06/27/2025
LOVE IS NOT A RELATIONSHIP
By Zen Prem
Love is not a relationship.
You think it’s love.
But really, it’s just a well-practised performance.
Relationships are performance.
Blueprints. Stories. Agreements.
Sometimes sacred.
Sometimes survival.
Sometimes just a habit with a shared postcode.
And love?
Love doesn’t care about your story.
Love is the fire that burns it to the ground.
Love is not a relationship.
It’s the fire that walks in uninvited.
It doesn’t promise to stay,
Only to burn away what was never true.
It doesn’t care how well the furniture matches.
It doesn’t care about your couples therapy.
It doesn’t care how many books you’ve read, or how fluent you are in attachment styles.
Love asks:
Are you real?
Are you awake?
Are you still pretending?
Love is the moment the mask slips,
And you realise the script you’ve been reading from was never yours.
It’s not the dinner dates,
the weekend getaways,
the “how-was-your-day?” texts,
or the couple selfies curated for strangers.
It’s the stillness beneath all of that.
It’s the split-second of unfiltered truth
that passes between two people
when neither is pretending.
No performance.
No choreography.
Just the raw hum of …
“It’s you.”
Love doesn’t need a name.
It doesn’t wait for mutual timing,
for your trauma to be healed,
or for your lives to be aligned.
It just happens.
Inconveniently.
Unreasonably.
Unforgettably.
And sometimes, it doesn’t lead to commitment.
It doesn’t end in marriage.
It doesn’t become a home with matching towels.
Sometimes, it just cracks you open…
then leaves.
Because love isn’t here to stay.
It’s here to wake you up.
To tear through your comfort,
your emotional laziness,
your spiritual bypassing,
and ask:
Are you even alive in this life you built?
Love is not a relationship.
It’s the soul collision that reminds you what real feels like before you go back to what’s easy.
Relationships are what we build when we want to feel safe.
Love is what happens when we’re finally honest enough to not need safety as a condition.
And most people aren’t ready for that.
They want love that doesn’t change them.
Love that fits their furniture.
Love that signs the lease and makes it to yoga on time.
But real love doesn’t fit.
It breaks.
And if it doesn’t destroy some part of the life you faked…
It probably wasn’t real.
They didn’t stay.
They shattered your sleep.
They mirrored you until you couldn’t look away.
They kissed your soul awake,
Then walked out the door.
Not because they didn’t love you.
But because their love had already done what it came here to do.
Love isn’t the relationship.
It’s the moment you’re undone by truth.
It’s what cracks the illusion.
And most of us spend our lives chasing the structure, while running from the fire.
Zen Prem
This is for the people who lost someone they felt everything with, and mistook their leaving for failure. It reframes that kind of love as holy rather than broken.
It wasn’t meant to stay. It was meant to undo you.
Zen Prem..Co author of Beyond Bu****it To Bliss with Samantha Spiro
Art: FreePik
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