L.O.V.E

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Love love love, it’s another topic that I place right up there alongside money that I truly love to explore. I love love in all it’s forms! I adore hearing people’s love stories, love a good rom com and just generally love, LOVE!!

This week then it felt like a great moment to pause and reflect on that very topic.

Why? I hear you ask!

Well because this time last year (5th October 2024), my husband and I celebrated our union in South Africa with our Umabo ceremony, our traditional Zulu wedding.

A year on, looking back, it’s a perfect opportunity to reflect and it felt like the ideal time to pause and pay homage to the most incredible, wonderful, important person in my life. My husband!

Before I get into all the gooeyness of how amazing he is (and he really really is!!). I’ll take a few steps back and share a little (brief) bit of our story. Now, I am a very private person, and don’t often share or reveal much of my private life, I like to keep my private life, just that - private! However in the spirit of these letters and it being my intention to share my life and my story in an honest and authentic way, as a tool and a platform for transformation - my own and others! I want to to share a little of our union and the love I have in my life.

Before I give you a run through of our story, my very first thought that springs to mind on love is about privacy. I believe it is so important to maintain privacy in your most intimate relationship, keeping it a private and intimate sanctuary I think has to be one of the golden rules of LOVE.

I feel that too often, too many people allow the opinions, thoughts and unwarranted advice of others into their relationship and in doing so they create a gap and space that can be filled by those very thoughts, opinions and judgement. My theory is that life and nature are one and the same thing. In the same way weeds will find and fill any gaps, in concrete, walls, bricks and will use the space to grow, over time often making the crack even bigger. So too will the thoughts, opinions and judgements of others in your relationship create cracks and gaps that can grow and become dangerous. With Sibo and I, we have never allowed that space to be filled by anything other than ourselves! It is probably our most powerful lesson and intention that our relationship has been built upon. A very powerful principle indeed..

Okay so off my pulpit. Mr Sithole (Sibo) & I. Our brief history!

We met in 2012 in South Africa in a bar I was working in. Honestly I knew when I met him that I had met my soul mate, although at the time and for many years afterwards, I just thought that we were friend soul mates not in any way intimate soul mates. We just had this incredible connection and spark instantly, the way we were able to chat and open up to each other and just share our lives through conversation was truly magnificent. Such a connection with someone is rare and when found, something to be cherished.

Sibo and I have a beautiful love story over the years which I won’t go into now as one day I’ll publish it in a book. For now, the overview. In 2012 I met my soul mate in South Africa. Ten years later in 2022, we were married at Home Affairs in Durban, South Africa. In 2024 we celebrated our union with two ceremonies, one in Scotland and one in South Africa, surrounded by our friends and families. Both ceremonies were dreams come true. Two of the happiest days of my life, days that I would live over and over again if I could as I enjoyed them so much.

Being surrounded by such joy and having so much support and love aimed at your union is a very special blessing, to feel that much love was so deeply touching. I am eternally grateful to our families in Scotland and South Africa for how they showed up and showed out for us at both weddings, we are incredibly lucky.

I am always grateful that I have met and married my soul mate, the man I believe I was born to love. I am very aware that many people haven’t met their person, many struggle to find love and to feel truly happy within their relationships. So in the spirit of honouring my husband and love itself, I wanted to share this week some of what I believe to be the important principles for finding and keeping love.

1. Privacy Always. My first and most important principle of love is the one I mentioned above. I believe you gotta keep your damn mouth closed a little more when it comes to love. You’ve got to let yourself feel what you feel and experience what you experience. Your friends, your family, your colleagues, they don’t know what or who is right for you, only you know that. So listen to yourself and trust in that a little more.
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2. Quality Time. When getting to know a potential love, taking your time is really important and in this ultra connected world, it is becoming harder and harder to take our time and build strong foundations. When Sibo and I got back in touch in 2019 we went through lockdown in different continents. This meant that we had several years in which we couldn’t physically be near each other. All we could do was talk and get to know each other again. What this taught me was that we were given an opportunity to get to know each other deeply before we physically connected. Those years of getting to know each other through conversation have meant that we have been able to build an incredibly strong foundation, friendship and real intimacy. In today's world, it is so easy and encouraged actually to meet someone, exchange numbers, text and be in touch day and night, meet up, probably sleep together fairly fast, everything happens at lightning speed. The thing is though, that all the incessant texts and constant communication doesn’t actually allow you the time to get to know someone deeply or to really process your feelings for that person. It all can happen just too quickly. We confuse proximity and access, with knowing another person deeply. This is an important distinction to make.
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3. Know Thyself. A principle of life not only in love! When we know ourselves, and know ourselves well, we make better, more informed, honest and authentic choices that suit us. I can reflect on my experience in love and of this and not knowing myself through all the times I was searching for love. I was looking for love in all the wrong places because I didn’t know or really value myself (we will come to that trait in a second). What I mean by this is that I was willing to accept situations and people that were not good for me because I wasn’t clear on what I truly wanted in life or in a life partner. I was so hungry for love and the gaze of a man, that I was willing to accept low level interactions. When I started getting really clear on what I wanted (remember my 2018 life refocus) it became so much easier to say yes or more importantly NO to people entering my life who didn’t align with who I was and what I wanted from life. As I got to know myself more I became clear on the kind of partner I wanted to attract. It made all potential romantic interactions so much easier to navigate.
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4. Love Thyself. For me this one took time and came after the 2018 low I had in my life when I decided that I was no longer going to treat myself so badly. I went on a journey to show up for ME and began to honour and love myself. How this physically manifested itself for me, was that I gave up having random, meaningless and unsatisfactory casual sex. Instead I decided that I would wait until I met my husband. I didn’t know at that point who my husband would be or when I would meet him. I was very single at the time I made this decision, I just knew I was going to wait for that person, whoever he was. That decision was not about the men I would sleep with or someone I thought would be my husband. Rather it was 100% about honouring myself, valuing myself and the woman I knew myself to be. Previously I had been very willing to jump into bed casually with men all in the name of having a good time. Sometimes it felt great, sometimes it felt really rubbish, underneath it all, I realised, was this lack of self love and honouring of myself. I wanted more for myself, I realised that first I had to show myself the love that I deserved, I had to value myself and show up for myself in a much higher way before I could ever expect to attract a man into my life who would honour, value and love me in such a way.
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5. Become the partner & person you want. It’s so easy to look externally for the perfect mate and all the things you want from them, but asking ourselves some really hard questions about who we want to be and how we want to show up in life and in love is really important. I believe you get what you give, maybe even more so, you get what you intend. If you intend to be a great, loving, kind partner to someone and work to sculpt yourself to become this person, you are by default attracting that into your life. As above, start with you, show up for yourself, become more of who you are, lean into who you can be and work to become the dream partner. In doing so I believe you will attract - when the time is right - your dream partner. ​
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6. Learn the partner you are. This might sound a little “out there,” but it was one of the most powerful exercises I’ve ever done. I spoke to my exes and asked them what it was like to be in a relationship with me. I first came across this idea in Shan Boodram’s book A Game of Desire, and it gave me huge insight into who I was in relationships and how I showed up as a partner. One ex told me that I never really let him in. He said he had no idea how to support me when I was down because I never shared what I needed. He gave the example of another girlfriend who told him she liked baths or tea when she was feeling down, small things that helped him show up for her. With me, he said, he was never sure what I liked. That feedback hit hard. I realised I mistook privacy for protection, keeping walls up even in my closest relationships. I didn’t know myself well enough to say what made me feel seen, loved, or cared for, so I stayed distant. When I started my relationship with Sibo, I knew that had to change and I had to let my walls down. It wasn’t natural or easy, but I made it a practice to open up, share honestly, and let him in. I still sometimes slip back into guarding myself, but over time it has become easier, he knows me more deeply than anyone else and I have truly let him all the way in. I wouldn’t have understood the importance of this without that feedback. It was life-changing! I’ll always be grateful to Shan Boodram for the exercise and to my ex for his honesty and care.
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Ultimately, like everything else in life. Love is no different, it all starts with us. We have to shift our focus from looking externally for the perfect partner, the perfect person and instead first focus on becoming the best version of ourselves, we have to focus on moulding ourselves into an epic partner that someone would love to be with and we have to really work to love on ourselves and value ourselves first.

We can’t expect anyone else to love us, if we don’t love ourselves first!

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Don't take my word for it! I’m only 3 years into a marriage, so I thought for this letter I’d go and ask some OG’s who are 36 years deep into their marriage. The two people who have modelled love to me throughout my life! My parents.

My dad once told me that he believes that marriage to the right person can be the greatest thing in the world. Marriage to the wrong person must be the greatest hell in the world. When I asked my Mum what she thought the secret to great and lasting love and marriage were she told me 'Marry your best friend.'

I’m very lucky to have had a happy marriage modelled to me over the years. My parents have both now been married longer than they were ever single - that is quite an extraordinary place to get to!

Honour yourself and your right to an out of this world kinda love. Don’t settle for anything less than that.

I wish you a once in a lifetime, best friend, soul stirring, earth shattering, absolutely easy kinda love. Through the highs and the lows, walking this path with your soul mate!

And it starts with you, I pray you, we, all of us fall deeply, madly, in love with ourselves. Because we are each incredible, there is only one of us! How freaking incredible is that.

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With love, from my Rom Com, lover of love heart to yours.

<3 Emma.

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💛 Emma