I recently saw a reel on Instagram captioned something along the lines of, “Tell me you were raised poor without telling me you were raised poor.”
The video showed someone pulling a tray of food out of an oven and turning it off. They then shut the oven door, only to keep it open a crack, so that the heat wouldn’t be wasted while the oven cooled down.
And I realized that not everyone does this, though I thought they did. I mean, it just makes sense to use the heat you’ve already spent money and energy to generate in your home. Why let that go to waste? Heat is heat, and it’s not free, to our wallets or the environment.
Now, it just so happens I was raised poor, which feels very strange to type here, for all the world to read. I don’t know why it feels weird, given that it is the truth. I guess because my mom worked so hard, moving heaven and earth to make sure I had not only what I needed, but also what I wanted. To the best of her capacity, she made sure I had as many opportunities as she could wrangle for me, and truthfully, that was a heck of a lot more than a lot of my friends from more-affluent, two-parent homes.
One of the many lessons I learned from my mom was how to be resourceful. How to find, and certainly how not to waste, resources, no matter what they were: food, energy, water, heat, talent, effort or opportunity.
So, I’ll keep cracking the oven open to warm the house up while it cools the oven down. Waste not, want not, after all. Thanks, mom!
There’s another resource we waste like leaving the door wide open in winter. Specifically, I’m talking about one particular and highly valuable form of energy: love.
We crank up the thermostat on love, constantly yearning to feel it’s tender warmth, only to leave the doors and windows open. And then we wonder why we’re so damn cold all the time. We make it hard for love to get in and easy for love to get out.
We let the love we seek escape us all the time. But if you want to experience more love in your life—and come on, who doesn’t?—here’s how to go about harnessing it.
The best way to receive the love we want is to be receptive. I know that sounds simple, but it’s easier said than done. Gosh do we ever struggle with this. That’s because being receptive requires some humility and a lot of generosity, which can be notoriously slippery attributes for mere mortals to practice.
Deep down, we all have an intrinsic need for love and belonging. Humans, armed poorly for survival, beat the odds mostly due to the sheer luck of our cleverness and our ability to form communities. Our strength and our survival lay in numbers. Love and belonging—the currency of community—literally kept us alive for most of human history, so no wonder we get so frigging squirrelly about it.
We all want love, we all need love, and we’re all deeply afraid of being unlovable, because once upon a time, if you didn’t belong, you didn’t survive.
That’s a lot of pressure on being lovable. Our fear of being unlovable would have us believe that love is scarce and fleeting, when, as the song goes, it really is all around us.
Obviously, for this to be true, you have to decide that love is available and abundant. Now, either you believe this or you believe it’s scarce and elusive. Our thoughts become our reality, however, and I know which version of the world I choose to live in.
Think of love like energy from the sun: when the sun is shining, it’s around us all the time and we can feel it. Even when it’s cloudy, there is still solar energy milling around. You can even get a sunburn on a cloudy day, which is why we should all wear sunscreen all year long, by the way.
But I digress. To convert solar energy into electricity, you need to set up solar panels to capture it. Otherwise, all that solar energy just swirls around, uncaptured and unconverted into other forms of energy we need to run all our gadgets.
Added to this, you need to set those solar panels up in a way that faces the direction of the sunlight. It’s no use having solar panels if you stick them in the shade or facing the wrong way. It might catch a little incidental energy, but that’s not going to keep the lights on for very long.
It works exactly the same way with love. You need to know your love language, and most people don’t. You can go online and take a quiz, which might seem cheesy, but it’s actually really important to understand how you prefer to receive love.
We often think that others should inherently know how to demonstrate their love to us, but how often do you feel let down by someone who loves you? How often do you find yourself thinking that someone must not love you because of what they did or didn’t do, or what they said or didn’t say? After all, “if they really loved us, they’d just know…”
Riiight. Just like you always know how to read your beloved’s mind?
What chance does someone else have of getting love right if we don’t even know ourselves how we most meaningfully receive it? Talk about shooting in the dark. What a set up for failure and disappointment.
We need to know our love language so that we can express that to the people we care about, and who care about us. Why wouldn’t we want to give the people we care most about a leg up in the loving-us department? Don’t we want them to win? Don’t we win when they do?
Another person’s inability to read our minds doesn’t mean they don’t love us. I mean, most of us hardly know how we’re feeling in our own minds a lot of the time, but that rarely stops us from expecting others to be able to telepathically get it right. And then we get mad and sad when they can’t do for us what we can’t do for ourselves or anyone else, either.
Jeez. Let’s all make this game of being human easier to win, at least where love is concerned.
But wait, there’s one more very important step!
In addition to knowing our own love language, it’s essential to understand other people’s love languages, too. Because it’s probably not identical to our own, though we usually expect it to be. And what winds up happening is that they’re out there, expressing their love to us, but it’s in a language we don’t understand and can’t, don’t or won’t translate (as the case may be).
See, we’re all out here, loving each other the way we want to be loved, and wondering why none of us can seem to get it right more often. We’re all trying to express and receive love, but we’re just missing it, because it isn’t showing up the way we’re expecting it to look, sound or feel.
We’re giving people gifts we want to receive, and expecting them to be grateful for it, rather than giving them the gift they want to receive, for which they would be grateful. It’s like giving someone a shirt that would look great on you, but isn’t their colour or style at all, and being resentful because they never wear it.
Knowing someone else’s love language means I can express my love for them in a way they can more easily receive, plus I don’t have to shoot in the dark, either, which is a huge relief.
The added bonus of knowing someone else’s love language is being able to translate when they express love in a way that lands a little sideways for me. Rather than be disappointed that they got it wrong, and then slip ’n’ sliding my way into making it mean that they must not love me (you know you’ve done this), I can choose generosity and accept the gift of their love with grace and gratitude, as imperfectly tailored to me as it may be, because I know they tried to love me in a way that matters to them, which is pretty sweet. It’s like a crow bringing me shiny trinkets. I may not want them (I mean, depending on the trinket), but I’d still feel special to be chosen by the crow.
It’s all love, after all. Gratitude can be an act of generosity, and vice versa, after all.
I don’t know about you, but I kind of want to receive all the love I want. This means I need to make it easier for people to get right, even when they don’t really get it right.
Learning different languages means you can connect and communicate better with new people around the world. Learning each other’s love languages means you can connect and communicate better with the people around you who matter the most to you.
Life is short. We might as well put up as many solar panels as we can, and point them in the best direction to catch the most love we can, while we’re still here to catch it.
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