Love is not finite...

Call me disgustingly behind, but I was just finishing the latest series of Bridgerton when I came across a line that stopped me cold. One of the brothers, right in the middle of falling in love, says: “Love is not finite.” I literally had to play it back twice.

Love is not finite.

My brain started whirring immediately, because those four words expressed something I have been trying to articulate for years. Experiencing love did not curtail my ability to find more of it, it grew my capacity to give it and receive it. Having more children didn’t divide my love, it multiplied it. Falling in love again didn’t diminish what came before. Simple, and yet somehow we forget it constantly.

Let me wind back a bit.

When I found myself single at 32 with three small children, you can imagine the thoughts that went through my head. No one loves me. I deserve this. I’ll never find anyone again. We all have a bully in our head. Or, sadly, I do. But what I don’t feel sad about, is how I stood up to it.

I might not have realised it at the time, but I was about to enter an era of discovering how important it is to find love in other places. I became abundant in love precisely because I was so starved of it romantically. I tried my best to notice it elsewhere, collecting little pieces of it like a scrapbook, evidence of why I deserved to love myself or maybe not deserved, a scrapbook to remind me of why I SHOULD love myself. And that, in turn, found me more love. I might not have been receiving love from intimacy or from a mutually loving adult relationship, but I was not loveless. And that made a massive impact on me. It sustained me through hardship, loneliness, and frankly, abandonment. It nourished me until I was ready to embrace love again.

It’s difficult to pinpoint one single moment as an example of patchwork of love I built around me but one I remember most clearly, happened in Paris.

I had announced the trip in my usual way: decide on something terrifying, then tell everyone about it immediately so accountability forced me to follow through. Ludicrous, looking back. Paris was a city I’d always been scared to drive in, but it offered a train where you could load the car and be transported to the south of France for a summer of camping and sunshine. Paris was a means to an end. I had somehow convinced myself that August was the ideal time to drive through it.

So there I was, entering the city, and I said to the children: I’m really nervous. Can we all be quiet? I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know how to do this.

Their response blew me away. Even now.

One child navigated with the sat nav. One narrated. He said: Mum, I know you can do this. Just pretend that... and he took me somewhere else entirely, drawing on a real memory to convince my brain it could handle the current stress. I didn’t even know he was capable of that. The third child was small, but even he understood the gravitas. The love inside that car was palpable. In that moment they knew me, they supported me, they cheered me on. They were free to love me, and I was free to receive it. Despite me being the adult, we were all equals in achieving our goal.

We were not poor because we were one family member short. We were rich because of what we did in spite of it.

That spirit is what gets lost in the traditional divorce narrative. The lens gets blurred by wounds and perceived injustices, and the quieter moments of achievement get overlooked entirely. Single parents and single people are vulnerable to feeling that without a partner they are somehow less. From my experience, I can tell you: if you’re looking, and if you’re open, you will find it.

It wasn’t only Paris. It was smaller things too. A neighbour texting to say they’d moved a large rock from my front garden so no one could use it to break in. A friend arriving with flowers on a day the school run went badly. A family member offering me a bed when I couldn’t find another way to cope. All of it love. All of it sustaining me.

As I’ve got older I’ve noticed that relationships wax and wane in ways I didn’t expect. The fierce closeness of a sisterhood of women with children the same age as yours. The strange distance that creeps in when those children hit their teens and everyone’s world tilts differently. What I want to encourage, in myself as much as anyone, is to keep nurturing the different loves in our lives so that when one dips, for whatever reason, we have more to draw from.

I cherish that Parisian August, but I don’t need my children to always show up for me the way they did that day. I am their mother. I hope and dream that they make their own lives, which means they must leave me and go and find their own adventures. That doesn’t make me any less grateful for what we had in that car. What it does mean is that I need to keep investing in love outside the traditional structures, so that I am still nourished when my children leave, when friendships drift, when life rearranges itself in the way it always eventually does.

One thing I say to clients: wanting love is not neediness. It is a human requirement. The trick is not to stop wanting it, but to stop looking for it in places that will never have enough to give you.

We are not valuable because of our relationship status. We are valuable as we are. And when we believe that, even a little, love has a way of finding its way back to you.

Love is not finite. Believe me.