When "In Love" Stops Being a Threshold

A partner and I were recently talking about that delicate threshold between love and being in love.

At some point in our dating history, I “caught feelings.” I told him, because I needed the freedom to be in my full expression rather than choking the feelings down.

An older version of me would’ve attached all kinds of meaning to that moment — expectations, stories, next chapters for our relationship that didn’t even exist yet. Being “in love” used to come with a whole rulebook of what it meant and what it required.

But one of the greatest gifts of walking multiple romantic and sexual paths has been the healing that comes from seeing myself through so many mirrors. Each relationship invited me to love the parts of me that once clung to meaning, to safety, or to validation.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that love required something in return.

I had to ask myself: Do I even “fall in love” anymore?

Because for me now, love isn’t a before-and-after moment. It’s a collective set of delicious sensations — the way my body lights up when I message with them, the way the sensual tension and warmth between us ripples when we share space.

I am no longer afraid of falling in love.
Because I don’t fall anymore. I rest in it.

There’s no waiting to “get to know you and trust you” before I let love move through me.
I already know and trust myself.

I live in the vibration of love as a baseline frequency — and what happens with another person simply moves the needle: sometimes deeper, sometimes wider, but always within the field of love itself.

There was a time when I felt an almost painful need to say “I love you” to someone, as if keeping it inside was dangerous. And maybe it was, back then. Because that love used to come tangled with expectation — an invisible hand reaching for something in return.

Now, I don’t filter. I don’t withhold love out of fear of how it will be received.

I let it move.
I let it be.

If that reflection comes back — if someone says “I love you” too — it’s a gift. But if it doesn’t, the love still exists, complete within itself.

That partner and I have our own story of this — one I write about in Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine.

There’s a moment in the book where I tell him I love him, and he tells me he doesn’t feel the same.

It could have shattered me. In another lifetime, it would have.

But instead, it became one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

Because it revealed how free I had finally become.

That I could express the fullness of my love without needing it mirrored back to me.
That I could feel love as mine — not contingent, not conditional, not transactional.

And this is why I say Forbidden Alchemy isn’t only about kink or BDSM.
It’s about every forbidden way of loving — the styles of connection we’ve been told are “too much,” “too unconventional,” or “too intense.”

It’s about loving without ownership, desiring without shame, and expressing devotion without needing validation.

The forbidden isn’t always about what happens in the dungeon. Sometimes, it’s about what happens in the heart — when you dare to love beyond the rules of what love is supposed to look like.

That’s what Forbidden Alchemy is really about: How the most “taboo” sensations — rejection, longing, unreciprocated love — can become medicine when met through the heart of devotion.

When you stop needing love to be returned, you start realizing it was never missing to begin with.

✨

Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine is out!

And may you, too, fall in love with the delicious freedom of loving for no reason at all.

In sovereignty,
-Sharon Marie Scott