The Barriers We Build Against Love

On rivers, fear, and the quiet work of letting love in

There’s a poem by Rumi, a 13th-century Persian mystic poet, that stayed with me long before I really understood it.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

For most of my life, I believed worth had to be proven. Love, recognition, belonging, all of it felt like something that came after you had achieved enough.

So without realizing it, I built a life around becoming impressive, capable, exceptional. Someone no one could overlook.

From the outside, it looked like I was living a big, expansive life. I was traveling constantly, moving between continents and field sites, working with wild animals, building a career people called a dream. But underneath that movement was a quieter pattern I couldn’t see at the time.

I kept choosing romantic partners who weren’t really available. People who needed fixing, or saving, or understanding. Relationships that required effort, strategy, and endurance.

At the time, it felt like devotion. Looking back, it was something else.

Somewhere deep inside, I believed love had to be earned. That if I could just be kind enough, patient enough, impressive enough, then eventually I would deserve to be chosen fully. So I kept entering relationships where I had to work for it.

Love felt consuming, like something I could disappear into. I would shape myself around the other person, but there was always a quiet hyper-independence underneath it. A private escape hatch that made sure I never depended too much on anyone.

My career served that purpose, too. It was always my first priority. I followed it wherever it led, across oceans and into remote landscapes. There was no stable home, no shared rhythm, no real rootedness.

Every relationship felt temporary, even when I told myself it wasn’t. I was always one opportunity away from leaving. On some level, that constant motion protected me. It meant I never had to root deeply enough to be truly vulnerable.

I thought I was searching for love, but what I was really doing was building quiet barriers against it.

The pattern reached its breaking point in my last relationship. We spent a year and a half trying to fix something that was never really right, triggering each other again and again until we both hit rock bottom. It consumed everything.

When it ended, I was left with a silence I hadn’t felt in years. And in that silence, I began to see the pattern.

I kept trying to find a home in another person because I didn’t yet feel at home in myself.

My ability to love authentically was like a river that had been dammed up, slowly, over the course of a lifetime. Each disappointment, each fear, each lesson about what love was supposed to look like added another layer of stone. Be impressive. Be useful. Don’t be too much. Don’t need too much. Stay independent. Stay strong. But also, give them what they want.

The river was still there, but the flow had been choked off over time.

Most of us live this way. Our nervous systems are wired for survival, always scanning for danger, always trying to avoid pain. So we choose what feels familiar, even if it hurts. We stay guarded. We hold back. We test love or run from it. Fear quietly becomes the architect of our relationships.

And then, sometimes, the dam begins to crack.

For me, that shift happened slowly, across years of therapy, heartbreak, and hard realizations. I had to slow down, let go of the constant motion. Stop organizing my life around the next assignment or the next achievement. I had to learn how to sit with myself, regulate my own nervous system, and be honest about what I actually wanted.

Only after that shift did my current partner enter my life.

And even now, I sometimes think that if we had crossed paths a few years earlier, I might not have even noticed him. He’s rooted here in Charleston. He has a son. A stable career. A real, grounded life. He was open and expressive about how he felt about me from the beginning.

The old version of me was drawn to intensity and unpredictability. A steady, emotionally available man with roots might have felt boring, or like something that would tie me down. I’m not even sure I would have agreed to meet him.

But by the time he came into my life, something inside me had softened. I had started to embody a different way of relating, one rooted less in fear and more in honesty.

So when he showed up, I could actually see him.

The relationship feels steady. I don’t have to wonder if he loves me or if he will stay. When my fears surface, he leans in instead of pulling away. We work through things as a team.

My nervous system, which used to feel anxious and braced in relationships, has started to settle. I can be apart from him without worrying. I can stay present with myself.

There are small moments that still surprise me. We’ll be doing our own thing, and he’ll come in just to hug me, kiss me, and say he loves me. When we’re apart, he’ll call just because I crossed his mind.

And in that steadiness, something inside me has softened.

For most of my life, I was afraid that if someone really saw me, they wouldn’t choose me. Now, when that old fear rises, I don’t run. I slow down. I regulate. I come back to my heart. And then I turn toward him instead of away, trusting that we’re on the same team.

That is what it looks like, for me, to choose love over fear.

But it isn’t a straight line. Growth rarely is.

It moves more like a spiral. We circle back to the same fears and old stories, but each time from a slightly different place. A little more aware. A little more able to stay present.

The dam doesn’t fall all at once. It cracks, softens, shifts, and slowly gives way. And with each turn of the spiral, the river moves a little more freely.

____

Rumi’s line feels different to me now than it once did.

I used to read it like a beautiful idea, something poetic and far away. Now it feels more like a mirror. Less about finding love out in the world, and more about noticing the quiet ways I learned to close my own heart.

For a long time, I thought love was something external. Something you found in the right person, the right relationship, the right life.

But that isn’t how it works.

Love is not other people. It isn’t something you chase or earn or stumble across by accident. It’s something that already exists within you, something steady and alive underneath all the fear and conditioning.

Rumi wrote, “If I love myself, I love you. If I love you, I love myself.” The line feels almost disorienting at first, because it asks us to stop looking outward for the answer. It turns us inward, and that’s the harder work.

It’s much easier to blame the wrong partners, the bad timing, the places we’ve lived, the things we’ve lost. Easier to keep searching than to look honestly at the barriers we’ve built inside ourselves.

The fears. The insecurities. The old wounds. The strategies that once helped us survive, but now keep love from flowing freely.

The real work, at least for me, was dismantling the dam, stone by stone, until the river could move again.

Love wasn’t something I had to go out and earn. It was something that had been waiting, patiently, behind the barriers I had built against it.