🗝️Opening note: I had previously locked this post behind a password because I feared what”others” might think. It was my desire to only allow a few safe, kind, and open people in, but I realized that in doing this I was acting against my own courage, not practiicng the love I believe in. So, I took down the guardrails 24 hours later. Why? I cannot choose how you react, but I can choose how I show up.
Love as this culture’s beggar
Love in our culture is like the beggar on the street looking up at you from their cardboard bed, asking for a few quarters. What do we do? We turn our nose up at this human, quickly walk by, avert our gaze, clutch our pearls, judge them as lazy or unintelligent, and wonder why they aren’t being cared for within our society’s system. We shun them and blame them for their misfortune. In that moment of interaction, we fail to acknowledge that the system we’ve created to care for them is mired in bureaucracy, underfunded, and unpopular among the affluent class. It is broken because it doesn’t fit into exploitative capitalism in a way where some people can profit wildly and control the system. The beggar is not the problem — they are just another human caught up in the same exploitative system we are in. We built the same kind of system for love.
The system we’ve created to care for love is similarly mired in bureaucracy, manipulation, and individuals prospering off of its direct control. To name a couple playing against beggars: we have NIMBYism in gentrified liberal communities and a judicial system that punishes the poor while protecting the rich. When it comes to love, the players are as big as the church and as small as your parents. Both systems are purpose-built around fear and control. Love never consented to being within our manmade systems. The first act of freeing and rebuilding love — for ourselves and for others doing the work — is to acknowledge the systems that have been in control and the fears we will still carry.
To love with courage is terrifying.
To truly love within the confines of our culture is terrifying because there is always a judge, jury, Facebook “friend,” and jaded family member waiting to tell you that you’re doing love all wrong based on their value system. Those who throw stones have a value system and a definition of love that were forced on them. Since they have not made the decision to figure out love for themselves, they impose their system of love on you whether you agree with it or not. No consent is ever asked for or given. They act like colonialists to native peoples — certain they have been chosen, by God or Freud, to tell you what to do.
As respectful and curious humans, we bend, contort, and apologize when we don’t act within their system, even as something deep down tells us that love shouldn’t make us feel this constrained and empty, this exhausted and anxious. They may base their system on a God, or draw their idea of romance from Shakespeare, or simply replicate what they saw from their parents — but they rarely defined it for themselves. They are loving on a borrowed and manufactured definition, because to adopt a new one has been deemed blasphemous, wrong, criminal, or sick. It puts us in a weird cycle of fear that many suffer through, from childhood to death.
What to call these manufactured prophets of love?
I’ve been trying to figure out what to call these confident players who peddle their love potions and manuals. I think they are charlatans. A charlatan is “a person who falsely pretends to have expert knowledge, skills, or qualifications, typically to swindle people by selling worthless goods or services.”
Charlatans might believe deep in their soul that they “know the way” — because of the books they can quote, the Gods they’ve convened with, the patients they’ve counseled, or the gurus they’ve practiced with. When they act as love’s fiduciary — genuinely in service of those they guide — they can help many people. But they also do a disservice to their followers by constraining them to a single view: their view of love. Some invoke data from biased sources to fortify their convictions; others use God as a cudgel. To include external definitions would undermine and dismantle the control that charlatans wield over others. They shut down all curiosity, shame all out-of-line questions, and ostracize those who refuse to conform.
Sound familiar? Could this be a cult? Yes. Could this be a church? Yes. Could this be a New York Times bestselling author? Yes. Could this be a well-meaning therapist? Yes. Could this be a family couple who’s been married for decades? Yes.
I brought up the word cult, and I think it’s worth talking about the word culture as well. Are some cultures cults? Yes. Can a cult have a culture? Yes, again. Both words come from the Latin colere — “to tend; to guard; to till; to cultivate” — which developed into cultus, meaning “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence.” Cultivate and agriculture share that same root, both pointing to the time, dedication, and motivation to grow something out of nothing. A cult is defined by a leader unwilling to share control, vision, or power — often enforced by a ring of loyalists who protect the narrative.
Those who truly support love will support your discovery, your doubts, your fears, your curiosities, and your exploration. They may have their own way of love — and they will not force it on anyone else. They will share their way of smelling flowers, of holding hands, of asking questions — not as a blueprint, but as a hand-drawn map that works for them. Their map cannot be yours, but it can inspire you to draw your own.
Start with self-love
There are alternatives beyond the manufactured options. Hindsight is 20/20, but I can now appreciate the kind of love I was taught by my mom. She danced through life to all the rhythms, wrapped gifts like treasures, dated men with a passion, and dressed like every hallway was a catwalk. It was not a narcissistic, manufactured, or falsely confident love — but one that was deeply personal, ever caring of self, and compassionate. It was self-love.
I lost her six years ago to what I believe was a broken heart and loneliness. I don’t think she gave up on herself. I think she was tired of dancing alone and knew she didn’t belong in the cultural system. It takes great energy to swim outside the current, to live one’s own freedom.
Self-love — right. Now we’re in woo-woo territory.
Not necessarily. Love isn’t sex or masturbation, but love is self-care and body, mind, spirit appreciation. If self-care leads one to celebrating and enjoying your body, then that celebration is love. We jump too quickly to sex as love because that’s what our culture has taught us — and made us fear. We narrow windows of opportunity in order to control input and output. I’ll leave the full accounting of sex and marriage rules for another post.
Self-love maps to a focused care of all parts of our being. I’ve cobbled together a practice from psychology, emotional intelligence, power dynamics, and interpersonal relationships into a 10-skill framework I call the Empathy Decathlon — specifically its first five me-empathy skills. I’ve practiced and facilitated this roughly 550 times now, so there’s something to it. The first five are:
- Energy
- Baggage
- Self-Awareness
- Inventory
- Listening
I originally built these as foundational elements for innovation and team collaboration. What I quickly found was that they go much deeper with individuals — more self-intimate than I anticipated. I’ve helped people quit jobs, catalyze searches for better employment, call out poor leadership, and successfully helped one team form an official union. A CEO once told me, “You are helping them mutiny.” Other leaders asked, “How will this make them more productive?” What I heard most from the people I coached was: “I feel more like I matter” and “I needed this time to breathe and see how important I am.”
Self-love, self-care, me-empathy had no goal beyond looking deeper into our individual states of being. It just so happened that most of the people I practiced with were focused on work environments — but it is impossible to hold the energy and baggage of life entirely at bay.
Love, like everything worth cultivating, is unfinished.
This piece is too. That’s not a disclaimer — it’s the point.
The practice of self-love doesn’t arrive at a destination. There is no certification, no final form, no moment where you’ve loved yourself completely and correctly and can rest. It is, like agriculture, like culture, like the Latin root they all share — an ongoing act of tending. You show up, you till, you guard what’s growing, and you stay curious about what hasn’t emerged yet.
What I’ve tried to do here is name some of the systems that got in the way of that tending for me, and likely for you. The charlatans. The borrowed definitions. The fear dressed up as tradition. I’m not offering a replacement system — I’m suspicious of anyone who is. What I’m offering is permission to be in-process. To draw your own map, even if it’s incomplete. Especially if it’s incomplete.
My mom didn’t finish her dance either. But she danced.
That, I think, is enough to start with.
🏁 Closing Note: I had AI help me edit this and have created a tool to show you how much AI helped and what it did. Check it out down there. 👇🏽
Provenance Label v2.0 : PL: 000017
Human: 70% · AI: 30% · Tool: Claude Sonnet 4.6 Human wrote, directed, and shaped all source material. AI assisted with editorial review, structural suggestions, and closing section drafting.
Hello, I am Shelton. 