Love the Ones You’re With
“Love loves to love love…You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.” — James Joyce
How is your heart on this day that we celebrate love?
Are You Feeling Love or Lack?
For many, Valentine’s Day can challenge our mental wellness, bringing loneliness and depression rather than chocolate, roses, and candlelit dinners for two. February 14th can feel like a day we celebrate one kind of love — a love we humans elevate and prize above all the rest — romantic love. The love of one. The one. Our one true love.
Sadly, it’s a day when many of us focus on the one we lack, the one we’ve lost, or the one we long for rather than celebrating the sea of love that we’re soaking in. And this day — a day that should be inclusive of love in all its forms — is one that has historically excluded large numbers of us, myself included as a queer woman, because our love doesn’t fit the restrictive, traditional definitions of romantic love.
In the absence of the one, we can end up feeling less than. It’s like we’re looking at love through a pinhole camera trained on what is often an unoccupied spot, a hole in our hearts that can feel like a vast, bottomless chasm. If only we had a zoom lens, we could expand our field of view to see the abundance of love that surrounds us.
Happy Couples Everywhere
As we are CRM-bombed with ideas for the perfect gifts, the perfect date, and the perfect recipes to celebrate our beloved, those of us who are unpartnered, who have experienced a loss of love, or whose relationships don’t live up to our romantic ideals can end up feeling anything but love and loved on this day. And because of something called the frequency illusion, we suddenly start noticing seemingly happy couples everywhere — attentional awakening in the brain courtesy of all the Valentine’s Day programming—compounding our sense of alienation.
In my nearly 56 years on this planet, I’ve spent far more Valentine’s Days flying solo rather than celebrating with a romantic love. One of my primary relationships officially came to a close on the eve of the day of love. In 2012, my then husband/now wasband and I chose February 13th to consciously uncouple, exchanging rings in reverse over a candlelit sushi dinner, celebrating the love we’d shared and the gifts we’d exchanged. The timing seemed fitting. We went into the relationship with love and I am grateful that we were able to release it with love.
We are all Polyamorous
In truth, we are all polyamorous. And by polyamory, I’m not talking about that sex-positive being who’s energetically humping your leg and undressing you with those hungry eyes from across the room. Nor am I saying that we all belong in a thruple, a V, or a Z. Polyamory at its root means the love of many. If we expand our narrow focus on the one — on romantic love — we’ll find that there is love around us always, love that comes in myriad forms all of which are worthy of celebration.
In the early 70s, in the midst of the free love era, Stephen Stills wrote the line: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”. Why not expand this invitation to love the ones you’re with.
Attention is Love
During a heart sutra meditation experience yesterday, our teacher, paraphrasing Tara Brach, said that: “Attention is love.” They say where attention goes, energy flows — what you focus on is amplified — so why not amplify love rather than lack. We are all one, we are all connected so love is all around us always. Together with a simple shift in our perspective, we can realize the one love, one heart of which Bob Marley sings.
This Valentine’s Day I am partner-free and awash in love and I am choosing to focus my awareness on all the love I have. It starts with self-love. Because if I can’t love all of me, no one else can. To be seen, loved, and met fully by another, we must first see, love, and meet all of ourselves. Self-love means loving and making space in my heart for all of me. Mine is an abundant heart with space and grace for all that I am, all that I’ve been, and all that I will be.
From this self-loving core, I am blessed to be part of a web of interconnected hearts that spreads around the globe and into other dimensions of space and time. A web of love that is stronger the more threads that I weave into it. All the love I have ever felt is still alive in me, living on long past the bounds of the relational containers it sprang from.
In honor of my Celtic roots, I feel married to the land that I steward in West Sonoma county (one of my most generative relationships yet!). And the mindful mystic in me chooses to believe that we are all one — each of us cells in a massive collective heart— so I find myself with an infinite number of ones to love.
The Energy of the Universe is Love
The energy of the universe is love and ours is an abundant universe. Love is all around us always if we allow ourselves to see and feel it. Whether it’s self-love, the love of one or the love of many, let’s be inclusive. Love is love. Whether eros, romantic love between a he and a she, two shes, or a he, a she, and a they; philia, platonic love of our chosen or birth family; canophilia (dog) or ailurophilia (cat), the love between a human and our beloved four-legged family members; or nemophila, the love I feel for the sacred redwood forest I call home, it’s all love.
What if all others were significant?
What if all love was true?
What if we loved not just the one we’re with but all the ones we’re with?
On this Valentines Day, let’s celebrate love in all its forms. Let’s focus on the love we have rather than the love we don’t. I for one am choosing to celebrate the love that I’ve had, the love that I have, and the love that is yet to come.
Won’t you join me?