Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on. — Billie Holiday

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

Author: Billie Holiday

Insight: Most of us grow up believing love should be constant—a steady hum underneath everything, reliable as electricity. But Holiday's image cuts through that myth with something truer to actual experience. Love does fluctuate. Some days you feel flooded with it; other days you're bone-dry. The person you adore can feel like a stranger after an argument. Your kids exhaust your patience one moment and break your heart with tenderness the next. This isn't a sign that something's broken. It's just the reality of being human. The tricky part is that we often panic when the flow decreases, interpreting it as the relationship dying rather than just shifting. We start questioning everything—"Do I still love them? Did I ever?" When really, the faucet turning down doesn't mean the water's gone. It's still there in the pipes. Understanding this helps us weather the dry spells without catastrophizing. It also takes some of the pressure off those high-intensity moments to mean everything forever. Love can be fierce and present one day, quiet and dormant the next, and both states are completely natural. That permission to let it ebb and flow might be the most realistic gift we can give ourselves.