The First Love You Ever Witnessed

You learned love by watching. Not from what your parents told you about marriage or commitment or passion—from what you saw in their bodies when they were in the same room, in the quality of their silence, in how they handled rupture and repair. If they fought with fury and then touched with tenderness, you learned that anger doesn't destroy love. If they were cordial and distant, you learned that peace and intimacy are separate things. If one of them disappeared—emotionally or physically—you learned that love can coexist with abandonment. These lessons became your blueprint for what normal feels like, what possible feels like, what you should expect and what you should never hope for.

Your parents' relationship is not your relationship. But it is the first sentence in the story you're still telling. A person whose parents had a genuinely loving, engaged partnership doesn't wonder if such a thing exists—they've seen it. They know it's possible because they've lived inside it. Someone whose parents were loveless or hostile or absent doesn't have this knowledge embedded in their nervous system. They have to build belief in love from scratch, against the weight of lived experience. This is not insurmountable, but it is real work.

Mirabai came from a family of warriors and royals where women were property and devotion meant obedience. Her own spiritual devotion was a refusal of her parents' world, yet it was also shaped by it. She had learned to love fiercely, to not ask permission, to risk everything for what mattered. These qualities, inherited from her family's intensity, became the fuel for her radical choice. She didn't escape their influence; she transmuted it. The same passionate nature that would have been her duty to husband and family became her devotion to the divine.

What becomes possible when you honestly examine your parents' relationship—not to blame them, but to understand it? You see yourself more clearly. You recognize which patterns you want to replicate and which you are determined to break. You notice what you're drawn to in partners and whether you're drawn because it feels like home or because it feels like a chance to rewrite history. You can choose, consciously, what to honor from your inheritance and what to release. You can recognize that some of your deepest assumptions about love are not laws of nature but artifacts of a particular household. And from that recognition, you become free to imagine and build something different.