How To: Find Love

As a preface, this post is for someone, so bear with the high sap-factor. 

As children we learn from our parents, elders, siblings, friends, and it seems like just about anyone how to love. We see it in romantic comedies, we hear about it in folklore, and we're told that "true love" exists, you just have to keep looking to find it. Loving is so ingrained into our minds that many of us feel incomplete without it being loved or having someone to love. Those people are the ones that are "in love with being in a relationship" and not necessarily their partner, spouse, etc. Love, it seems, is akin to dying and paying taxes... they're all things we must do. 

But this concept of love is... well... false. It's quite clear that from day one we're taught that love comes from someone else. That personal validation and self worth only comes from another and not from within. I submit to you that this is not false but also nonsensical. As the great Ru Paul puts it "If you don't love yourself how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?" You can choose to not like her, but the drag diva gets it. She knows that before you can express love to someone else you have to love yourself... and that street runs both ways. You can't expect someone else to love you if you don't even love you. Did you have your epiphany yet? I'll say it again. You can't love someone or expect someone to love you until you love yourself. That's step one. That's your starting block.

But how do you find love? Where do you find love?

The easy answer is that you don't. I don't mean this in a dark or brooding way, but you can't go looking for love. I believe that once you love yourself, love finds you. It sneaks up on you in the aisle of a grocery store, at a swanky dive bar, or in an online chat room. It just appears to you, seemingly out of nowhere. I honestly - down to the core- believe that love isn't something you can force. It's something that finds you and that you and your love build together.  

So you ask, "how do you know this, how you can you believe this to be so fundamentally true?" Your answer: because I'm living it. I'm lucky enough to have found someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. I wasn't looking for love when we met, and in fact it was quite the opposite. I had just gotten out of a bad relationship and being with someone other than a fling was the last thing on my mind. But just as we think we know we know what we want the universe throws a wrench in our plans, Murphy's law takes over and we're at the mercy of "what is simply meant to be." We met while at a military training installation, our first encounter was at the gym and our first "date" was at a less than clean Chinese restaurant. I had no expectations and yet, after that first goodbye I knew that there was something more to this than I previously thought or could have ever imagined. Every date thereafter, every late night reconnaissance mission for slushies, every moment in the car or at the schoolhouse was just... right. It's very clear to me now that our love and appreciation of ourselves, or understanding of our own being is not only what set us to love, but also what set us up to be loved and fall in love with one another. Even though we're separated by seven thousand miles, an ocean, and countless countries, we're still in love. Our love breaks the barrier of space (and I'd like to believe time since technically I live in the future). We found love because we loved ourselves. We found love because we didn't need to love someone else. We'll keep loving because we were brought together by fate and will stick together because of love and dedication. 

To that special someone I'd like to simply say "I love you. Always and forever." 

I hope that you, the reader can love yourself so that you can, in turn, be loved and love someone else. It's step one that's the hardest. Every step thereafter will find you.