Does Love = Happiness? Is everyone as anxious as I am about love and relationships?

I started this blog as a way to release some of my frustration of being a spinster in the Lesbian world. Also, I thought that perhaps I could connect with people who share the same anxieties in their quest to find love within the community.

On my path to discovering "how to find love and overcome my love-related anxieties," I discovered a couple of things:

Finding romantic love is not the only path to happiness
Society and the media tend to promote the idea that happiness is achieved through romantic love. Perfect-ending romance stories or San Valentine's Days advertisements full of images of happy couples get into our brains whether we like them or not. The heavy role that romantic love plays in our society's portrait of happiness creates a focusing illusion. If we can only see that Happiness = Romantic love we are very likely to feel unhappy if we are single. The idea that happiness is only achieved with romantic love leads in opposition to the unconscious thought that single people must be unhappy.

However, happiness can be achieved in many different ways such as having good friends and family relationships, the feeling of belonging to a community or personal self-development (you have to trust me on this; I am studying Happiness as a part of my PhD).

There are many types of love. Romantic love is just one of them. If you don't have romantic love in your life right now, maybe change your focus to other "love" in your life such as family, friends, art, sports or even work if that is what you love.  

Love = Happiness but, love is not only found in romantic relationships!

Finding romantic love will not be the end of your relationship-related anxieties
For those of us that tend to have some love-related anxiety, finding love is not the end of our "being single-related anxiety" as the "being in a couple anxiety" will kick off.

From my many conversations about love with my friends, lovers and colleagues over the years, I have come to the conclusion that most of us have some degree of love-related anxieties (and the ones that don't seem to have it are because they don't share it with the world). It is perfectly normal to be a bit worried from time to time about your close relationships. Low doses of worry could be healthy to keep couples engaged, but high doses of anxiety might break any romantic relationship attempt. Finding an anxiety middle point that works in favour of your needs and also towards developing the type of relationship that you and your other half want could be the key to a happy relationship.


I personally find love in "being creative" and use art as a way to release my own relationship-related anxieties:

My little art project titled "Coming out". Summer 2007

The gap between Disney and Reality creates me anxiety!

The title of this post is the epiphany that I had the other day when I was talking to one of my housemates about love... I thought that my realization deserved a post! So, here is my non-sense mumbling about love...

In this over-saturated Tinder-love market dominated by use-and-throw-away relationships... Romance is dead! 

I know that my previous statement might sound a bit strong, but that is my view of love in this Tinder-oriented-society. That has been my experience of love in the XXI century as a lesbian women dating in the online world in a mildly progressive city of Brighton. Watching lovers coming and going and getting my heart broken every so often...

No one cares about breaking your heart anymore, as at the end of the day, we are all strangers in the online net. One day, you might wake up and discover that you have stop caring about your heart too...You have lost it somewhere... sometime... along the way in one or few of those past love stories with a disappointing ending... But there is still a last part of you that still want to believe in love and romance.

I STILL want to believe IN LOVE & ROMANCE!

The other day, I found myself having some strange mix of emotions when waiting for someone to answer me a silly message. I realized that I'm just a lonely lost girl in this world, keen on finding someone to share a connection... Desperate to believe that I will find that connection and fearing at the same the inevitable disappointing-ending that have always come with every past love story...

Some days, I really want a Disney-like-princess to appear on my door step with a bucket of flowers and a big smile... Have some romance in my life, but in reality, only grumpy delivery guys with parking problems knock at my door...

I STILL want to believe that there will be someone that will save me from becoming a Tinder-addict, save me from the apocalypses of romance in the online world...  I guess that my Disney like idea of love conflicts with my reality... and that is what creates me most of my love anxieties...

Should I still believe in love despite of the fact that the evidence of my reality has show me that is it just not there (like UFO's)? Should I give up and just go with the Tinder-flow of one-night stand and at least have some fun in the meantime? 

Why some people find love and others don't? Why some couples last until the day they die and others don´t? What keeps a couple together? 

What is love anyway? Is there only one type of love? Do people feel love equally? Is the balance on the intensity of the feeling between couples what keeps them together? What does your partner thinks is love? Does sharing a matching concept of love bring people together?

If any of my few readers have an answer to any of these questions, please, feel free to leave a comment below...

It is clear that there is not perfect love as nobody is perfect even (if they believe that they are...) and it will be foolish to think that I'm going to find a perfect love and that there is a Disney princess waiting for me.... But I like to keep believing that romance can happen.... I guess that I am still a believer!