrapped in ribbons or dictated by expectations. Not the kind measured in how well it fits the image of what you were told it should be.
But love that is felt. Love that is alive. Love that exists simply because you do.
You don’t need permission to belong to love.
You don’t need another to grant it to you.
Holidays are an invitation. Not into performance. Not into expectation. Not into presents or purchasing things. Not into anything else besides presence.
Today, like all holidays, can be an invitation to remember that there is still magic woven into our adult lives—if we are willing to allow ourselves to feel it and live amongst it.