What 50 Love Letters Taught Me About Feeling Loved

“Can we have lunch on July 1^st?” she asked. “It has to be that date.”

It was early June. I had no idea what this oddly specific request could mean, but when my friend Emilie asks something like this, there is only one answer.

YES.

Over the two decades of our friendship, there have been others.

Surprise dinners dropped off during a terrible week. My kids whisked off when my momma battery was at zero. The text to “check my porch” to find a loaf of warm banana bread on a random Tuesday.

(Brief brag: I’m lucky enough to not just have one friend like this but two. Hi Ange!)

She was already seated when I got there. I didn’t see what was waiting on the chair beside her. I couldn’t have imagined the journey that lay ahead.

After we settled and ordered, she handed me a wrapped gift.

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To celebrate (and prepare?) for my 50^th birthday: fifty days of letters from people who love me TELLING ME WHY.

Love, In Black and White

Fifty days of love letters, each one from a surprise person. You can imagine how fun it was to wake up each day.

Some days had 2, and even 3, letters.

I got poems, artwork, and quotes. I got stickers, good advice, and walks down memory lane.

I got HANDWRITING. (Stunningly personal in these digital days.)

Some writers were expected. Some were wonderfully surprising.

I got deep vulnerability, heard stories I didn’t know, and got to see myself through so many other eyes.

I got love. So much love it spilled over, a sweet honey sticking to every part of my life so I couldn’t forget.

I started sharing small snippets from the letters on my stories each morning, and something unexpected happened. People told me it made their day. Some felt inspired to reach out to people they loved or create something similar.

The letter writers told me how much they had loved writing them.

Love wasn't just moving toward me. It was multiplying through everyone who participated in it.

I got the sense Emilie’s gift was a stone thrown in a still lake, rippling out in ways neither of us could fully grasp.

What If This Is How to Feel More Loved?

We tend to talk about love as something we either have or don't have - something someone else gives us, withholds from us, or takes away.

We think of love as a prize to earn and keep. Something we hope to be worthy of. Something to hold in place with vows or genetics.

People are either giving it to us or they aren’t.

During the countdown, a friend (and letter writer) said, “How many times can you be told how great you are before it just starts to lose its impact?”

This stopped me. Because, though I was being celebrated and complimented, this actually didn’t feel at all like an ego trip.

It felt like being seen.

It felt like layers of old doubt and unworthiness being burned away in the steady, bright light of love.

Every day someone I love and trust took a turn holding a mirror up to me and saying, “This is who you are.”

These weren’t just letters. They were love doing its work. And it was changing me.

This got me very curious about what love actually is - and whether there was a way to feel more loved that had nothing to do with getting more love from other people.

What Grief Knows About Love

Then, my soul dog, Piper, unexpectedly died.

I took a break from sharing the letters publicly. I was gutted and needed to let myself be just that.

I was devastated by the loss - and by the gray wash it cast over my 50th birthday countdown and the joy of reading a letter each day. I felt guilty that I couldn’t enjoy the fruit of Emilie’s (and everyone’s) labor.

But those letters carried me through those early, dark days. And loss began to teach me something new about love.

That love isn’t simply admiration or affection. It isn’t something bestowed. Nor is it a promise or agreement between two people.

Real love is an expression. An energy. A wildly brave vulnerability.

As I sat in the cavern of loss, my heart burgeoning with love for a being I could no longer see or touch or snuggle, I just kept wondering: what happens to all this love now?

My love for Piper didn’t end when her life did. If anything, it intensified, a hurricane blowing my broken pieces around.

It seemed like the most precious resource, one I couldn’t imagine asking myself to stop feeling because she was no longer there to receive it.

And every day I opened a letter. I received an expression of someone's love that existed before I opened it and did not depend upon my response.

My love for Piper existed without her response. Their love for me existed without mine.

I began to wonder: What if love doesn't require reciprocity to exist? What if we experience love simply by loving?

This doesn't mean other people's responses don't matter. They tell us a great deal about the relationships we choose and the people we allow close to us. But they don't get to determine our capacity to experience love. That part belongs to us.

If that's true, then I'd misunderstood something fundamental about love. It is generated within us.

It isn’t something we must wait for. It’s something we can, any day of the week, choose to experience.

I don't know if I can overstate how freeing this feels to me.

Because it means we have far more power over how much love we experience than I ever understood. We don't have to wait for someone to choose us, understand us, appreciate us, or love us in exactly the way we want before we get to feel love.

We can be a source of it.

And maybe the more freely we love, the more available we become to receive it.

The Bargain We Make With Love

I used to be someone who would only love if I knew I would be loved back. I tracked people's behavior and investment in me. I looked for evidence that it was safe before I risked that kind of vulnerability.

I see versions of this all the time in the women I work with. We wait to see how we'll be received before we say what we think, express what we feel, ask for what we want, or reveal how much we care.

It makes sense. Rejection hurts. Ridicule hurts. Loving someone who doesn't love us back hurts. We want some assurance that if we make ourselves vulnerable, someone will meet us there.

But love doesn't offer that guarantee.

We can choose to love. We cannot control what comes back.

Maybe that's exactly where the bravery of loving lives. Because our hearts may get broken. (Mine certainly has.)

And perhaps a broken heart isn't diminished by its breaking. Perhaps the breaking expands its capacity to love.

Love is not the safe choice. It's the brave one.

What becomes possible when we stop requiring certainty before we open our hearts? When we allow ourselves to love without first securing the outcome?

Maybe We’ve Had It Backwards

Emilie didn't just give me fifty letters. She created fifty-plus opportunities for all of us to experience the love already alive inside us.

Who knew these letters would not just usher me into 50 but also become part of the bridge I built across the canyon of loss - and teach me something about love I never expected to learn?

I can't stop thinking about how many people want to feel more loved. People whose open, aching hearts are waiting to be told and shown that they are wanted.

And what if that waiting could end? What if we have far more power over how much love we experience than we've been taught to believe?

The letter writers didn't create love inside me. Their expressions helped awaken and amplify what was already there. And my response didn't create their love, either.

Because while being loved matters, it isn't the source of our love.

Even knowing what love can cost, we can choose it - because the experience of loving itself belongs to us.

Maybe that's the best news I've discovered in all of this: no one else holds the keys to how much love I get to experience in this life.

Thank you to Emilie for the time and effort it took to make this vision into a reality. Thank you to the people who wrote letters, and to all the people in my life whose love couldn't possibly be contained in fifty envelopes.

Thank you to everyone who keeps choosing to love with an open heart.

And not that you need it, but I still want to say it: I love you.