I love love. How do I love love? Let me count the ways. Actually, I do not love love the way many people think about love, like a fairy tale. To me, that’s the problem with love is in way we’ve been programmed to think about love.Disney doesn’t make movies about a Prince and a Princess working on their relationship. They always live happily ever after. I don’t want to live happily ever after. I want to work happily ever after. I say work, because to me, this is what is required for happy relationships. Conscious love. I choose it knowingly (we are here concerned with a sort of conscious, knowing love… not the madness that often precedes). Its like choosing a home. I choose this home. This is the one I want. I can see that it is a little rusty around the Door hinges. I can see that it’s floors creak. I can see the paint is chipped off a little here and here. I can see that there’s been some bloating from water-damage but, that’s what I love about it. THAT is what I love about it. I love those precise qualities The rust. The hinge. The bloating. The scratched paint. I love that love and relationships are work. That they aren’t perfect. That they aren’t the fairy tale.

So how do we love consciously? A good place to start is with the five love languages. There’s even a book about it, it is called, The Five Love Languages. The books premise is that everyone has a love language. Most have a primary love language and a secondary. They are, words of affirmation, gifts, quality time, physical touch, and acts of service. These love languages are the ways we express and interpret love. It is very important for us to know our own Love language and that of our partners. We can even learn our children’s love language. There’s even a quiz we can take online to find out our love language. Simply go here… http://www.5lovelanguages.com/ I have had many people take the love language quiz with me. i believe in this concept, very much. You would be amazed at how willing most people are to learn their love language. Humans need love and connection. Everyone wants love and knowing and practicing love languages with our nearest and dearest will Help us get it. My primary love language is words of affirmation. Words. Who’d have thunk it? All those Keats poems. All those letters. All these words I fill screens with. I did not initially learn this by the quiz, though. learned it by reading the book, “The Five Love Languages”, by Gary Chapman. I was told to read this by the first person I ever paid to listen to me. I brought the book up to her, initially, and she said, “yeah, I don’t usually recommend self help books, but I want you to read that one.”

“The secret to lasting love.” Kinda hokey sounding, but it seems that everyone wants to know the secret, the key to finding and keeping love. It seems to be one of the few pleasures we look forward to in aging, is having someone else with sidewalk cracks holding our hands in the sunset of our lives. That is why It is very important we know and understand our love language. It is about how we give and receive love. So say you have a partner whose love language is gifts and gifts are your number five, then your partner may be lavishing you with gifts, but you may still feel deficient in being loved because you do not interpret that as love. Likewise, your partner may be feeling unloved simply because you are not reciprocating these gifts. The person I paid to listen to me said the couples who seems to work the best are the ones who speak the same love languages. But, this is not necessarily the case. I can see how this would be true because you wouldn’t have to make a conscious choice every day to speak your partners love languages. It would just come naturally. However, this is not to suggest that couples who speak different love languages won’t work, they just have to work at it a little harder and make that conscious effort. It’s very important to know our partners love language else wise they may have needs that are not getting met by us. It’s also beneficial to know and speak our children’s love language. Psychology says that love is a primary need that must be met for children to grow into healthy, functioning adults. When that need is not met, children tend to have behavior problems and do not grow into fully functioning adults. There are numerous ideas in the book about how to learn to speak the different love languages. It’s kind of fun, and good for us, learning to speak a native tongue.

What about you? What does it take for you to feel loved? Is it words of affirmation, someone telling you, “you were made from the brightest exploding star.” Is it physical touch? Someone reaching to hold your hand? Is it acts of service? Someone bringing you coffee or mowing the lawn for you? Is it quality time? Quality time is not someone sitting on the couch watching tv with you, it is actually sitting and engaging with you, not their phone, you! Or is it gifts? Small or large tokens of appreciation. Remember whatever your love language is,you tend to naturally speak that tongue, and that is why it is imperative that we learn not only ours, but that of our nearest and dearest so we can consiously choose to do what they need to feel love. You too can find, love, happiness, whatever the hell you want, if you oil those hinges.