Seek Joy, Not Love | The Love Letter Weekly
Finding love in life is less about looking for it and more about finding the match to your joy.
There is so much pressure to find love in every capacity of life. Finding love romantically, building familial love, loving “what you do”, but in the end, the true measure of contentment is joy.
Love is a verb. Though it’s a noun, it is best expressed as a verb. To me, I feel like there is so much pressure on love as a noun that it can easily slip through the cracks in action.
In my own life, when I started seeking joy, I found more satisfaction in my loving relationships and self-love journey. On my journey into a deep romantic connection and a closer relationship with my family, I found that when I prioritized happiness, it was easier to be in the flow of love.
Joy is so universal that it only serves to expand personal frequency to offer more space to love. It also alleviated a lot of the pressure that makes recognizing incapability more obvious. When seeking love, discernment dwindles because desire overshadows the truth.
For example, the more that you’re attracted to the idea of a person, the more likely you are to project character traits they don’t possess on them. It’s unfair to both of you in the dating process.
When you’re seeking joy, it becomes very clear who is for you and who isn’t. For me, the biggest change I saw was that I wasn’t impressed easily by kindness. Kindness should be a minimum to have access, but it is not a determination of compatibility.
When joy is the goal, there’s room for reality. Living for joy offers clarity because of the constant internal check-in to see if you’re still enjoying yourself
We often mistake love as a noun only which can create a block around emotions Finding someone to share joy with breeds an honest love. It doesn’t have to perform or act but genuinely develop with the expectations only being sharing experiences together
If you’re having trouble finding joy, love probably won’t be the answer. Explore the world with a lens of joy seeking and you’ll find more than you bargained for.