I’ve always loved Seal.  There’s something magical about his raspy, not quite smooth, yet intensely velvety voice that takes me to places unimaginable—comfort, warmth, maybe even possibilities—whenever he begins to croon. He’s one of the most musically complex artists of his generation. His husky baritone has carried him credibly from acid house to intimate ballads to classic soul without ever losing his emotional depth. That’s because he’s a songwriter first, and his music never abandons that principle. 

Back in 2003, when Seal IV first dropped, the song that held me the most was Love’s Divine. Seal, in ways only he could, was articulating something The Four Agreements (Don Miguel Ruiz) had already tried to teach me about myself. I first purchased the book in the summer of 2000 for myself and a guy I was seeing at the time. I had been on a quest to understand myself and my relationships with others better, and had just finished reading Friendship with God (Neale Donald Walsch) , In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want (Iyanla Vanzant), and If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path (Charlotte Kasl). Based on The Four Agreements’ promise to rapidly transform my life into a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love, I decided to give it a chance.

The summer of 2000 wasn’t just about the books; it was about him. I’d met the guy I was seeing not long before and we fell into each other the way gay men often do, fast, consuming, and completely unbothered by self-preservation. Initially it seemed right. We shared the same beliefs, had traveled similar spiritual paths, and seemed to genuinely vibe the first time we formally met.  

“I’ve been wanting you for years,” he said. I wasn’t prepared for that. 

I smiled. “Word?”

“Seriously. But I’ve been too afraid to approach you.” He laughed a little, like he couldn’t believe he was actually saying it out loud. “Call me what you want—but I was scared as hell.”

“Scared of what!?”

He got quiet. “Of you not wanting me. Of being rejected.”

I stood there lost.  No one had ever admitted anything like that to me before—that they’d been watching, wanting, and desiring me from a distance. And honestly? That alone did it. 

"Please forgive me, now I see that I've been blind." —Seal, Love's Divine

All those books. All that seeking. And I still walked straight into it with my eyes wide shut. This pattern isn’t unique to gay men, but for many of us it runs particularly deep—and the questions it raises are ones I’ve struggled with all my adult life. Why do so many of us enjoy the emotional roller coaster toxic relationships take us on?  Why do we expect so much from so little?  Why do we find it difficult to resist love-bombing rides?  Why do we cringe every time we find ourselves in the same situation, only to blink, and find ourselves right back there again? When you spend your formative years hiding who you are instead of learning how to love, you arrive at adulthood emotionally eager and dangerously inexperienced. 

Unsurprisingly, we ended before the summer was out. But the ending wasn’t the hard part. It was everything I had built around him that collapsed with him. I had convinced myself through some intoxicating blend of emotion, physical connection, and spiritual certainty that he was the one. I did what the immature in love do so well. I made plans. Built dreams. Assigned a future to something that hadn’t yet earned a present. And when it began to fall apart, so did I. Every piece of the dream I’d built around him took something of me with it. So, I did what made the most sense at the time—I blamed love and swore it off completely. But that’s what happens when you center someone else in your story. You forget you are the author.  

"When you don't love, respect, and honor yourself, then you allow other people to treat you without love, respect, and honor." —Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

The Four Agreements was still within reach when things fell apart. And it wasn’t gentle about what it showed me. I saw how freely I assumed. How deeply I internalized everything he did and didn’t do as a direct reflection of my worth. How many promises I made to myself that I quietly abandoned the moment they inconvenienced what we had. I hadn’t protected myself at all. I handed myself over completely and called it love. And well, it wasn’t.

What does any of this have to do with Love’s Divine?  Everything. Seal and Don are doing the same work, one through prose, one through music. And each of them helped me arrive at the same place: clarity about who I am, what I need, and how I should engage others. In 2000 when that relationship ended, I kept moving, scars and all. I’d lost belief in myself and my ability to choose the right partner, but I’d retained just enough faith in love to be dangerous. Three years later, when I heard Love’s Divine it served as a mirror. The blindness Seal confesses to, the broken spirit, the desperate plea for love to help him know his name…I’d lived every line and hadn’t known what to call the desperation for love until I heard him sing it. But even more, it helped me understand that love doesn’t arrive in a whispered confession on a street corner in the middle of a Pride celebration. It arrives when you’ve done the work of knowing yourself well enough to receive it and not mask it as something it’s not. Don had been saying the same thing all along. It just took Seal’s voice to make it land. 

That’s the innate beauty of artistry, its ability to help you understand the parts of yourself that go unspoken until tapped. Which is why it matters what we call art. So much of what passes for artistry today is just capitalism in costume. Shock for its own sake. Provocation dressed up as freedom. And somewhere in all that noise the most important part of what it means to be an artist gets lost: the capacity of art to tell us the truth about ourselves. Seal has never lost that, and neither has Don. They both understood something that gets forgotten in the pursuit of spectacle: that the highest purpose of any art, any wisdom, any love worth having, is to know your name, first. Not someone else’s version of it. Yours. The one that exists before the assumptions, before taking things personally, before the reckless surrender to someone who hadn’t yet earned the access to you. I know my name now. It took more relationships than I’d like to admit, more books than I can count, and more songs than I’ll ever remember to get me there, but I know it. And every time an artist like Seal reminds me, I remember that I always did.