And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone."
- Tennessee Williams


I think it's insane how conditioned we are not to love and not to let other people love us.

This isn't true when we are children. As children, we love everyone. Why not? Everyone loves us.

It's when we start to grow up, when we go out to the real world, when we meet people who are not required to love us, that we are not required to love back, that we learn not to love. We learn that loving, caring, is a subject worthy of derision from our peers, that it's "creepy"; we learn to reject signs of love from others.

As we continue to grow, we also learn to love differently. We know love of family and love of friends and love of pets. We discover romantic love. With this love we discover pain. It's here that the self-defense mechanism kicks in. We try to prevent this pain - we let the fear stop us from loving freely. The same fear stops us from letting others love us freely. We cower from being loved because it scares us to know that someone else could care. Knowing that others also fear being loved, we hesitate to let them know we care, especially knowing that they might not love us back, or in the same way. But this is wrong.

What we aren't taught is that we should take our love where we get it and love whenever we can, however we can. If you care for someone, let them know. If someone tells you they care about you, let them. Take strength from it. Everyone, at some point or another, needs reassurance: everyone needs to feel loved. Yet, we are taught not to let others know we care, to let others know we need their love. Because of this, we feel alone.

We feel isolated when we limit our love and the amount of love we receive. We feel lonely. We are alone. The closest we get to losing that feeling, is being alone with others - being lonely together. Knowing that we are among others who feel the same way we do. Yet, we don't do anything more to fix it, when logically, it should be easy. Go beyond what we are conditioned to do, go beyond what the fear tells us we should do, go beyond what society labels as acceptable or unacceptable or normal or weird - to do what, as humans, we know is right. To know how to love freely, and to let yourself love freely, is a gift. To accept others' love, and let them love you, is also a gift. If we could only use these gifts, our isolation would cease. No longer would we live and love alone. We would hurt, yes, but everything else we would know would be beyond that.

With all kinds of love comes confusion. How do we love someone? How much? Perhaps it doesn't really matter. Perhaps the way we love isn't so important as the love itself. Sometimes we need the feel the warmth of another human - we need that touch, that reminder. And sometimes we need to fulfill our lust for that touch. Again, society tells us that morally, we should not seek that touch without love; that doing so is wrong. But what kind of love must exist to condone satisfying our lust? Who knows. Just, everyone needs that touch from time to time, and we should not need to have found our one true eternal love in order to feel it.

Learn to love. Learn to speak it warmly, learn to show it always, learn to earn it humbly, learn to receive it graciously. Fill your life and others' lives with love, and rejoice in it - together.


"There is no remedy for love but to love more."
- Henry David Thoreau

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Listening to: Billy Joel - An Innocent Man