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