I realize now how I set the tone for mediocrity in my life. Year after year, friend after friend, relationship after relationship. Don’t get me wrong, it was not intentional, but very much my fault. I did the quiz on my love language and ran with it never knowing the true capacity of love nor the language of it.

“I don’t really care for gifts” I would say, “quality time and physical touch are my love languages”. There I was, setting the tone for “minimal effort and underserving”, innocent and naive. I was too young minded to know that effort in all forms of love is the minimum of what love requires.

Somehow thinking those statements would set me apart from other women who required extravagant gifts or stopped people from assuming I was a gold digger.  I would be left wondering why I didn’t get random flowers and cards, why I didn’t get asked on friend dates, or why I didn’t get those nice gifts on special occasions or exquisite dates. Just hanging out and sex. I was so wrapped up in the surface of what loving me looked like, instead of understanding what love itself looked like, and then how love and I fit together.

 Let’s not forget the standards we set in love, seep into every aspect of life. I sat and realized that friends, my jobs, and even my relationship with myself was built in mediocracy. Furthermore, I had no one to blame but me.

We set the tone for what we allow and endure.

Accepting that love is this all-encompassing verb, the languages of love will have a new meaning. The idea if love is not to be desired in one form. It’s to understand that in your most vulnerable times, in your happiest times, and even in your saddest, the love you require will change. Love is fluid because it is something you experience in real time. No day is the same, no version of you is the same, so how dare you limit what the love you require looks like. Minimizing what you require into popular love quizzes. Realizing that your love language is either what you lacked or received in abundance in your youth, shows you that trying to fill that void is limiting.

Challenge

The next time someone asks you your love language, I want you to say it depends on the day. Explain that physical touch is your favorite form of love because you lacked it in your youth. Yet, you love gifts simply because you deserve it, hearing affirmations because words are powerful, acts of service because life gets hectic, and quality time because life is too short. I dare you let the love you require be all encompassing.

-Love Language

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