Life
4 Reasons Why It's OK To Want Love
Sadly, we've made "love" into a sort of game, if not competition. We have this strange collective mindset, one that tells us that love functions on a scale of worthiness — the more objectively beautiful or wealthy or generally desirable you are, the more love you have. Sadly, it's not that simple. (Maybe it would be if it were!) The reality is that none of those things create genuine connections, and it's not just beautiful and wealthy and perfectly put together people who find and cultivate and "deserve" love. It's everyone. It's everywhere we fall on the human scale. It's only a matter of how long it takes us to realize that we don't have to be perfect, we just have to be open to it.
It's OK to want love. That's a sentence that so few people say and yet so many need to hear, and truly accept. It's a part of how we function as human beings. It's OK to want love and it's OK to refuse to settle for anything less than that true, heart-to-soul connection. And it's OK to keep trying, even when it doesn't work out. In fact, the happiest people tend to be, ironically, the ones with the longest and messiest track records.
Love Is Crucial For Humans To Survive
Despite what the twisted dark cynical world would have you believe, your desire for companionship and love is not rooted in an inherent flaw, it's literally a part of our survival. We desire inclusiveness and community out of a really core part of ourselves. The part that wants to, you know, keep the human race going. Now, that's a really reductionist way of putting it, but the point is that you're not broken for wanting love, and you're not broken for not having it, either.
To Share Your Love Is The Most Noble Way To Spend Your Life
The reality is that there's nothing more worthwhile than to devote your life to love. The problem is when people start to use what they think is "love" to make their existence more palatable, rather than to genuinely enrich it. Love is what runs between families and friends and yes, of course, romantic partners. It's what's present when you're doing the thing you most enjoy doing, and it's what's inherently within you, even if you can't always see or feel it. To connect to and express that love as best you can is the greatest thing any one of us mere mortals can attempt, and the extent to which we can put love into every part of our lives, the greatest we can do.
You Should Respect Yourself Enough Not To Accept Any Less Than The Real Deal
People who are still "wanting" love are, categorically, those who don't have it, and that's OK. The reality is that most people who "don't have love" are the same people who refuse to settle for anything less than what they know they deserve. Actively seeking love isn't what people who are so inherently flawed that they don't already have it do — it's what people who refuse to give up on trying to find the real thing do.
Every Failed Attempt At Romance Shows You What It's Not, So You Can Get Closer To Knowing What It Is
I think there is this stigma that serial daters who can't seem to commit to something "right" are somehow "less than" people who find their soulmates right out the gates of their late teens. But the opposite is true. People who have dated a lot are people who more deeply understand how love and relationships and people and their own selves work. They've learned. They've learned what they want, what they don't, what works, what doesn't, and all that's done is brought them closer to finding what's truly right — not just what they found themselves stuck with, and accepted.
