Love is such a tricky thing. How we love and what makes us feel loved is formed from our first days on this earth. Today is a day to celebrate love.
Being a single woman on Valentine’s day, I often find myself kind of rolling my eyes at this day, and I know I’m not alone in that. But this year I choose to make today a celebration of all love, not just romantic love between partners. Today I’m celebrating the love I share with my children, my friends and for myself.
Romantic love can be an amazing, beautiful thing. It can also be destructive, cold and callous. How we learn to love others, and how we feel loved is the result of our life experiences. Because the first ways we learn about love is through the people we grow up with, those experiences are deeply rooted in our psyche. We are the result of the cumulative experiences of our extended families, and what they believed about what love is, and how to show it to another human being. In short, we are all flawed, imperfect and many times broken. This is what makes romantic love so hard, and yet, we crave it. So much so that it becomes part of our identity. Our social status is tied to our identification as single or married. For hundreds of years, a woman’s worth was determined solely by her marital status.
Our society deems romantic love as the most important kind of love, but I’d like to challenge that idea. I believe that platonic love (love between parents and children, friends, relatives and others) is far more important, and therefore worthy of being celebrated today. This kind of love is so much more forgiving, because it’s not bound up in the social constructs of romantic love. It isn’t used to for financial gain or a change in social status. It’s free to be given at will. It’s a complete choice. The only thing to be lost or gained from it, is love in return.
The best life, is a life full of love. ANY love. Celebrate all the love you find in your life today. Don’t allow the presence or absence or a romantic partner determine how you feel today. Your worth is not determined by your status as single or attached. Your worth comes from inside, from the love you freely give to others and too yourself. Happy Valentine’s Day.
