23 Feb 50 Shades of Love

This blog post was written by RHN’s Jesse Hugh Hauck, MA, LMFT

If Anastasia and Christian can find it, why can’t you? I will leave defining “it” to your own imagination. For the purpose of this work of literature, the “it” I’m referring to is love.

How do you begin to find something you can’t see or touch? Yet, in a way, we see it and feel it in some capacity every day. Sometimes it seems more real to us than anything our five senses can perceive alone. Love is the single greatest mystery for me in life and yet it seems to have the singe greatest impact upon my life. There are seven billion other people on this planet currently. There are seven billion other people experiencing love simultaneously. How do you measure that? How do you describe that? You can’t if you are being honest with yourself. And maybe that is the point. Maybe love transcends any single individual’s thoughts, feelings, or actions.

So then what’s the point? Maybe the key to understanding love is just embracing the search for it throughout your life. As children, we seek love from parents or caregivers. As adolescents and young adults, we seek the same end by a different means from a partner or many, many, many partners along the way. Sure the ways we seek and measure love change over time. Then, something happens. As we have grown older, we convince ourselves we have mastered this concept of love and place our measures and expectations on others. Beware to anyone we encounter who does not fit our individualized measures and definitions of love. Should that be the case, you can rest assured anger, betrayal, heartbreak, and pain will certainly soon follow.

Yet, we never lose hope. We pick ourselves up. We learn the lessons from our mistakes. We change. We grow. We love again. Then, at some point, you look back at the road you traveled and realize that to love in its purest form is to live life. So, take a moment today to stop and ask yourself how do you love and how do you live each day you are given. Love cannot be defined by anyone else but you. There is no answer outside of you. Your individual ability to love makes you unique from the other seven billion people on earth, but that love that only you can share is what also connects you to them.