Why being in love really matters?

Today is a day that I have learnt the different but true meaning of being in love with life. There is certain kind of person that bugs me, it's the certain kind of person that when you have a problem or you are down about something, or you are going through about something difficult and their response is smile, be positive, be happy, and they want to list out all the reasons you should be happy, especially the self-help world encourages us so much to feel inadequate if we're not happy, like "you should be happy all of the time and life isn't it amazing, isn't it beautiful, isn't it the most incredible thing? You should be happy! You should be happy!" And I'm like maybe today I'm not that happy, and maybe today there are things going on in my life that are making me really sad or depressed or angry or anxious or frustrated, and that's human, it's human to feel those things. I know it's like there's those people who think life is amazing and then there's these people who think life sucks like life is a hellish struggle, and both sides are arguing for which is truth.

My response is why can't both be true? What if life wasn't good or bad? What if life is like a "lover"? And as a "lover" we go through many different experiences with life, sometimes we like life, sometimes we hate it or we're angry at it, sometimes you feel like you're gushing with love for that thing and at other times you feel like that thing has wronged you, and the thing that I started thinking to myself is what is it that's fundamentally true about my relationship with life - the so-called "lover". It's the deep down underneath all of the problems, I love life, but I don't always have to like life in order to love it, but when you decide "you know what. I do love life. Despite the fact the day is bad today, and it's pouring with rain and it's far from ideal, I love life, don't always like it but I do love life."

What is it we need to do to strengthen that relationship and if you think back to your lover and you know what is it you need to do to strengthen your relationship with your lover, and the funny part is I know it so well how to love my man but actually forgot how to love life just like how to cherish a lover, you need to get good at forgiving certain things, you know there are certain things that life has done to you and you need to get good at letting go off, there are certain things that you need to accept about life, to say "this is the way life is sometimes and I accept it. Instead of wishing that my partner (life) were different. I'm going to accept certain things about them."

Sometimes, it is about looking at the best side of life and understand that there's yes and there's also a worse side of life, there's also life has really bad habits but I'm gonna focus on the best parts of that partner. Sometimes, it's saying I'm gonna be proactive about what I bring to the table with life instead of being entitled. So many people complain about what life isn't giving them, about what they're not getting from life instead of focusing on what they can bring to life, how they can nurture it, how they can be generous with their energy and give more. Sometimes we need to learn how to argue better, not all relationships are about eliminating arguments but it's about arguing better, arguing more productively. If I'm in a fire with life now, am I focusing on why I hate about it or am I focusing on what I could do actually do to improve it.

I believe life is beautiful. I wouldn't do what I do if I don't believe life is beautiful. But I think life is far from a perfect partner, I think there are two choices we get to make, one is where we have power and where we have agency because we can't control life. We can choose to stay in this relationship with life if we love life, we can also decide as much as we can or possibly bring to that relationship with life to make it as good as it can possibly be.

So many of the physical parts of life we cannot change; we can't change tragedies, we can't change disasters, we can't change unpredictable events in our lives, we can't change our own aging, we can't change some of the certainties in life which are the uncertainties and the way time moves on. But what we can change is our emotional experience of those things, and ultimately it's the emotional experience we have of life that determines the quality of our lives. I love life, just like how I love my man, and I always choose to stay with him. And because I choose to stay in this relationship from the day we decided, it would be a fool not to make that relationship as good as it can possible be. What relationship will you choose to have with that lover is going to determine everything in your life.

I'm not someone who is always happy, not someone who always feel positive, but someone who loves life in spite of its flaw and is committed every single day to working on that relationship. I hope you are doing the same. Love your life just like how you love your lover.