Love starts at Home

Love is one of the most sought after and thought about concepts since the inception of humanity. We spend our lives trying to find love, be loved and feel loved. Our obsession with being loved makes rejection that much harder to take but not having love at all feels worse. So we are in endless pursuit until we find someone who can immerse us in a love that makes us feel a little less alone. We form friendships with the intention to have that friend forever. We don't connect, we attach because without strings, we feel too vulnerable, too exposed. 

Every time I think about the sentiment that love is freedom not ownership, I think about how we grow up making love all about the latter. We want undying devotion and commitment. If it doesn’t last forever then it wasn’t real, it's all or nothing and so on. We have turned relationships into voluntary, comfortable prisons where you can get in but please don’t ask to leave else everything will unravel. 

I wonder, are we loving or are we simply latching on to people asking them to give us what we can’t give to ourselves? 

Our incessant need for love drives our interactions and how we fare in relationships. The more you feel deprived of love, the more you want it and of course, the greater your efforts in seeking or holding on to it. People who don’t feel as deprived on the other hand aren’t so incessant and insufferable. They know that love is meant to be shared but they also have an unconscious knowing that they are never without it. People who have a deep rooted sense of self-love seem to understand that giving love isn’t dangerous nor is opening yourself up to receiving it. 

What is dangerous however, is using external sources of love as your barometer of self-worth. You can’t make someone love you if they don’t. Nor can you keep someone in your life when they want to leave. When your source of love is external, someone leaving you is gut wrenching. When we haven’t yet learned that we are our first source of love, love can seem finite and with every lost friend and failed lover, it starts feeling like you’re running out. Self-love isn’t a superficial millennial fad, it’s your lifeline to better relationships and wholesome connections. As you learn to love yourself you also learn to be what you need. 

Love is our birthright and the essence of our being. At our best, we are love. At our most broken, we are love. It is our job to remember how to show up as love, so we can always show up for ourselves. 

Even those closest to you will never be able to take your place. We all need our own love, our own acceptance and our own permission to be here. We need room to be ourselves, with ourselves. We need time to heal from heartache by healing ourselves. We need to be able to handle rejection by being enough comfort and love, on our own. It sounds amazing in theory but can be very lonely & heartbreaking but once you’ve mended your own heart, you learn that you were what you’ve been longing for all this time. 

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