Love as Expansion, Not Erasure: 

A New Myth for the Uncontainable Ones

There is an old story, told in a thousand voices, across a thousand epochs.

It is the story of love as a singular path, a singular devotion, a singular undoing. It is the story of the one great love that devours all others, that demands everything in return. In these stories, love is a knife: You cut away what demarcated before from now, you carve out a space in your chest, and you offer yourself to the flame.

We have been told that if love is real, it must be all-consuming.

That to step into a love that shakes the very foundation of our being, we must leave behind all that we were prior to its arrival.

That love is a portal through which only one version of ourselves may pass.

But there is another story, one that has been whispering through the cracks of time, waiting for the ones bold enough to remember it.

It is a story that does not end in exile.

It is a story that does not demand erasure.

It is the story of love as an ever-growing landscape—wild, untamable, fecund with new life forms. Limitless.

The Old Myth: Love as Trial, as Fire, as Severance

The old myths demand proof. Proof of devotion, proof of sacrifice, proof that love is more than a passing wind. And how do you prove love?

You cut off the past. You forsake what was. You stand in the ashes of your old life and call it transformation.

We have seen this story before.

• The mystic who renounces all they have built—their art, their home, their community—to chase a transcendent love they trust will initiate them into a higher state of being…only to find they were always meant to birth their love into the world, not escape from it.
• The wanderer who belongs everywhere and nowhere, slipping between identities, cultures, and selves, but never quite finding the place where they can rest—until they are forced to ask if home was ever meant to be a place at all.
• The poet who erases every past version of themselves for the sake of passion, believing that in order to be chosen, they must first be rendered unrecognizable to themselves.
• The warrior who believes love must be proven through sacrifice, surrendering their softness, their tenderness—offering only their strength, never realizing they were meant to be adored in all their forms.
• The oracle who sees their future written in the eyes of another but assumes fate demands that they leave behind their history, their sacred ground…as if devotion cannot unfurl from familiar soil.
• The lovers who believe they must flee to prove their passion, that love is only real if it is forged in exile, never questioning whether they might have been meant to build a new world right where they stood…not from the ashes of their old lives, but from the raw, undiluted truth of who they have always been—and from the courage to be fully seen and known.

And we, the children of these stories, have inherited the belief that to step into something new, we must destroy what came before.

That love is a house that cannot hold more than one story at a time.
That love is a blade, rather than a bridge.
That love is a cage, rather than a sky.

But what if the old myths were wrong?
Or rather—what if they were only half the truth?

A New Myth: Love as Expansion, Not Wound

There is another way.

A way where love is not a door that locks behind you, but a horizon that stretches forward.
A way where new love does not demand the sacrifice of the old, but builds upon it.
A way where the heart does not shrink to accommodate a single devotion, but grows to make space for glorious uncontainability.

To love in this way is to refuse the decree for destruction. It is to say:

• I will not exile myself from what I have built, just because something new calls me forward.
• I will not turn love into a trade—this for that, past for future, one desire for another.
• I will not believe the lie that devotion requires scarcity, that love is real only when it is singular.

This is not an easy story to tell.
Because the world trafficks in binaries.

Because the world trusts a stable hearth more than it trusts a blazing growth.

Because the world does not know how to hold a love that does not writhe beneath an ultimatum, bow beneath a summons, or bleed beneath a reckoning.

But what if our collective imagination is asking us to stretch into a new truth?

• A love that asks you to shrink is not love at all. It is fear disguised as kindness.
• A love that demands exile instead of expansion is not love—it is a mistrust of vastness disguised as devotion.
• A love that forces you to choose between the vows that shaped you and the portal that calls you forward is not love—it is control disguised as fate. True love does not sever; it expands, making room for both the roots and the horizon, for what has been sworn and what has yet to unfold.

The Fear That Holds Us Captive

Why do we fear the new myth that love is asking us to breathe into being?

Because we have been told that to hold more than one love, more than one devotion, more than one truth, is selfish.

Because we have been told that if love does not come with sacrifice, it is not real.
Because we secretly believe that if we allow ourselves to expand, we will become too vast for the world to hold.

But is this fear the voice of love?

Or is it the whisper of scarcity dressed in devotion, the tightening hand that mistakes its grip for grace?

We have learned love from a world that detests its own vastness, that measures the heart in rations, that warns: Take in too much, and you will drown; you will fracture; you will be lost.

But love is not an economy.

It is not a barter of longing for permission, not a careful tally of what is owed and what is spared.

Love is the cosmos spilling over itself, a star collapsing and birthing a thousand more.

Love is the river that carves new paths in the dark, never asking if it is allowed.

Love is the great horizon that does not demand you sever the road behind you, but dares you to walk forward— with everything, with all of it, with all of you.

What It Means to Love Without Erasure

To love without erasure is to live in the impossible vastness of the in-between.

• It is to cherish what you have built, without fearing what is still unfolding.
• It is to step into the arms of something new, without burning down the home that sheltered you.
• It is to say yes to fire, without worrying that it will consume you whole.

This is not a love that the old myths understand.
This is not a love that the world knows how to hold.

But it is a love that exists, waiting for those who are bold enough to step beyond the edge of the known map.

Not a love that binds.

Not a love that cuts.

But a love that expands, enriches, and engenders even more possibilities that currently only exist beyond the threshold of the known.

The Strength to Expand

To love in this way is not easy. It requires a strength beyond certainty.

Because it means holding paradox without trying to resolve it.
Because it means trusting love’s infinitude, even when the world tells you it must be contained.
Because it means rambling into the unknown, not with a torch to burn the past, but with open hands to carry what is still sacred.

And perhaps that is what this moment in time is calling us toward.

Not a love that demands exile.
Not a love that trades one life for another.
Not a love that forces us to choose.

But a love that is big enough to hold everything.

A love that refuses the old maps and fashions a new myth by threading together all the directions instead.

A love that does not end in destruction, but in widening—until the heart itself becomes a universe, large enough to hold both the roots and the sky.

A love that is not a cage. But a new world, waiting to be made through us.