Love Recognizing Itself
On love, recognition, and what it means to choose
For me, Love is where longing may live most urgently — and where many of us have come to believe the answer lives, too, in the right person, the right relationship. What follows is my response to a question asked by a close friend before my wedding on Valentine's Day to Cathy, my wife and partner in Legacy of Love — about how we found each other and fell in love. What it speaks to, I think, is something anyone who has ever loved — or longed to — already knows somewhere in themselves.
February 2, 2026 · The Address
Cathy and I didn't "fall" in love, as if we were out of it or void of it, as if it were possible for love to be absent — but instead we recognized the love that is ourSelf, our real Self, in one another, in the clearest, most profoundest of ways.
When we first experienced this, lying together on the floor during a ceremony, while holding hands at arms length from each other, Cathy said: "I've never seen anyone's energy so closely match mine. I could stay here forever."
And forever here we are.
Now Cathy and I quickly realized that this recognition of Love
is a perpetual choice that is offered now
from moment to moment, from experience to experience.
And that to choose Love, to choose ourSelf, is my life's primary assignment. And in choosing myself first, I always choose Love, and in choosing Love, I choose Cathy, and all three of those apparently separate choices is, in the end, just one choice.
Me — Love — Cathy = One Love. One activity. One choice of endless creative love overflowing and folding back on itself, beautifully sharing its radiance for all to see and feel and know.
To put it succinctly: my love for Cathy is beautiful, overflowing, and inexhaustible. As is her love for me, and that's just the voice of Truth. And who doesn't love the truth?
Knowing this truth is freedom. "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," it is said. But this freedom, by itself, isn't the whole picture — because this freedom needs to be a living, embodied freedom that is exercised every continuous moment through experience. Through what Cathy calls "3D."
And Cathy and I also realize that our task, our assignment, our job — if it could be said we were to have one — is to live our lives in alignment with this truth. To let our lives lived with each other be an expression and celebration of this truth.
And seeing that this Love, without exception, must be shared, because that's its nature — to share itself with everyone and everything; to create and participate as one family in Love. And that's it. That's us.
This is what our wedding ceremony is designed to be an expression of — this one love celebrating itself in gathering, in song, in deep, deep gratitude for you, our friends, our family.
Love is just another way of saying "what is." All is Love, more or less skillfully expressed in everyday life.
And to understand this — to truly respond with love and understanding to all experience as it arises within us and flows through us in ever creative motion — is to be right with ourselves.
And each little bump, each resistance, each conflict or struggle however brief or intense, is to be met with loving acceptance. And in that meeting, true healing takes place instantaneously, as the veils of our innocent mis-education are lifted, and we sink ever more deeply and broadly and completely into this perfect Love that we all are. That we all share.
Life is simply the moment-by-moment choosing of Love over fear, peace over control, and truth over illusion.
When I choose Love within, Cathy naturally reflects that choice back to me, because we are One.
And for me — that, Cathy, is heaven on earth.
I love you.
With all my love —
Kirk Love, Psy.D.
February 2, 2026 · Loveland, Ohio
Kirk Love, Psy.D.
kirk@drkirklove.com
859 512 9230
If something in this stirred a recognition, you are welcome to reach out.
A first conversation is always complimentary and without obligation.
