Growing up, I thought love was a definitive feeling. You were either in love or out of love. You liked someone and then, suddenly, one day it tipped over into love and a new level of emotion was unlocked. It was qualifiable and sure. When I was little and my OCD was raging, I went through a period when I wouldn’t even tell my parents I loved them because I wasn’t sure what love was and I didn’t want to lie. How do you know if what you’re feeling counts as love if the only way to know is to know? You know?
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this obsession around “real love” in romantic relationships has hurt a lot of people. (Especially those with anxious minds or relationship OCD.) Society has led us to believe that love, particularly of the romantic kind, is a definable thing, which implies it is both felt and expressed in a certain way. But the reality is that love takes many forms. The moments when I feel the most love or loved are unique to me, my relationship and what else is going on in my life.
Through this understanding, I thought it would be fun to share some of those moments as a way for me to better appreciate my own definition of this intangible thing and to inspire others to figure out what love looks like and feels like for them. This way, we aren’t sitting around waiting for a clear and certain feeling that might never arrive. Instead, we are collecting and noticing moments that are the building blocks of something we’ve decided to call love.
I feel love…