Who told you that about love?

There are ideas about love that feel older than we are. They arrive already formed, certain and heavy with history.

Love is hard.

Love requires sacrifice.

Marriage is a trap.

Love must be earned.

Settling down is boring.

Strong women don’t need anyone.

Love is all there is. If you don’t have it, you’re missing out.

Sometimes these ideas rise in ordinary moments, while washing a cup, while lying beside someone who feels both near and far, while watching a friend settle into partnership, while turning down an invitation, while watching your own reflection and wondering why tenderness feels so complicated and my favourite is, while you’re quietly insisting yourself that you don’t want what you once wanted.

When we pause, we realize how many of our ideas about love, relationships, and marriage were never consciously chosen. They were absorbed: in kitchens, in schoolyards, in the way our moms kept quiet during an argument, in the jokes our uncles made, in solo traveller & financially independent digital nomad influencer reels, in the magazine headlines and romcoms, in what our fathers could not say, in the way affection was given or withheld. Isn’t it startling to consider that our beliefs about love and relationships could’ve passed down to us in glances across dinner tables?

Louise Hay, in her book, You Can Heal Your Life, wrote about inherited consciousness, the understanding that though patterns travel through generations. Beliefs move through generations the way posture does. Love especially. We do not always remember learning them, but we do stand inside them.

And oftentimes we build our lives around them. If you look closely at your own timeline, it begins early -

At five, you watched what love looked like in your home.

At ten, you heard adults speak about it.

At fifteen, you experienced a heartbreak up close.

At twenty-five, society layered its own narrative over everything.

By the time you’re thirty, these ideas begin to feel like “preferences”. “I just don’t believe in marriage”, or “love always costs too much”. The belief can feel personal, intimate, rooted in us, as though you arrived at this conclusion all alone. Yet when you trace it backwards, you can often see the signs.

In older times, when life thrived in villages, stories did not stay still. They moved and travelled across courtyards, through open windows, between women grinding spices and men returning from their fields. By evening, a sentence spoken on one of the streets could shape how everyone felt by nightfall. Folklore remembers this.

In many tales, the village decides what the forest is before anyone ventures into it. A castle gathers its reputation long before its doors open. The stranger becomes desirable, cursed, or dangerous because a story is settled around them. Because villages represented collective beliefs. Villages held collective beliefs, and once a story settled, it was easier to repeat and accept it than to question it. A feeling passed from one person to another and became truth by repetition.

In Beauty and the Beast, the beast carries a narrative before he carries his name. In the Norwegian tale, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, a mother’s concern becomes a daughter’s hesitation, and her protection turns to harm. Across Folklore, borrowed beliefs often appear as suggestions, warnings, cautions, or shared understandings about how things are meant to be.

Today, our village is digital.

Ideas about love trend.

Detachment trends.

Hyper-independence trends.

Slow living and the minimalism trend.

“Never settle” trends.

“Marry rich” trends.

“Stay single forever” trends.

For a moment, language can feel like an aesthetic, and beliefs become branding. And when enough people repeat a sentence or idea with confidence, it begins to feel self-evident because believing otherwise can feel isolating. To say, “I actually want a partnership” in a room celebrating singledom can feel naïve. To say, “I value my independence deeply,” in a room that romanticizes devotion feels cold. So sometimes we adopt a language that allows us to belong. And we convince ourselves it's true because it is collectively believed to be so.

When Louise Hay spoke about inherited consciousness, the way thoughts and patterns pass through generations, it isn’t only families that shape us, but also the air we are living in. The headlines and the comment sections. And by the time we are in our thirties or fourties, these currents have woven themselves into our identities. We begin to form preferences; we firmly believe these ideas so much that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between conviction and conditioning.

But if you look closely, something subtler can begin to emerge: a witnessing or a noticing or even a sense that some beliefs fit like clothing chosen carefully, while others feel inherited or projected.

Virgina Wolfe once wrote, “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” Beliefs move in a similar way. They are drawn out of us by family, by culture, by what is fashionable to say out loud. Sometimes what we call clarity is simply the loudest voice we have heard most often.

Perhaps the deeper question is not whether love is hard or easy, not whether marriage is liberating or confining, nor whether independence is empowering or distancing. Perhaps the question is simpler:

When you think about love and relationships, whose voice speaks first? Is it your own lived experience? Your mother’s caution? Your sibling’s protection? A trending reel? A collective sigh?

Beliefs about love settle slowly. They become familiar and then begin to sound like our voice. And then, every so often, something makes us pause.

This week, as the light shifts and the sky does what it always does, revealing and concealing in the same breath, I find myself wondering what might surface if we paused and asked ourselves:

Who told me that about love?

Love,

Charvee