Valentine’s Day: Finding The Love You Already Have
Our deep need to love and to be loved is romanticized through songs, movies, and books. We take chances, get our hearts broken, sometimes get disappointed, and in the end discover we’re all imperfect. The same goes for love.
We can feel lonely and alone, finding ourselves despising the dreaded “heart day,” especially when we are fresh out of a failed relationship, divorce, or newly separated. Maybe we compare our new partners to relationships idealized in romance novels, only to soon discover that we’ve built up the most unrealistic of expectations.
We can love the idea of love, but not understand that love is often unromantic. Love can be cleaning the toilets when it’s supposed to be your partner’s turn. It can be making coffee for your partner even if you’re not a coffee drinker. Love can be going on a diet just so that your significant other doesn’t feel the temptation to cheat.
Love can also be found in our faithful and loving fur babies, our dogs or cats that have stood by us unconditionally throughout all our mood swings. Despite our conditional, restrictive affections and often ill-tempered selves, our pets love us no matter what. And though we don’t have the picture-perfect idealized life or love that we assume we should have, the life we’ve got now is what we ought to appreciate.
The Bottom Line:
We love being in love and we love the sweeping romantic notions of what that picture looks like. Love is caring for partners who can longer care for themselves. It’s not running away but running towards a resolve. Love is talking through disagreements, communicating our needs, and learning to give as well as to receive. Love is understanding your partner’s love language and speaking that language, even when we’re not fluent in it.
Love is not trying to fill a void with someone. Only when we are whole does love find us and become an extension of ourselves.
Love is learning to love and appreciate what we have because what we already have is all we need.
Writing With Hope 
February 14, 2017 at 12:10 PM
Love is usually romanticized and it’s true that real love is the ordinary little things you do for each other each day. 🙂
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February 14, 2017 at 12:13 PM
Sometimes the little things are the most romantic. 🙂
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February 14, 2017 at 3:46 PM
Well said! 🙂 I hope that people will read this and become at least somewhat liberated from the fantasy of commercialized love that, as you said, is “romanticized through songs, movies, and books.” It’s interesting that you bring up the fact that “love is often unromantic”. My wife and I figured out a long time ago that romance is often a product of love, but never a substitution for it. 😉
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February 14, 2017 at 5:11 PM
At first we all want the “honey phase” to last and on rare occasions they do. You phrased it well, that commercialized love isn’t reality. What’s important are the unromantic, but often necessary things you do for one another. 🙂
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February 14, 2017 at 11:06 PM
Loved this post
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February 15, 2017 at 5:39 PM
Thanks & look forward to reading more of your work too. 🙂
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February 15, 2017 at 12:30 AM
The movie High Fidelity with John Cusack has one of my favorite scenes about love and what you have written reminds me of it. As he is trying to work things out with his long-term girlfriend, they meet over coffee and they have this conversation:
“Rob: The other girl, or other women, whatever. I mean, I was thinking that, they are just fantasies, you know? And they always seem really great, because there’s never any problems. And if there are, they are the cute problems, like we bought each other the same Christmas present, or she wants to see a movie I’ve already seen, you know. Then I come home… and you and I have real problems, you don’t want to see a movie I want to see, period. There’s no lingerie…
Laura: I *have* lingerie!
Rob: You have *great* lingerie! But you also have cotton underwear that’s been washed a thousand times, and it’s hanging on the thing, and… And they have it too, it’s just that I don’t have to see it, because it’s not in the fantasy… I’m tired ot the fantasy, cause it doesn’t really exist. And there are never really surprises and it never really…
Laura: Delivers?
Rob: Delivers. Right.
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February 15, 2017 at 5:39 PM
Good movie, I haven’t seen it in a while. 🙂
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February 16, 2017 at 12:07 PM
Lovely post. Hope all your days are filled with love. 🙂
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February 16, 2017 at 12:30 PM
Thank you and hope the same for you! ❤
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April 3, 2017 at 9:23 PM
this was so powerful for me- I’ve been wrangling with this idea for such a long time and i wish my friends would understand it as well! love is so diverse and unique at all times and i just wish we could all realize this
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April 5, 2017 at 5:04 PM
I’m so glad you connected with this post! We need to all realize that ❤ comes from within and not from an external source. Thanks for reading and commenting! I will check out your blog! ❤
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April 13, 2017 at 2:58 PM
So beautifully written.
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April 13, 2017 at 3:03 PM
Thank you ❤
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April 22, 2017 at 12:39 PM
[…] via Valentine’s Day: Finding The Love You Already Have — Writing With Hope […]
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April 22, 2017 at 12:41 PM
Thanks for the link!
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