Valentine’s Day Reflections

by | Feb 14, 2016

Valentine's Day is a great way to celebrate a love you already have. But if it's a way to make up for your lack of appreciating your love the rest of the year, you better do some thinking.

Valentine’s Day is a great way to celebrate a love you already have. But if it’s a way to make up for your lack of appreciating your love the rest of the year, you better do some thinking.

A true love relationship is one that is worth celebrating all year long. If your life is better because of your love relationship, then Valentine’s Day is nothing more than a way to reinforce, and celebrate, this already obvious fact.

If Valentine’s Day is a way to try and rekindle what you don’t have or perhaps never had, it’s a sign that you ought to reevaluate how you are in your relationship. Are you making your relationship everything it can and deserves to be all year long, or not?

Don’t look to your partner to make you happy. It’s his job to simply be who he is. Either he has earned your love by being who he is, or he hasn’t. It’s not his job to be doing things to “make you happier.” It’s your job, and his, to simply make sure you love the other as you both are.

You don’t love that which you seek to change; you love what already is. Love is a response to what exists, not to what you wish, what once was, or what merely might be. Love applies to the actual, not the theoretical.

To those of you who already understand this, it will be a happy Valentine’s Day indeed. To those of you who don’t yet grasp what I’m saying, use this day as an opportunity to think about it. Next Valentine’s Day, or the one after, can then be a much happier one.

Dr. Michael Hurd is a psychotherapist, columnist and author of "Bad Therapy, Good Therapy (And How to Tell the Difference)" and "Grow Up America!" Visit his website at: www.DrHurd.com.

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