Where does your mind go when your hear the word ‘love’?

Is it to romance? To feelings? Or perhaps to passion? Maybe words like commitment, trust, attraction, or intimacy come to mind.

There’s no right or wrong answer. Any conversation about what love is should only ever continue in the spirit of, ‘Yes, and…’.

And in that spirit, I want to propose that, whatever else love is, we include what we doin our understanding—and practice—of love. As Julie and John Gottman write in their book, ‘The Seven-Day Love Prescription’:

We all want to be loved. We want to be on the receiving end of love. And that’s good and normal and appropriate. But our relationship with love needs to go beyond that. The truth is that the best way to open ourselves up to getting love is to give love.

Love is not passive. It does not wait. 

This is a reminder to myself that I have a choice today. I can expect and hope that love finds its way to me. Or I can put myself in the way of love by asking myself what I can do to show love today to my family, my friends, my colleagues, and yes, strangers too.

We open the door to love by loving.

Thanks for reading,

–Sam