Love better

Love is the most important thing in our lives, yet we are taught very little about it. One Love is on a mission to change that. We educate young people about healthy and unhealthy relationships, empowering them to identify and avoid abuse and learn how to love better.

The above entry is from the One Love Foundation. (joinonelove.org) Last night, I was reading an article about the CEO and the background of this foundation, and I thought to myself, “Oh, I’ve got to save this for Favorite Things Friday. This is a great website.” The Ted Talk, lead by the CEO of the foundation, Katie Hood, is an excellent watch.

Honestly, I planned to make this website one of my Friday favorites, mostly for myself, as a saved resource for my daughter and for my sons, and for my friends’ children, and for the girls whom I mentor, and for you, my readers and your children. Sometimes, I see a great resource or website or an article and then I forget about it, or where I saw it and I try to find it again in the massive mountain of information piled on the internet, and it is sadly, Mission Impossible to do so. My blog has become my treasure trove of what strikes a chord in me, and thus, hopefully, it can be helpful to others, as well. Still, I woke up this morning, thinking about this foundation’s mission and I thought, “This can’t wait until Friday. It’s too important.”

One Love was created by the Love Family. In 2010, a University of Virginia lacrosse player, Yeardley Love, was violently killed by her ex-boyfriend, also a UVA lacrosse player, right before they were both to graduate from college. In retrospect, all of the signs of a dramatic, unhealthy, abusive relationship were there, waving their red flags. Unfortunately, though, a lot of people (even smart, educated people from loving families) are colorblind to red flags in relationships because as the above statement says, we as a society, don’t do a whole lot to teach young people about love. We don’t do much teaching about what is healthy and what is not healthy when it comes to love or any other type of relationships.

Yeardley Love, was a beautiful, athletic, talented young woman who came from a loving, prosperous family. I remember in college joking that there was an obvious inverse curve when it came to relationships. Often, the prettiest, most ambitious, most campus involved, women with the highest GPAs, who I knew – the women who seemed to have “their sh*t together in every other regard (pardon my French), would often have the least healthy relationships out of all of us, with really toxic men. Yeardley and her boyfriend would have proven that hypothesis. It’s not really a funny joke, though. Obviously.

The old model for love relationships has kind of been a try, experience and learn, without much direction from anybody. But too often those experimental relationships turn deadly or leave lasting scars that color all future relationships to come. I really like what One Love is on a mission to do, in terms of educating young people and giving them some insight and direction.

That being said, I think One Love needs to add a precedent to these videos and lessons about relationships with other people. I think, we as a society, have to teach and model to our young ones how to learn to love themselves and how to have healthy relationships with themselves, first. I copied this quote into my notebook recently by Melanie Tonia Evans:

“Most of us won’t stay in relationships in which the level of love is below what we feel for ourselves.” Evans then goes on to say this:

“We have as yet not become a solid source of love, approval, survival and security for ourselves and we hold other people responsible for meeting our needs.”

Narcissism is a huge buzz word these days, but it is still largely misunderstood. People equate self-love with narcissism, but nothing could be further from the truth. True narcissism is a personality disorder, usually formed at a young age as a defense mechanism from abusive or neglectful experiences. A true narcissist has no sense of true self, and can only find his or her reflection and sense of self from others, hence often being called “energy vampires.” A healthy person with good self-esteem and full of self-love and who is capable of self-care, has absolutely no need to take anything from anyone. They are brimming with confidence and comfort, that comes from within themselves. A healthy person understands the bounty of their own grace and the grace bestowed on others.

Often, especially in a competitive society such as ours, our children think that they need to do special things, to be high achievers, or to stand out in some form, in order to be noticed and to be loved. They are searching for love and approval from outside sources. They have put conditions on whether or not, they are worthy enough to be loved.

If we are honest with ourselves, what kind of love are we modeling to our children? Do we love ourselves unconditionally? Do we treat ourselves with kindness, understanding and respect at all times? As a mother of four children, I have seen again and again, that children are much more likely to model what we do, than any lecture we give to them.

Love better. It is such a good mantra. We can only love better when we fully understand what true unconditional love looks like and what it feels like, when we choose to embody it. Better love is there, inside of each of us, ready to come out into action form, for ourselves and for others. People like the Love family understand that, as they are turning this horrific tragedy into a revolution of change in the ways our young people approach love, and life, and relationships. If that isn’t the deepest form of love, I don’t know what is . . . . .