How is Love the Most Positive Emotion That There Is?

Because love is both bigger and simpler than you think and feel that it is.

Photo by Micah Hallahan on Unsplash

Shopping at the grocery store, I saw that all the Valentine’s candy was on display. Chocolate hearts everywhere.

Valentine’s Day is my least favorite holiday. The reasons are many, and frankly inconsequential to this story — save one. Love is falsely represented by Valentine’s Day.

How’s that? Everywhere you look, Valentine’s Day celebrates relationships, intimacy, romance, and various other notions of overblown, romantic love. It implies — and sometimes outright says — that this is the most important love that you can have.

This notion of romantic love isn’t just the purview of Valentine’s Day. Tons of books, TV shows, movies, and scripted programming across other media puts the notion of it on a pedestal. All of them claim that it’s the ultimate achievement, and without it you’re nothing.

This often leads to another utterly surreal place. A whole genre of media exists around broken hearts and people who have been hurt by love. It has broken them, they can never love again, and blah, blah, blah.

This is where it all goes off the rails. Why? Because real love — the truth of what it is at its core — can…