love.

What a perfect day to talk about love.

Having spent the last 5 years living single, Valentine’s had generally become a holiday of dread to me. What I have come to realize this year is that such a feeling is completely unnecessary- and in fact not useful.

If I could sum up the difference between last year and now, it would be this: I learned to love myself.

We spend hours in the day as a society longing for the wrong kind of love. Love for family. Love for wealth. Love with a lifelong partner. Music and film have presented us since childhood with love. But as a romantic child always looking for the philosophy in things, I was always looking outside of myself for the answers. I never considered they existed in my own mind.

My childhood was spent absorbing. Learning about the relationships around me. Learning how I fit into them. After my first decade, I learned how I didn’t fit into all the relationships around me. Groups, cliques, friendships that lasted for or ended in a day. The flight of belonging and the desperation to grasp back on.

It wasn’t until my twenties that I was ready to date myself. I got to know who I was, tested the waters. I asked questions and tried on different hats (or careers or boyfriends). Heartbreak with men and women and family. I questioned my way through a neverending philosophy degree, then turned to personal development for the second half of this decade to learn the deeper side of what makes me ME.

But as I near the end of this era, I see that love is my next step. I have reached a point of acceptance for everything I am and all that I am not. It’s not second nature yet, but I am confident my thirties will help me get there.

This is what makes me see love and Valentine’s in a whole new light. Consumerism has convinced us that the holiday is about romance and sex. I see it now as a celebration of love. And love can come in any form, for any one. How we choose to experience our love on the one day devoted to it is exactly that- our choice.

I watched this video today, and I got it. These people were asked to focus on love- any kind, for any one- while in an MRI machine that evaluated their dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin levels. What caught my attention is how all of the contestants experienced an overwhelming sense of abundance after spending the time in that machine focussing only on love for a few minutes. 

I can't help but question; when was the last time you spent 5 minutes focussed on love in your life? Have you ever devoted time to thinking about loving you? If these people after 5 minutes of focussed thoughts on love could experience that high for other people and things, how would it affect your life to have those feelings of belief and acceptance for yourself?

However your Valentine’s turned out, ask yourself; what love did I neglect this year? What can I focus on differently? What do I take for granted? What am I grateful for? Take 5 minutes in your day to invest in love. Surely, it will repay you tenfold.