Love Equals Freedom

These ideas have unsettled me as much as they have freed me. I invite you to sit with them and see which parts resonate with your own journey and which parts you feel called to push back against.

I’ve spent some time looking at the friction between our public ideals and our private lives. It led me to wonder: Why is it that freedom is one of the most sacred values on earth, yet the first thing we negotiate away in love?

In partnership, the union intended to be our safest harbor, many accept the erosion of our agency. We stop questioning the shrinking of our world because we’ve been sold an idea: that to be ‘one’ with someone, we must suppress our self, our needs, our joy. We mistake surrender for devotion, and sacrifice for love.

Freedom: The power or right to act, speak, and think as one wants, without constraint or coercion.

Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Across beliefs, ideologies, and generations, one pattern keeps repeating: when people sense their freedom is restricted, they respond.

Outside of love, we don’t just value freedom, we react strongly when it’s threatened. We organize societies around protecting it and define human dignity through choice, voice, and autonomy. Many of us live in this country precisely because those values mattered deeply enough to be defended and preserved. So much so, in fact, that the founders built an entire framework around it: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. It’s clear that we are evolutionarily and culturally tuned to the smell of tyranny.

We’ve watched public debates erupt around speech. Who gets to speak, who gets silenced, and who decides what is allowed. People recoil when an authority figure or system monitors expression because we intuitively understand the difference between protection and control.

We’ve also seen fierce defenses of the right to self defense, grounded in the belief that rendering someone helpless creates dependence. For many, the right to bear arms isn’t about aggression. it’s about agency. About the ability to protect oneself, one’s family, and one’s autonomy rather than outsourcing that duty to an external authority.

We’ve witnessed massive movements around bodily autonomy, rooted in the conviction that no one should hold more power over our physical self than we do. We’ve seen uproar over limits on education, history, and identity, recognizing that when you restrict what someone is allowed to learn, you are also restricting who they are allowed to become. And we’ve seen resistance to systems that seize resources or dictate movement, because we understand that when agency is compromised, something essential is lost.

These reactions aren’t about agreement on policy. They’re about agency and therefore, POWER. About the human instinct to resist conditions that make us smaller, quieter, or dependent.

So you see, freedom isn’t a modern concept. It’s an ancient, primal impulse. People have crossed oceans, risked their lives, and dismantled empires in pursuit of it because we understand that to be human is to possess self discovery and determination.

Freedom takes Courage

What if freedom is something we all approach unevenly, shaped by what we’ve lived through and what we’ve had to survive?

Freedom is not only expansive; it can be demanding. It asks for self trust and uncertainty, and the ability to carry responsibility without guarantees. For those who grew up in instability or learned to equate closeness with control, freedom can feel less like relief and more like exposure.

In those moments, structure may feel safer and certainty kinder than possibility, not because it is healthier, but because it is familiar. When safety has always come with conditions, we learn to call it love. We confuse containment with care, support with surrender, pain with intimacy, and predictability with peace. And while I recognize how human this is, love should not be the place where freedom disappears, but one where we feel safe enough to experience it for the first time.

Friendship as a Blueprint

The good news is, we already know how to love without control. We do it in our friendships.

In friendship, we don’t view a friend’s new hobby, solo trip, or change in interests or style as a “breach of contract.” We defend their autonomy because we know that when a friend begins to lose their “self” it raises concern and we are often the first to come to their defense. We understand that their uniqueness is what makes the connection valuable and the individual so beautiful.

Synergy

What if we stopped treating love as a “merging” or an “acquisition”?

In a merger, the original identities are dissolved to create something new, and in an acquisition, one person’s life is simply taken over by the other’s. In both cases, the individual is lost. INSTEAD, we could treat love as an alliance of two sovereign states.

In an alliance, both parties remain powerful, independent, and self governing, but they choose to point their power in the same direction.

In the culinary world, there is a concept I’ve loved seeing more frequently recently: the restaurant collab. If you’ve never attended one, I highly recommend you do. It’s a masterclass in how two distinct creative powers can occupy the same space without erasing one another. You get the best of both worlds because both remain fully themselves while sharing the same kitchen. One doesn’t “acquire” the other; they simply combine their strengths to produce something that neither could have achieved on their own.

Love is Liberating

Independence isn’t a red flag; it is the foundation of a healthy union. It is the practice of saying: “I am whole. You are whole. And we are choosing to build something together that makes us both more, not less.”

In a sovereign relationship, our partner doesn’t act as an anchor holding us back from the storm; they act as the launchpad for our spaceship. They are the inspiration and hope that makes us want to reach further. We have the courage to take risks, to dream, to fail, to pivot, because we know that if the mission doesn’t go as planned, we have the safest place in the universe to return to.

We can stop treating love and freedom as paradoxes. For too long, we’ve been taught that to have one, we must sacrifice the other. But true love isn’t the antonym of freedom, it is synonymous with it. Love doesn’t just survive through freedom, it expands because of it.

True freedom isn’t found in a life where we feel the need to check someone else’s mood before deciding if it’s ok to act, because frankly, walking on eggshells is not a love language. If we have learned to move a little more cautiously or to shrink our own joy just to keep the peace, we aren’t being supported; we are being managed, and therefore we aren’t truly free.

Breaking away from those dynamics can feel like choosing isolation, and sometimes that is the necessary cost of reclaiming oneself. But for those who are fortunate, there is a third option: redefining partnership itself. A safe space where you don’t have to trade your “self” to preserve the “we.”

And maybe that is where love becomes what it was always meant to be, not a cage, but an expansion.