Just a lover girl, loving
And I no longer apologize for that.
For a long time, I thought being a lover girl required a recipient. A man, a muse, a room full of energy you could pour yourself into. I thought loving was directional, something you aimed at someone and something that expanded in the presence of another person.
And in many ways, it still is.
I’m engaged to someone I adore. I love loving him. I love loving the people in my life. That part of me hasn’t changed. What has changed is realizing that loving doesn’t only live in relationships. It also lives in the way you tend to your own life.
Lately, loving looks like small things.
Flowers on a random Tuesday. Showering twice in one day because you wanted to feel new again. Wearing perfume to sleep, even though no one will smell it. Dressing cute in your own home, not for a FaceTime, not for a photo, but because your body is a place worth adorning.
I used to think this kind of attention was indulgent. Now I think it’s devotion.
There is something grounding about loving yourself in ways that don’t require witnesses. About choosing softness even when no one is around to applaud it. About curating your own experience of being alive.
For a long time, I reserved that energy for other people, my sweetness for romance, my attentiveness for friendships and my effort for moments that felt worthy of it. But lately I’ve been wondering why loving should only appear when someone else is present.
Why not practice it daily?
Now loving looks like getting myself coffee in the morning and actually sitting with it. It looks like stepping outside before I check my phone. It looks like going for walks and noticing small things, light on a building, flowers growing through concrete, the quiet choreography of people living their lives.
It looks like breakfast dates with friends who feel easy. Simple dinners that don’t require me to perform. It looks like posting a sensual photo because I liked the way I looked in that light, not because I need affirmation, but because the moment felt beautiful.
It looks like choosing which friendships make my feed, not out of pettiness, but out of narrative clarity. I get to decide how my life is told.
Loving, lately, also looks like something that used to make me uncomfortable: not responding immediately.
Lover girls are often conditioned to be available, to soothe quickly, to reassure and to prove we are kind. But loving myself has required something I once avoided: honoring the parts of my life that need quiet.
Sometimes I don’t respond because I haven’t responded to myself yet. Sometimes I let a text sit because I need to check in with my body first. Sometimes I choose silence not as punishment, but as protection.
And I no longer apologize for that.
I still pour love into the people in my life. But I also pour it into my routines, my space, my posture, and the way I enter a room.
When I imagine this version of me walking into a space, something subtle shifts. I walk taller. I sit straighter. My eye contact lingers longer. I’m not scanning the room for approval anymore, I’m observing it.
And there’s something magnetic about a woman who already feels settled inside herself.
For a while, I confused being a lover girl with being needed. I was the muse, the emotional anchor, the soft place people came to land. And while that role held beauty, it was also exhausting when it wasn’t reciprocated.
Now I understand something better.
Being a lover girl isn’t about depletion. It’s about devotion.
Devotion to the people you love. Devotion to the life you’re building. Devotion to the woman you’re becoming inside of it.
I am still a lover girl.
But loving, now, is more complete. It is generous but boundaried, sensual but self-contained, tender without being naive.
And maybe that’s what growing into womanhood actually is, realizing that your softness is not something to be exhausted. It is something to be maintained.
If you’ve been feeling this shift too, the desire to romanticize your own life, to move slower, to choose yourself without guilt and consider this your quiet permission.
You don’t need to stop being a lover girl.
You just learn how to love in a way that keeps you intact.
The Calendar
Becoming isn’t just something you write down.
It lives in the sway of your walk,
the way you hold yourself in a room,
and the quiet rhythm of how you gather.
Join our studio for an editorial photo walk 3/28/26 along Rodeo Drive.
Let us romanticize your becoming and join us for dinner
Be Apart of Our Archive
1 In the margins are fragments from readers. Stories, images, essays, quiet thoughts that deserved a place. Reserved for those who subscribe, held it, turn the page.