On Love, Capacity, and the Parts of Us Shaped Too Early

February arrives every year carrying a very specific demand.

To feel. To declare. To perform love loudly, convincingly, and on time.

I do not often write about romantic love. Not because it does not matter, but because in this part of the world, love rarely announces itself the way February expects it to. It is quieter, more restrained, more practical. It is shaped early—by survival, by responsibility, by environments that teach us to endure before they teach us to feel.

And yet, February insists. So this piece is for those who love differently, late, cautiously, or incompletely. For those who sense that something in them is capable of tenderness, but also know that life has already left its marks. For those who carry affection in unfamiliar forms. For those who recognize love not as a feeling they lack, but as a capacity that has been shaped—sometimes narrowed, sometimes sharpened—long before the person who might have needed it most ever arrived.

This is not a celebration of romance as it is sold to us. It is a reflection on love as it is lived.

We often speak about love as if it arrives in a vacuum.

As if it is something we simply choose, step into, or recognize on sight. As if love should feel instinctive, generous, soft, and immediately knowable. As if the right person automatically unlocks the right version of us.

But love does not arrive to us untouched. It meets us where we already are.

By the time we encounter the kind of love that asks for care, gentleness, and emotional availability, many of us have already been shaped by other demands. Survival. Responsibility. Endurance. Silence. We have learned how to manage, how to push through, how to be self-contained. We have learned how not to need too much.

So perhaps the more honest question is not whether we know how to love, but what kind of loving our lives have prepared us for.

In many parts of the world—Kenya included—life does not pause to teach tenderness. Even in middle-class homes, survival is not abstract. There is pressure to succeed, to stabilise, to carry family expectations, to stay alert. Emotional expression is rarely centred. Physical affection is often restrained. Care is shown through duty, provision, and sacrifice rather than words or touch.

You grow up learning how to hold yourself together long before you learn how to hold another person gently.

And then, sometimes much later, love appears.

Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind announced by certainty. But a quiet, unexpected possibility. A person who asks something different of you. Someone who requires presence rather than performance, openness rather than strength.

This is where the fracture often happens.

Many of us are shaped long before we meet the person we would need to be gentle with. Certain paths cannot be untaken. Certain experiences harden specific edges. You may recognize love when it arrives, yet feel unequipped to meet it fully. Not because you are cruel or unwilling—but because the tools you were given were designed for a different life.

In this recognition, there is often grief.

The grief of realizing that had you known such a love was possible, you might have protected your inner world more carefully. You might have been softer where you were sharp, slower where you learned speed, more trusting where you learned caution. But you did not know. You were busy surviving.

This grief is not loud. It does not demand resolution. It lingers.

And yet, it would be incomplete to end the story there.

Because recognizing limitation is not the same as being incapable of love.

In environments shaped by necessity, love is often rerouted rather than absent. It takes forms that are practical before they are poetic. It may not sound like affirmation or look like ease. It may not involve hand-holding or verbal reassurance. But it shows up.

It shows up in consistency. In reliability. In being there day after day. In a cup of tea already waiting in the evening. In a life quietly adjusted to make room for another.

Many people here do not lack the capacity to love. They lack the vocabulary they were never taught.

We measure ourselves against ideals that were formed in different conditions, then conclude we are deficient when we do not perform love in the same way. We question whether affection that feels restrained is genuine. Whether care without softness counts. Whether presence without romance is enough.

But love is not a single expression. Capacity is uneven.

Some parts of us may be irrevocably worn down by the lives we have lived. Others have been sharpened and groomed to hold different things. You may not know how to offer reassurance, but you know how to show up. You may not be fluent in tenderness, but you are fluent in commitment. You may struggle with emotional language, but you understand responsibility deeply.

This does not make one form superior to another. It makes them different.

Recognizing this is not an excuse to harm others, nor is it a call to remain unchanged. It is an invitation to honesty. To know which forms of love you cannot safely offer, and which ones you can—fully, steadily, without destruction.

Perhaps the question, then, is not why love feels so difficult or why companionship sometimes slips through our fingers. Perhaps it is whether we still recognize love when it does not arrive in the shape we were taught to expect.

Whether we can allow space for care that does not impress, advance, or announce itself. Care that simply reminds us that we are human, shaped by our histories, doing the best we can with the capacities we have.

Some loves arrive after we have already changed. And sometimes, the task is not to undo what has shaped us, but to honor what remains intact—and learn how to offer it with care.