The Poison Has Never Been Love

“Lason ang Pag-ibig sa Babaeng Puno ng Pangarap”

The world has repeated this sentence so often that it has begun to look like wisdom. Women inherit it like a warning, stitched into the hems of their ambitions—as though love were a sickness waiting to happen, an inevitable distraction from everything they are meant to become.

But I have always wondered why love is the one thing we insist on villainizing.

If love were truly poison, then who taught us to dream in the first place?

Was it not love that held our tiny hands before we learned to walk? Love that stayed awake while we slept? Love that celebrated every small victory until we believed we were capable of greater ones?

We speak of ambition as though it grows in isolation, when it has always been enriched by someone's unwavering faith in us.

An ambitious woman does not become extraordinary despite love.

More often than we admit, she becomes extraordinary because of it.

Perhaps our mistake is that we have reduced love to romance.

We hear the word and immediately think of sacrifice, compromise, and heartbreak. We picture candlelit dinners, broken promises, and stories that end with one person abandoning themselves for another. Yet romance is only one of the languages love speaks.

Love is also your mother packing lunch before dawn. It is the friend who reminds you who you are, after failure convinces you otherwise. It is the homeland that keeps calling your name no matter how far you wander. It is the promise your younger self whispered into the future, trusting that you would survive long enough to become the person you dreamed of being.

Then there is the love we owe ourselves. A love too often poured into everyone else's cup until our own is left empty. Yet it is this love that becomes our truest wings, lifting us not away from ourselves, but closer to the person we were always meant to become and people that are meant to walk beside us.

Without love for ourselves, dreams become obligations rather than aspirations. Without love for our families, success becomes hollow. Without friends to share the journey, achievement becomes lonely. Without love for our country, accomplishment loses its purpose. Without love for humanity, ambition risks becoming nothing more than another monument to the self.

How, then, can we call any of these poison?

The problem has never been love

The problem begins when love demands that we disappear.

When a woman is told to shrink so someone else can feel taller, it is not love.

When she abandons her voice to preserve another person's comfort, it is not love.

When her dreams become negotiable while another's remain unquestionable, it is not love.

Love does not diminish us.

It creates enough room for us to become more fully ourselves.

They often speak as if a woman must choose between being deeply loved and deeply accomplished—as though tenderness and ambition could not exist within the same heart, as though greatness belongs only to those who have mastered detachment.

But even history has never been shaped by people who felt nothing.

It has always been shaped by people who loved something enough to devote their lives to it.

They loved justice enough to fight for it.

They loved knowledge enough to pursue it relentlessly.

They loved their people enough to stand before them.

They loved freedom enough to risk everything for it.

Even revolution is born from love—for what else is revolution if not the refusal to watch what you cherish be destroyed?

Love has never been the opposite of ambition

It has always been its heartbeat.

So no, I refuse to believe that love is poison to a woman full of dreams because every dream worth chasing begins with love for something beyond ourselves.

And if we strip love away in the name of protecting our ambitions, we may one day arrive at success only to discover that we have forgotten why we wanted it in the first place.

A woman who knows how to love—herself, her people, her purpose, and those who choose to walk beside her—is the woman most capable of changing the world.