Love Is Whatever You Need It to Be
Love is for you. | November LOVE Challenge: Week 4
PROMPT: Define Love.
At the time of writing this, it’s the Monday after Thanksgiving and I am TIRED. I hosted Thanksgiving dinner with my entire family for the first time at my own house and it was hectic. I spent over a week cleaning and organizing and buying things and cleaning again trying to get my home in a state to host about 20 relatives (including elderly people and babies and relations I’ve never met before in my life) for the most important meal we eat all year.
I was really stressed out in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. I wanted everything to be perfect. I planned everything down to the directions people should take to get to my house to the time they should arrive to the menu activities and games we could play once we finished eating. I bought new furniture because I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want there to be any reason someone could say they didn’t enjoy themselves.
Many things did not go according to my plan. For one thing, it rained two out of the three days people were here and a lot of the outings and activities I had planned had to be canceled. No one arrived at the times I had so carefully planned and people brought food that wasn’t on my pre-planned menu so we had to hustle to find room in the refrigerator. One of my toilets stopped working, the TV wasn’t and I ran out of aluminum foil.
But I think I’m the only one who noticed so many things had gone wrong. By the end of the holiday everyone was telling me how much fun they had and how comfortable my place was and how good the food was (even though we had to cook it in no less than 4 different places) and how they couldn’t wait to come back and get together again.
And even though I was exhausted, I felt really good.
Love is both a feeling and an action. Love is many, complicated things and it’s also really simple.
I live alone and spend a lot of time with my thoughts which are typically kinda harsh and critical. At the time of Thanksgiving specifically, my self-love supply was critically low (thanks to the general loneliness of the holidays and also good ol’ PMS). It was nice for three days to be surrounded by people who care about me, who want to help me, who would be happy I existed no matter what I did or didn’t do. It felt good to have so many people feel proud of me. It was nice to have a break from the negativity in my head and just feel loved. I felt replenished, I felt loved.
Is that what love is for me? Someone being proud of me? That seems too simple and also like it requires the input of other people to be effective. That can’t be all love is.
Gary Chapman wrote The 5 Love Languages in 1992 to describe how we as human beings give and receive love. He narrowed it down to five actions: Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Quality Time, Giving/Receiving Gifts, and Acts of Service. Our affinity toward any combination of these actions is how we both show and receive love. I’ve always been a Words of Affirmation girlie, hence why people telling me I did a good job at a hard task boosted my spirits. But sometimes that alone, or any combination of Chapman’s love languages, is not all I need to feel loved.
Movies define love in a lot of different ways. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” according to the classic film Love Story. “Love is passion, obsession, someone you can’t live without” in Meet Joe Black (underrated movie). According to Noah in The Notebook (overrated movie), love “awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.” These versions of love sound fun and fantastic and safe. Maybe that’s what love is: security. Knowing that there’s a person who just gets you. That’s what family is to me, for sure.
In one of my favorite books of all time, All About Love: New Visions, feminist writer bell hooks defines true, genuine love as a mix of various ingredients: Care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open, honest communication. She goes on to write that love is a “combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect.” This has always felt like the best definition of love to me. But it doesn’t make a lot of room for growth or exceptions. I’ve felt love from people who didn’t openly communicate with me. And I’ve loved myself even though I’m sometimes not disciplined in my commitment to my own care. Does love have to be the same thing all the time?
To me, love is a combination of all the things I’ve learned and read and felt. Love is peace and it’s pride in someone. It’s quiet in the storm of life. It’s protection and security. It’s freedom. It’s family and community to share that love with. It’s other people and it’s you all by yourself. It’s all the things everyone says it is and whatever else you want it to be. Love is for you. It’s for you to define and you to receive. Love is what others give to you and what you give to yourself. Love is both a feeling and an action. Love is many, complicated things and it’s also really simple.
Love is whatever you need and whatever you can give to yourself to feel your best.
This entry was written for WEEK 4 of the Finding the Right Words November Challenge under the theme of LOVE. Follow along using the graphic above and write about whatever comes to mind with the corresponding prompts. Share with me using the tag #FTRW or email me at jdoggett9 [at] gmail.
There’s no wrong way to journal. You just gotta find the right words. Happy Writing!