Loving Yourself Because of It
Years ago, when I was leading discussions in the ethical non-monogamy community, we often talked about what it really means to love someone.
Not just the easy parts. Not the curated, date-ready version.
Sovereign love—the kind that deepens over time—asks us to love someone because of their little idiocies, not in spite of them.
Because those quirks, those triggered moments, those frustrating edges, are often the exact mirrors that show us where we still close, where we still withhold tenderness.
To love someone fully is to meet the whole mosaic of their being with curiosity and reverence.
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I was married for twenty-seven years.
Halfway through, we opened the marriage, but that isn’t the part that matters here.
What matters is what I learned about love.
When I first met my husband, his ambition was magnetic to me. It was sexy—his drive, his vision, his hunger for success. But over time, that same ambition became the thing that hurt. He chose work over family more often than I wanted, and I carried that as proof that I, or the family, wasn’t a priority.
That was me still embodying victim consciousness.
It took years to realize that these were two sides of the same coin.
That the same fire that built his business was the fire that first drew me in.
When I could hold both truths at once, I stopped trying to love him in spite of who he was and started loving him because of it.
That shift changed everything.
It softened judgment into understanding, turned irritation into intimacy, and taught me what devotion actually means.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how rarely we extend that same love to ourselves.
We say, “I’ll love myself when I’m calmer, healed, less reactive…” We treat self-love like a reward for good behavior.
But what if we loved ourselves because of the parts that still scare us?
Because of the contradictions, the wild hungers, the fantasies that don’t fit neatly into the image of who we’re supposed to be?
For most of my life, I tried to love myself despite my taboo desires.
I told myself they were too much, too dark, too strange.
That if people really saw them, I’d lose love.
But what I’ve learned—what Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine is really about—is that the parts of us we hide are the very ones that make us whole.
Our taboo desires aren’t detours away from love.
They’re invitations into it.
When we can look at the fantasies that once made us blush or flinch and say, “I love you here, too,” something profound happens.
The shame begins to dissolve.
Pleasure starts to flow.
And love—real, unconditional, cellular love—becomes possible.
This is the alchemy:
To turn the places we once feared into portals of devotion.
To celebrate the parts of ourselves we were taught to exile.
Not just to tolerate them.
But to worship them.
Because the point has never been to love yourself in spite of who you are.
The point is to love yourself because of who you are—every contradiction, every hunger, every beautiful, human edge.
That’s the journey Forbidden Alchemy invites you into. A homecoming to the parts you thought made you unlovable—and the discovery that they were always the most lovable of all.
[Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine is available anywhere books are sold.]
In self-love and sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie Scott
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