Let's flood the zone with LOVE.

Liberate your heart this Valentine's Day.

Jody sharing some elephant love at the Doilom Elephant Sanctuary, Thailand, February 2025

We need love more than ever—we need it to escape the boundaries of heteronormative coupled-up bliss and to spill out with abandon into the streets. We need to flood the zone with LOVE. And not the flowers and hearts Valentine kind either, but fierce love.

Something that the incredibly wise Rebecca Solnit wrote, many years ago, about her choice not to be a biological mother has stayed with me. It was part of her response about always being quizzed on her non-mother status, as if that defined her as a writer, nay—as a person. (Sigh: hard relate here). In her essay, The Mother of All Questions¹ she writes:

‘One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.’

For me, perhaps one of the hardest parts of grieving biological motherhood was working out what to do with the maternal love that was homeless in my heart; it felt like a succubus trying to devour me and had a physical density that I feared would eat me alive unless I found a way to release it back into the world.

I remain on-my-knees grateful that for me, that release came through the blog I started about my childlessness in 2011 called Gateway Women—which then grew into the support and advocacy network of the same name: a truth-telling, supportive and compassionate home for broken childless hearts. (Here I’d like to acknowledge that not every childless woman’s heart breaks; some seem to manage this curveball just fine, and many others freely choose to be childfree and not to have children—because despite reductionist stereotypes, women without children are as diverse as ‘mothers’.)

However back to liberating love. I’m publishing this around Valentine’s Day, the annual heteronormative, singlist, patriarchalized love-bombing fest that punctuates so many women’s Februarys like a deflated balloon. And although I absolutely can’t speak for everyone, I do know that for many heterosexual women who are childless-not-by-choice, it seems that if you have neither a loving male partner nor loving children who are willing and able to honour you on that day, it’s yet another ‘holiday’ on the calendar to make you feel shit about yourself; a big reminder that life and love didn’t choose you. (And thus, according to pronatalism, there must be something wrong with you²).

But how would it feel if instead of feeling that we were missing something, we chose to honour love as the cosmological force that it is, as the mystic core of life itself?

Although I was lucky and privileged to meet a sane, kind and loving life partner in my early fifties (I’m now sixty), the fact remains that during my very solo forties, I chose to make peace with most likely remaining single for the rest of my life. And, after decathecting from the societal propaganda that trumpeted my utter worthlessness as a human being for being a single and childless middle-aged woman I discovered that, much to my surprise, the solo life suited me rather well.

I don’t mean to downplay the logistical, emotional, financial and psychological challenges of ageing solo without children³—they are real as hell, as Sue Faglade Lick’s brilliant Substack Can I Do It Alone? explores.⁴ However, there were benefits to me as a recovering codependent people pleaser in learning to please myself, and the friendly and self-compassionate relationship I built with myself during those years continues to nourish me now that I’m part of a couple again too. I created a single life that was not something I wanted or needed to be ‘rescued’ from, and that made all the difference. Yes, I was still working on finding a way to ‘do’ Christmas that worked for me, but I was getting there!

Right now, we are seeing the ugly rise of lovelessness writ large in the Western world—a grandstand view of meanness, selfishness, pettiness, spite, cruelty, injustice and unkindness. It’s nothing new, it’s always been there—in fact the whole shitty project of Western Imperialism and industrial modernity is built upon this swamp. And it’s not news at all to those of the Global Majority—it’s just that it’s now becoming visible to those of us who, until recently, have had the privilege of choosing not to see it. But the gloves (and blinkers) are off, and the shadow of modernity walks in daylight now.

When I was training to be a psychotherapist, I volunteered as a counsellor in a local primary school (ages 4-11) for a couple of years, and built relationships with some child clients for that whole period. And whilst yes, I was utilizing all my ‘training’, and unpacking my ‘clinical interventions’ with my supervisor, I realised that the main tool I was using was love. But I wasn’t allowed to call it that—‘unconditional positive regard’ is the acceptable therapeutic term. Love is a dirty word in therapy.

One Christmas, as was recommended in working with all our young clients, we would plan a ‘party’ together for our last session before the holiday/therapy break, and then co-create it in the therapy session. The night before those final sessions, I baked some gingerbread cookies for all my young clients and iced their names onto them. When I gave the cookie to one of my tween clients, she interrogated me about where it had come from—she had an unusual name, so she knew I couldn’t have bought it from a shop. When the truth sank in, she was astonished: ‘You made this for me? In your house? At night?!’ In that moment, she knew for sure that the love in our sessions wasn’t just something that happened when we in the room together, but that I carried it around with me all the time. I don’t know where she is today, but I still carry that love; I hope she does too, and that the seed that love planted in her heart was one she has been able to water. Love changed us both.

Love is not a finite resource and neither is liberation.

I was brought up by a mother who had received so little love in her childhood that she aggressively hoarded and defended it for the rest of her life. It was only in her last couple of years, when dementia lowered her barriers, that she was able to show me love without having to claw it back at the earliest opportunity. As is so often the case with unhappy daughters, I used my mother as a role model of who I didn’t want to be, and thus I have loved generously and recklessly—and although the costs have often been ruinous, in truth, every morsel of love I’ve put out into the world has paid me back somehow. It has never been wasted, even when the reward has been heartbreak, betrayal or disillusion. Love and its shadow—grief—can be hard teachers.

Love pulls me out of my scared little shell and forces me to acknowledge that my passion for loving this world is not mere foolishness, it’s the whole damn point of it.

This Valentine’s Day, and every fucking day, the world needs our love more than ever. Let’s liberate love, and each other, any and every way we can.

In the words of the inestimable James Baldwin, ‘love has never been a popular movement’.

Let’s change that.

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1. Solnit, Rebecca. (2017). The Mother of All Questions. UK: Granta; USA: Haymarket Books. http://rebeccasolnit.net/book/the-mother-of-all-questions/

2. If you’re feeling ‘less than’ an unpartnered woman, allow me to recommend @saraeckel’s brilliant 2014 book It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single and Shani Silver’s 2021 book, A Single Revolution: Don’t Look for a Match, Light One. I’d also recommend the Substack On the Outside by @Y.L.Wolfe, who writes achingly well about building a soul-centred life as a single, middle-aged childless woman.

3. Watch/read December’s ‘Fireside Wisdom’ webinar on ‘Solo Elderhood’ here.

4. Please join me, and my brilliant panel of nomo (not-mother) elderwomen, for my next free ‘Fireside Wisdom’ webinar on ‘Eldering During a Time of Collapse’ on Saturday 29th March - click here to sign up to attend live and/or receive the recording.