Beyond Valentine’s Day
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Beyond Valentine’s Day
Beyond Valentine’s Day and its declarations of love, gifts of roses and chocolates, dinner dates and romantic proposals, is the unadorned simplicity of love and the beauty of real romance that begins and ends with ourselves.
What if we are the love of our life – the ‘one’ we have been looking for? ...
We have a world marketed with products, goods, services and stories all founded on the promise of cupid’s arrow hitting home and bringing colour and meaning to our lives with love and romance. Finding 'The One' who will complete us is a driving force that has no social barrier to it – rich or poor, black, brown or white, man or woman, we grow up under an invisible umbrella of waiting or looking for 'The One'. Even when we say we are happy being single, underneath all the happiness is a hope for the one – a hope that we may dare not acknowledge because it hurts too much to think we may never find the love of our lives, dying a love virgin.
Yet even for those who find ‘true love’ comes the astounding research in the UK that shows 71% of divorces are for first marriages, not happily ever after. [i]
Getting along 24-7 in relationships
If we make relationships about love first rather than from fulfilling a need, we can live harmoniously together 24-7.
Many social and cultural voices tell us that love comes from someone or something outside ourselves. We learn from this to seek the warmth of love in any spark that comes our way and when a spark kindles or bursts into flame we call that true love and find ourselves entwined with another above all others, not caring about food or the chores of life, just the fire and warmth of this passion and the love we have found and never want to live without.
Beyond Valentine’s Day is the reality that comes when the warmth cools, the flowers stop and the chocolates and dinner fade into takeaway and nights at home. In this eventual reality we begin to feel the chill of our own emptiness, the disappointment of a faded flame, along with a side dish of doubt that what we had was love at all, or a serving of guilt that says we failed because we had love but lost it through something we did or didn’t say or do.
Scratch the surface of Valentine’s Day with its glamorous portrayal of love and romance and beneath it there is an ocean of broken hearts and smashed lives that populate the statistic of 71% of divorces being for first marriages. How can any of this pendulum of bliss to misery be love?
What if love is not something we get from another person, but something we find inside ourselves and get to share with everyone in our lives, including the person we choose to partner with or marry?
Those three little words
Why do we feel we prove our love the more times we say ‘I love you’?
Beyond Valentine’s Day and the lie it sells us about love being something we find outside ourselves and in another person, is the true love we’ve always known exists, a love that is consistent and everlasting, based not on being noticed but on noticing how marvelous we actually are and appreciating ourselves to the bone.
Discovering that the only source of love is and always has been, us, is the beginning of a life-long romance with the love of our lives – Ourselves.
Filed under
Love, Relationships, Romance, Marriage, Valentine's Day
