We often think that if we love someone, that love must be returned by them in exact measure for it to be true. But I’ve learnt that true love operates on a far more complex plane. Real love is always reciprocated, though not always in the ways we imagine. When you love without attachment and expectation, your greatest love stories will begin to unfold.
The more freely you give love, the more vigorously it finds its way back to you. Love cannot be confined to a single arc of “him and her.” Love stories are many and manifold. True love arrives from numerous sources and takes on countless forms over time.
Even heartbreak, with all its ache, is still a kind of love story. In every heartbreak tale, that someone may not have offered the love you longed for, but still you loved and learnt. And that grieving process itself is a love story.
The most beautiful part of it all is that you will grow through all the love stories.
Heartbreak became my teacher
I learnt this through my first romantic heartbreak. I loved a man once. He summited Mount Everest, was a professional skydiver, and built a multimillion-dollar business. Beyond being inspired by his success, he helped me unlearn shame around my desires and dream bigger. When he would kiss the soles of my feet, I would let myself wonder about our love story — what it was becoming, what it could be.
Yet within three years, our relationship had become a corpse. In the rawness of heartbreak, I fantasised about making him jealous. I told myself I’d go to Burning Man, an off-the-grid nine-day gathering in a Nevada desert, to avenge my pain because he had, unknowingly, planted the seed. If he saw me there, radiant and unbothered, maybe he’d regret losing me. Maybe he’d even want me back, and I’d reclaim my power.
Meditating on death freed my heart
But when I arrived in Black Rock City, the temporary city built by Burners, my revenge plot churned into something far bigger than him. Burning Man is infamous for playa (the desert) sandstorms. During my first duststorm, the wind twisted itself into something sentient. The combination of lightning and rain in the desert felt uncanny. Veteran Burners huddled with me, their movements calm, deliberate. Someone asked again, “Are we all going to die?”
“Yes, we are,” the senior Burner said.
This is no time to joke, I thought, until I matched his gaze. His eyes said it this time: Yes, we are all going to die.
At that moment, I understood that surrender is the truest form of survival. The storm stripped us of the illusion of permanence, leaving only the now. The possibility of dying woke me up. This revenge trip was no longer about a man, but about me accepting whatever is to come.
I wanted to suddenly love. If I was to die, let love be on my last breath.
True love always finds me
The sandstorm cleared my heart’s blockage and I carried lessons from it — the duality of life and death — as I continued my Burn. I was shamefully underprepared in the desert and had not brought a mode of transportation to get around 200 acres of dried lakebed. But as Burners say, “the playa provides,” and indeed this limitation shaped into serendipity the next night. As I trekked alone deep in the desert, a gentle stranger appeared and offered me a ride. I let my intuition lead the way and happily accepted. “I’m Butterfly,” I said, introducing myself by my playa name, the nicknames we are either gifted or earn at Burning Man. An earlier stranger named me Butterfly because I had a blue butterfly tooth gem and I resonated with a butterfly’s theme of reemergence.
“I’m True Love,” he replied.
True Love and I spent seven hours at a grief temple talking about love and loss. As we waited out another sandstorm, I traced the tattoo on his skin that read “a life without limits.” While he had scribed it on his hands, I had the same sentiments imprinted in my heart.
I’d planned to meet up with my online friend, Raaginder, who was set to perform a violin set, but the moment I arrived in Black Rock City, my phone went dark. With eighty thousand people scattered across the playa and hundreds of performances unfolding around the clock, I resigned myself to the idea that I’d probably miss him. So I gave myself a different mission: follow the music that pulled at me the most. One night, it led me straight to Raaginder. He played his story into the night air, each note carrying the weight of where he’d been. After the show, I thanked him, then wandered off, smiling at how divinely aligned the unscripted always is.
Love is transcendental
And of course, this was the moment my former lover appeared in front of me with his eyes holding the memory of our redolent history. My love for him eclipsed any open wounds and my ego death said: “the ethos of forgiveness is godly.” I gave him a warm embrace. My hug said, “we could never go back or be the same, but we would make something new and beautiful.”
My body started shivering, acutely aware of the desert temperature dropping. Again, I was underprepared, but the playa provides. My former love pulled out an emergency blanket from his pouch. I was shocked he had the one item I needed most then. He wrapped my body in the blanket, kissed my forehead, and told me he loved me. I finally understood he loved me, but not in the way I yearned to be loved by him.
I never forgot that he couldn’t meet me where I needed to be met. We weren’t aligned, but even in that unmet longing, I was still held. I was held by the wild love stories and magic that surrounded me.
All I had to do was love despite him and the hurt, and love flowed to me in abundance.
The sandstorm, the intimacies with strangers, and the reunion with my former lover freed my heart. I wanted nothing but peace for myself, and for him. I let him go, knowing love was never meant to be transactional — only transformational.
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