Making Love Manageable, Part 2: How to Treat the Hurt

The other day, I stumbled across this movie called Stuck in Love. The first sentence of the movie is the quote you see above, and it captivated me in so many ways. I thought a lot about love after that, what it really means, and I concluded one simple thing about it that probably isn’t news to you at all – love hurts.

It doesn’t make much sense at all. Isn’t love supposed to make us happy? If so, then why does it feel sometimes like love just reaches into our bodies, pulls out our heart, and stumps on it as we seemingly disintegrate into a million pieces?

When we love so much and love so hard, we necessarily give it our all. Our lives are no longer our own. We feel a total loss of control that makes us fearful of what might happen to us if that love fails. If that love fails, will we, too, fail?

On the other side, battling the fear of losing ourselves, is the fear of disappointment. Because we love the other person and care about them, we see how much we mean to them, and how terrible it would be to let them down. So we make all kinds of sacrifices, willingly. We give and give, sometimes without the other person asking for it or needing it at all. In the process of all this unnecessary giving, we become depleted and bitter.

This is why love is so hard. It’s not complicated because we don’t understand it; it’s complicated because we feel too much- our emotions confuse our thinking, so we do irrational things that snowball into more emotions, which further confuses our thinking. A complicated web we weave.

There are people who live off of this kind of emotional roller coaster. When it gets too quiet, they have to stir things up in the name of “love”. They think drama is romantic, that without it, it’s not really love. Perhaps Carrie from Sex and the City puts it best. “I’m looking for love,” she says. “Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.”

I don’t know about you, but to me, this kind of “real love” sounds terrible! My life is complex enough that I don’t need my love to be ridiculous and inconvenient, let alone all-consuming. I just want to be with people who don’t have a problem with attachment, who can solve relationships problems with me in a reasonable manner without the “screaming, crying, perfect storms“. When people think of love, I think there is often a misconception that being rational cannot mean it’s love. You can argue that by being rational, you lose the “magic”. I say, you just lose the drama, which is not such a bad thing. 

Below are some tips for making love a bit more rational, and thus, a bit easier to deal with.

1. Don’t be afraid 

Not being afraid is the singular most important thing to help you learn to let go and be at peace. In yoga, it is only when you stop fearing falling over that you come to balance your body, in say, a standing bow pose.

The human mind tends to escalate the possibility of bad things happening more than the good, and if you’re invested in someone you love, this mental exercise can escalate to biblical proportions. What if it doesn’t work out? What if he’s not the right guy for you and there’s someone else out there who is? What if he cheats on you and silly you, you don’t even know it? What if he’s still in love with his ex?  What if your parents don’t approve of him? What if the sex never gets better?

As with many other things in life, worrying is premature. It’s like walking outside every day fearing a crane might tip over and fall on you. Why not just let it go, see past the cranes, appreciate what a beautiful day it is outside, buy yourself a macaroon? Enjoying all the good things today and making the most of what you have today, is really the only way you can prepare for the future. Anyway, hasn’t your past experience taught you that worrying doesn’t ever stop the inevitable? Whatever will be, will be, but unlike everyone else who would have had a miserable time getting to that point,  you enjoyed many-a-macaroons.

2. Set some boundaries

First, internal boundaries. Repeat after me: I am only responsible for my own happiness. You care for your loved ones a lot, I get it. You worry for them, I get it. But you have to trust that they can take care of themselves. Don’t make everyone’s problem your problem – life is too hard that way, even for you, a strong, confident woman who is capable of handling a whole lot. Be selfish, focus on taking care of yourself. That’ll probably be the biggest favor you can do to everyone around you.

Second, external boundaries. Women are not very good at setting external boundaries, probably because a lot of us aren’t used to asking for what we want. But you have to. Don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings – they’re grown-ups, they’ll be okay. Don’t worry about coming across as too demanding – you deserve only as much respect as you allow yourself to have. Don’t worry about getting “no” as an answer – once you throw it out there, you can always negotiate and meet each other in the middle. A simple “Hey, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I would like…” is a good way to start the conversation.

 

3. Make your own decisions

A lot of times relationships is about getting your way (or not getting your way), you know, what people call “compromise”. Whether you make your best decisions by listening to your head or your gut, it is important to know where you stand on a topic before trying to harmonize with your loved ones. Harmony is an illusion of things unsaid, unless you own your decision and stand by it through doubts raised by others. Rather than trying to appease conflicting parties, your primary goal should be to articulate what you want out of the situation. This clears the air for sound discussions, and prevent the talk from escalating into a battle of emotions and “he said/she said”.

—————-

All of this sounds very romantic, no? Love is about romance, sure, but it’s also a lot (a loooot) of work. But if you approach it the right way, at least you won’t give it a reason to hurt as much.

And remember, you can always eat a macaroon.

Love,

V

 

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Making Love Manageable, Part 1: How to Know You’re in Love

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a taxi in San Francisco with a good friend of mine. Rain was steadily puttering down on the window, reflecting shards of bright headlights in our traffic jam.

“Have you ever been in love?” He asked me.

This question stunned me. “I don’t know,” I said, after a long period of silence.

“Being in love” is a strange phrase. It’s so ambiguous, but so overused in our society that we don’t really pause to think about all that it could mean. On the outset, people tend to associate it with infatuation -i.e. “Have you been so deeply infatuated with someone to the point of being dysfunctional? To the point that you can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t walk down the street without thinking that you’ve just seen him in the crowds? Do you think about him so much that every time you hear a song playing, you think it was written about him? Wake up so pumped because you might bump into him at school or work? Secretly check horoscopes and personality compatibility and social media pages like a die-hard pop star fan?”

Yes, yes, been there, done that. Never doing that again.

The thing is, what I just described is only a small part to “being in love”. It is perhaps most well-defined by Hollywood, most socially conditioned, and most romantic. Perhaps most importantly, it is glorified. When you say “I’m in love!” it induces a concoction of odd feelings, something like a mix of wonder, jealousy, melancholy and nostalgia. It is a powerful phrase, but often good for temporary self-reassurance and not much else.

What about the other more elusive and far less romanticized side of being in love? Keeping each other warm at night, doing grocery shopping and cooking in quiet synchronization, laughing together at something silly (“Ugh I just farted, again!”), laughing at the other person who’s crying at something you think is silly, and in between, all those almost completely mind-shattering, exasperating moments when you either want to hurt each other or someone else who’s messing with your relationship.

Because of my belief that being in love goes much deeper beyond the infatuation stage (which, let’s be realistic, may not end up as a healthy relationship at all!), I’ve basically stopped trying to ask myself “Do I love him?” or “Does he love me?” Like, so what?? What are you trying to prove here? Who are you trying to prove it to?

In light of it being almost Valentine’s Day, I thought I would do a different spin on love, to take a break from the self-focused, mushy, gift-giving culture that is slowly engulfing and suffocating us. Don’t worry about “being in love” for a second; pretend the question is moot. Instead, ask yourself:

1. Do you care about each other a lot? 

This is the bottom line. Are you interested in the other person’s life? Are you open to learning more about each other’s interests, even though sometimes they might seem boring or weird on the outset? Do you take time to listen to each other, and share your stories, jokes, everyday ups and downs? Do you cater to each other, let the small things go? Do you sometimes worry for each other’s safety, health, and well-being?

2. Do you care for each other willingly? 

Caring for someone is different from caring about someone. To me, caring about someone doesn’t necessitate you changing who you are as a person, whereas caring for someone else does. It calls for a shift in the boundaries that define you as a human being, in some level of self-sacrifice or at minimum, self-adjustment.

Growing up, my mom had put it best. She said, “Dating a woman is like taking care of a flower – you can like it a lot, and pluck it from the earth, smell it and keep it in your pocket and let it die, or you cherish it for what it is, and leave it in the garden, and water it and care for it. Which kind of relationship are you in?”

3. Do you respect each other?

Respect is so important. With respect comes a number of things – giving him space, understanding why she’s upset, being supportive, refraining from being overly critical, having rational discussions to sort through issues (versus crazy screaming matches to hurt each others’ egos). The list goes on.

Every time I catch up with a girlfriend of mine over brunch, we inevitably end up talking about relationships and men, and the story always follows the same trajectory: “We are in a weird place. Things were good before, right now I’m not so sure about him. He used to be XYZ, now he’s not XYZ. I don’t know.”

To which I’d ask, “Have you told him this?”

To which they’d answer, “Not really, not yet.”

Girls, before you decide to break up with the guy, please, talk to him. Recognize his role in the relationship, its importance (it is a partnership after all). Big decisions, such as breaking up, are not decisions for you to make alone, nor are they decisions for you to make for him. Sometimes, you naturally lose some respect for a guy when he stops trying to impress you, but it could just be that he’s gotten comfortable enough in a relationship to feel that he no longer needs to impress you. It doesn’t mean he’s a terrible boyfriend, let alone a terrible person. It just means you need to talk.

—–

In Part 2 of this blog series, I’ll be talking about how to make the irrational parts of love rational (and easier to deal with). Stay tuned!

Love,

V

 

Female survival guide in the dawn of the dating apocalypse

[This is the first contribution piece for this blog. The author wishes to remain anonymous – but you should know she’s pretty awesome.]

This post is in response to Nancy Jo Sales’ recent Vanity Fair article on Tinder and hookup culture in the digital age. Because we are twentysomething young women and we support her.

Basically, if you must ask, online dating is a bitch.

I once had a guy who messaged me with every sentence ending in an emoji. I once had a guy asking me if I’d like to have a threesome with him and his half-Asian wife of five years. I once had a guy asking me if I’d like him to be my sex slave. I once had a guy who wanted to make me his little sister so I could cook for him and together we could “climb trees”. You can’t make this stuff up.

I am on OkCupid, Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, eHarmony, and briefly was on Hinge and this kind of elitist site called Sparkology. Why so many, you ask? Well according to the boys it’s “a numbers game”, so I was like, fuck, two can play this game. So.

This is an advice post for all you girls out there who are online and dating but NOT FINDING LOVE.

[Shit Nobody Tells You About Online Dating – a non-exhaustive list]

1. Don’t ever pay for online dating.

DO NOT. The first reason is that you want to avoid the “death spiral“. In economics, a death spiral happens due to a phenomenon called “adverse selection”, where some people in a decision-making pool has more information about the stuff they should be deciding on than other people (“information asymmetry”). For example, some loser guys on an online dating site know they’re not studs like they say in their profile, but you don’t know that! In this case, the “seller” – the owner of the profile- knows more about themselves than the “buyer” – poor innocent you who just want to find true love. Eventually, after enough bad dates, the higher quality “buyers” start to drop out because they don’t want to keep on having to deal with lackluster candidate selection in the online dating pool. As a result the people who are left tend to make poor dating choices and poor relationship partners.

Now, you say, but wait a minute, I come across so many “legit” men on OKC! Well maybe that’s because you live in a large metropolitan city like New York where everyone and their grandmothers are on OKC. Online dating success is essentially about the quality and size of the pool you have to work with – if the pool is small, to find that guy taller than 5’10” who is white and works in medicine and has no children and speaks some German, you can kill yourself filtering and you still won’t find him.

So you shouldn’t pay for online dating because typically the pool is much more restrictive (like if someone can find enough people to date on a free site why would they PAY to do the exact same). People also tend to self-select into a paid site so if birds of a feather flock together, and you don’t share their feathers, you probably wouldn’t want to flock there.

2. Your cleavage is begging for that one night stand 

Ladies, I have no doubt your boobs are glorious but save ’em. Men are visual creatures, so while this indeed means you might get more attention online from your cleavage and butt pics, what this also means is that your photo will immediately lead them to associate you with sex. While this association is inevitable, flaunting your assets in such a blatant manner does not bode well for any one looking for something serious (which, if you are not, then well…have fun banging dudes and use a condom). Have like, I dunno, one or two sexier pics but keep the rest of them true to yourself. Like, if you’re really a sweet, girl-next-door type, ask yourself if your photos convey that message.

3. Don’t take no bullshit

Okay, this is where our collective female New York City spirits will help you. If you’ve ever lived in New York, you’ll know that dating is seriously a pain in the ass here, partially because of the sheer number of gorgeous young women in the city, some of which are models. As a means of survival, we’ve gotten pretty tough, and that means we don’t take no bullshit.

Example #1: His messages are never longer than 3 words and sometimes just emojis (like winks and shit) – you say to yourself, “I don’t take no bullshit” and walk away.

Example #2: You don’t hear from him all week, and he texts you Friday afternoon as work is winding down and is like, “Heyyy what you up to tonight? Wanna grab a drink?” In this situation, be strong. Say to yourself, “I don’t take no bullshit”. A first date should take more planning in advance than this.

Example #3: He only picks places close to his apartment even though he knows you live friggin far away from him. Don’t fool yourself into thinking he CARES about you. He is just lazy. Say to yourself, “I don’t take no bullshit.” You can either call him out on it or just move on.

Example #4: He doesn’t ask too much about you and you haven’t exchanged more than 3-4 messages with each other before he asks you out for a drink and didn’t even ask for your name or your number. In this case he probably just doesn’t give a shit. Don’t make excuses for him like, “Oh he’s just a busy guy ’cause he works in iBanking at Citi, prob doesn’t get enough sleep to begin with.” Say to yourself, “I don’t take no bullshit.”

I have a lot more examples. If you feel like having a heart to heart about this leave me a comment and holla.

4. Maybe don’t actually drink at all 

I know this is hard because I personally actually love fancy cocktails – and also, liquid courage.

But hear me out. Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t drink on a date:

• Potential for you to lose sexual inhibition faster than you’d like
• Empty calories, especially if you go on a lot of dates.
• Sometimes when you are drunk you say the wrong things – like, about your ex
• You probably look a lot sillier drunk than you do sober
• You might lose your stuff or have trouble finding your stuff, which is not lady-like
• Because you need to keep drinking and finishing and drinking and finishing cocktails, your date might end up running very long and very late. That is just exhausting and you lose a bit of that intrigue if you stay too long.

5. When you are harassed 

Fight back, report them, hold onto your faith.

We’ve all been there – having men say things to us that are simply humiliating, things that keep our hearts pounding before we go to bed because we’re so angry, things that make us lose faith in humanity even if it’s just for a little bit. Sometimes you are discriminated because of your ethnicity, your photos, the things you say that were simply harmless in your profile. Know that these people are cowards, that this shouldn’t take away your deeply-seated belief that there is a good man out there searching for you just like how you are searching for him.

Never, ever give up.

XOXO

J. A.

Why you won’t find the love you’re looking for

Displays of Affection, Jean-Jacques Sempé

Dear everyone, my sincere apologies for the lack of updates for the past while. A lot has happened in my own life since then, but I won’t bore you with the details. I hope your summer has been a gorgeous and relaxing one. I hope you’ve been breathing deeply every day and not sweating the small stuff.

I want to write about love briefly. Last night I watched Maleficent for the first time, and when it spoke about how “true love does not exist”, that really affected me. These days I see so many of my friends struggle with dating, with break-ups, with reconciling the “is” with the “should be”. Part of it makes me realize it is human nature for us to struggle with the anti-logic properties of emotion, but part of it also makes me sympathize with them because the problems of love are uniquely universal.

So without further ado, some of my thoughts on love you might find interesting/helpful/controversial

1. The love you are looking for does not exist 

One does not simply look for love. Rather, you look for a person to get along with, who can inspire you to be your best. When you proactively look for love, you’re really projecting your experiences, expectations, and fantasies into a fictional scenario – a scenario whose outcome is manipulated in your mind, as we tend to be overly optimistic about the future.

If you tend to make decisions based on past tangible experience, you need to know that no future man or woman will ever fully possess all the good qualities in a previous SO that you hope to retain, so that you can recreate all the good things you had while purging the bad, the uncomfortable, the regrettable. You might succeed sometimes, but chances are you’ll quickly become disillusioned by your partner’s slew of other negative qualities, which you may soon find intolerable because you had set your expectations too high.

If you tend to make decisions based on intuition, you need to know that this imaginary person you crave for in your dreams but has never met in real life, is more a reflection of your own self than of your circumstances. He or she is a projection of those dark corners of your psyche that you’re wholly unaware of as you go about your day-to-day activities – your fears, your shadows, your ego, your dreams. You might dwell long enough on certain superficial characteristics to sometimes succeed in finding someone who possess them, but chances are you’ll quickly become disillusioned by your partner’s slew of other negative qualities, which you may soon find intolerable because you had set your expectations too high.

2. The love you have needs to be cultivated 

One of the questions people often ask to reaffirm that the love they have is “true love”, is this: “Does he/she make you happy?” First of all, how selfish ARE you? Why is it anybody else’s responsibility to make YOU happy, ever? Especially if you can’t make yourself happy, why should the person you’re with take on a burden you can’t even take on for yourself?

The kind of love that makes you “happy” is not love, but infatuation. It isn’t the person who’s making you happy, it’s the idea of falling and being in love with this person. The subject that owns all of these activities and emotions has nothing to do with the other person, and everything to do with you. The sad truth is that at some point this infatuation will die. If you’re lucky, at this point you’ll stop being IN LOVE and start to LOVE. Those are very different things. To be “in love” is about what you want, to ‘love” is about how you can give freely to another without expecting anything in return.

For me, the act of love is founded on the basis of respect. Point blank, if you cannot respect the other person, whether for the majority of his/her being or holistically as a whole, then you’re screwed. You might try to justify for your decision to be with him/her in all kinds of messed up ways that ultimately promotes inequality in the relationship, a lot of negative power dynamics, and gaps in understanding and empathy.

3. Love is not something you can hold onto forever 

Life is complicated and things change, all the time. People come, people go. At its best, the love you have will transform into something deeper, more spiritual, more grand. At its worst it will die, and you’ll fill the void with other kinds of love, some of which you didn’t know existed. Either way, you have to let it carry you, not the other way around, into the future. Let it take you to wherever, because at one point you had signed up for it, and you shouldn’t regret anything because at that point in time it was exactly what you had wanted.

Because love is never stationary, it is also difficult to be kept at equilibrium. There will always be balances of tension, things that tuck on your heartstrings that are good, bad, and ugly. Part of the challenge – and the fun – is to bravely navigate these points of tension, and teeter-totter through the days and the months in order to grow it into something more beautiful.

When we first open ourselves up to someone else, there is always a moment when suddenly we come out of our armors and once again become vulnerable. That moment to me is always terrifying. We’ve all been through the disappointment, the struggles, the confusion, the hurt, and the last thing we’d ever want is to go through all of that again. So this final, third point has been giving me courage to move forward with my own life – knowing that whatever happen will happen, and that in the meantime, you have given love and learned in the process.

——

So that’s all I have to say. These past few weeks, one of my grandparents in China has been physically unwell. Right now she’s got most of her extended family by her bed, taking care of her day and night. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about death and loss, and I think, at the end of the day, whether is it parental love, friendship love, romantic love, or any other kind of love, it really is all the same. And we do it because we are human, and we do it because there really is no other way.

Love,

V

Health in a Sack of Nuts

This week has been a jam-packed week for me. I spent most of my time back at my client site outside of Philadelphia, with 50% of my day focused on work, 40% on sleep, and the remaining 10% on exercise.

I don’t travel often (thank God), but when I do I like to apply my life’s philosophy (“Keep it Simple”) to everything from packing to my diet. For a young consultant who spends much of his or her time on the road, in the beginning it can be difficult to say no to the “perks” of “free food” and the plentiful flow of alcohol. In my first year of work, I pretty much let myself loose when it came to food – I would wait till I was so hungry that I felt faint, then grab whatever I could reach first, be it pad thai or burger or sushi or Chinese stir fry. In my first year of work, I also gained at least seven pounds.

For a 5’4” Asian girl with a small bone structure, the result of this can be disastrous, especially when combined with irregular sleep and a lot of stress.

The turning point of all of this was when I took my first vacation trip in nearly three years to Barcelona. It was actually last year around this time, and Barcelona was brimming with life in the exact way that New York was not. Compared to the dirty, chaotic, fast-paced life we’ve come to associate with “urban living”, where people around us seem to literally be fighting for that extra second of time while taking immense pride in this absurd masochistic fulfillment, the people in Barcelona recognized what Elizabeth Gilbert had highlighted from her journey to Italy – “Dolce far Niente“, the Sweetness of Doing Nothing.

What astounded me wasn’t just that Catalonians knew what to appreciate life, but that they understood the time to do this was here and now. It didn’t matter to them that Europe’s economy was failing fast. It didn’t matter to them that they were living in cramped quarters with limited access to more money-making potential. The cultural difference between what I’ve always known was alarming – whereas I was raised in a culture juxtaposed between the Chinese relentless pursuit of excellence and the North American relentless pursuit of opportunity, Catalonians knew pleasure like Hindus knew peace. It was a way of life.

When I came back to New York, I suddenly realized that what I had called “living” wasn’t really living at all; my life was just an expansion of the busier, more messed up version of the grad school student life I had grown into, after all those years of fearing for my future and all the uncertainty that came with it. I kept thinking that because I was a student, “real life” had yet to start, so all this healthy-living stuff, as a corollary of “real life”, wasn’t worth paying attention to yet.

A couple days after I returned from Barcelona, I was at the Barnes and Noble at Union Square looking for recipe books, to recapture the fresh burst of taste in my food in Barcelona that I never got from eating out in New York. Like fate, I stumbled upon Daphne Oz’s book “Relish: An Adventure in Food, Style, and Everyday Fun.”

In her introduction, she wrote something that has come to define my motivation for living a healthier lifestyle:

“In many ways, I was waiting for my twenties to end because I assumed real life, and all the things I thought (and think) I want as a part of that life, would hit in my thirties and forties. The part of the equation I was forgetting is that to have that life down the line, you need to start living like you want it – laying the foundation, acting the part, doing the searching and finding – now. […] Relish is about adding a little something special that changes everything, about not only living in the moment but loving that moment, too. It’s about savoring highs and lows, gives and takes, and seeing that maximizing joy, potential, and growth while minimizing fear, worry or (gasp!) boredom begins when when you find that balance between effort and laissez-faire. Where you’re working towards something better but loving where you are and making the most of every day.”

So what does this have to do with the “sack of nuts”, you wonder? In my consulting work, I hate to be the person with “strategic insight” and then pump nothing concrete out of my brain. The same goes for this blog – now that I’m done with the wishy-washy “big picture” idea, now that I’ve got your attention, I’m going to tell you how you can start being healthier today.

It’s really quite simple. Just buy a lot of nuts, like pecans or walnuts, bake them for like, a couple minutes, store them somewhere dry while constantly keep a handful in a Ziploc bag and carry them with you everywhere. If you’re particularly eager, you can also mix it up by adding in some dried cranberries, etc. All grocery stores sell these things prepackaged, but to ensure this becomes a habit, I recommend getting them in bulk.

Until I started doing this, I had no idea of the plethora of benefits it would bring. It’s taken me years to realize this, but fundamentally, the conscious decision to eating healthy is a direct outcome of your perception of food availability at the time you feel hungry. If you’re at home and perceive that you have no easy access to food at the moment (e.g. your fridge is empty), you’re much more likely to order delivery or eat out. If you’re outside and perceive that you have nothing in your bag you can grab and snack on ASAP, you’re much more likely to go to the nearest place (and in New York this can mean Chiptole or Starbucks or the halal cart or a full meal at a restaurant) and indulge in food that has high sugar, high salt, and high cholesterol content.

Also, over time it puts a huge dent in your wallet.

So the bag of nuts solves a few issues: availability, immediacy, healthy content, cost.

And then, you know, you can pat yourself on the back and feel great, because you were good to yourself today.

Sincerely,
V.

The meaning of love

My parents just left for Toronto. They came Thursday morning and stayed over at my place in New York for Easter.

There’s always some emptiness lingering when someone you’re very close with visits your home for the first time and then leaves. In the end, after all the hustling and effort to fill one’s life with stories and things, I guess what we really want is simply a sense of closeness with another human being.

In those final moments when I knew I would part with them again, with these people who know me so well (perhaps even better than I know myself at times) and who love me so much (perhaps even more than I love myself at times), it was suddenly so crystal clear to me what love really means.

To love means to settle, but not in a “I know I deserve better but I’m scared to be alone so I’m going to stick with him” sense. To love means to settle, as in, to let go of the little things, those things that we think matter but really don’t. To fully give in to another person, to realize that what happens from there may be outside of your control. To relinquish the fear that he or she may not love you back, and just give. Today I realized we cannot love without first choosing to give without hoping for something in return.

When we live alone, it’s so easy for us to build up walls, to become defensive after all the hurt. After all, it’s an adaptive strategy to ensure survival. It’s hard for us to take a step back and catch ourselves being selfish, being judgmental, being clouded by our own ideas of what we think we’re looking for when it comes to love. But this means we end up living in a box. We lock ourselves up inside and feed our thoughts to our surroundings only to have them bounce back at us and reinforce our preconceived (and possibly erred) notions that we know best.

This weekend with my parents have made me realize that I’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places, all along. Love isn’t found in bars, or online. Love isn’t found in text messages, in all the silence between text messages, in smileys and winks and hearts and selfies. Love isn’t found on paper, in degrees or in dollars. Love isn’t found in numbers -in how much you date and how long. Love is found in effort. In all of us trying to be our best, to ourselves and to each other. Today, not tomorrow.

Sincerely,

V.