The Kind of Love No Man Could Ever Compete With

what man could possibly compete with oil paint and a good brushstroke?

There’s something I’ve realized as I’ve been working on this latest painting. It’s not polished. It doesn’t even know what it wants to be yet. But in the process of creating it, I stumbled into a clarity I’ve never known anywhere else.

This—standing here with paint on my hands, letting instinct pull me into something I never saw coming—is love. Not romantic love, not the love of being chosen, not the love of being needed. It’s the love of being complete.

I don’t know another word for it. Complete is it.

And here’s the truth: no man has ever made me feel that way. Not once. Not even close. Men, in fact, have often been the opposite—conditional, demanding, sometimes even diminishing. But this? This flow of color, this quiet revelation that blooms on canvas—this gives me back everything I thought I was missing.

Maybe that’s why no man stands a chance with me anymore. Not because I’m closed off. Not because I don’t want connection. But because there is nothing anyone could offer that’s greater than what I feel in this space of creating. And if love doesn’t at least meet me here—at this level of clarity and completeness—I don’t need it.

What started as a plan to paint black roses became something else entirely. It unfolded, like all true things do, and it showed me something I didn’t know I was ready to see.

That art isn’t just what I make. Art is the only place I’ve ever felt the kind of love that doesn’t leave me questioning, auditioning, or grasping. The kind that doesn’t take. The kind that doesn’t vanish.

The kind that just is.

And maybe that’s the whole point.