How we come to know love, in the heart and the gut, long before the mind can explain it.

How do we know what we know? It is a slippery question anywhere, and it gets slipperier the moment we bring it to love, especially romantic love, and especially the new kind, the kind that is just seeding, or just breaking open, or just breaking your heart. We say we know. We feel it in the mind, and somewhere the body seems to know it too. But how do we know a thing like this is true, when we cannot even say for certain what love is.

Here is the paradox at the center of it. We throw the word around all day, and we do not really know what love is. We have a sense of it, a texture, a shared understanding among everyone who has ever been overwhelmed by it, and still it slips the net of any definition. And yet we do know it, in our own way. What came through for me is that the knowing does not come from where we usually go looking. It does not come from the mind.

One

Love does not live in the intellect. It is not a checklist, not a list of pros and cons, not the scientific method applied to a person. That is a real way of knowing things, and it is not the one that works here. Love is felt. It is visceral, closer to the body and the gut and the old mythic part of us than to reason. So you come to know it by feeling your way in, with all of your senses, the five you can name and the one you cannot. Notice the images that rise when you hold someone in your mind, the little movie that plays, the scent that registers, where your attention goes when you sit with the whole of them, not their face or their words but their soul, their full beingness. You can feel this even for someone you have not yet met. The knowing is that old, and that deep.

Two

The second way is stranger and simpler. Sometimes you meet a person and something in you says, quietly and with complete certainty, oh, there you are. You feel you have known them before, that you are picking up a thread you set down somewhere you cannot quite place. Even if the meeting is a little awkward, there is a confidence running underneath it, a sense of rightness, and later you look back and wonder how you did not see it all along. That recognition is real. It is your soul tribe, the people you were always going to find, and the body knows them before the mind has caught up.

Three

The third way sounds almost too simple to say, and it is still true. Follow your heart. Ask it directly. Sit down with your journal, or your voice notes, or your art, or put on music and move, and ask your heart, your soul, the deepest part of you, what it knows about this person and this connection, and then get quiet and listen. The heart will override the mind if you let it. It has things to tell you about the resonance, about the story you are in, about whether this one is yours. Let it speak, and trust what it says, because the story of one soul meeting another is one of the great mysteries we are here to enjoy, not to solve.

We never fully answer the question, and we are not meant to. Love stays a paradox, felt long before it is understood, and that is part of its beauty. We are all in this dance together, everyone alive right now, moving with and around each other whether we chose the partner or not. It is wild and tender and sometimes heartbreaking, and it is the most human thing we do. Feel your way. Trust what the heart already knows.

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— Juli Martin, The Love Lady