4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails.

– 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

Love never fails. Love is life’s greatest wonder but can also be life’s greatest loss. As awe encompassing as love can be, it is also a source of crippling heartache when it leaves you and when it had left me almost a year ago, I found myself in one of the saddest states of human condition: heartbroken. However, what needs to be understood is that love is not the root of that pain, but rather the absence of it is. And while it may cause you to question everything you had previously known, love is also the ultimate answer.

In this past year, love has made itself known to me in an abundance of ways. From the love of my parents and siblings to the love of friends who I have come to regard as family, the cracked crevices of my heart were slowly filled with moments of tender affection that are too many to name but have been carefully documented in photos littered all over my social media. Although they do not possess the same fervor of romantic love, they have still been just as powerful. 

However, of all the love that I have known since my time of heartbreak, the most gratifying love that I have cultivated is the love of self. When things had ended, my self-esteem, self worth, and belief in my own capabilities plummeted and I could not love anything about myself because I feared those were the things that caused love to leave me. I questioned my humor, doubted my intelligence, and rebuked my physical appearance for potentially not being enough to meet someone else’s standards. My pained, naiveté mentality spoke to me and said that if someone could know you so deeply and so intimately and still choose to leave you, then there must not be anything to love worth staying for.

The one and only thing that I never criticized myself for was my capacity to love and ability to show it. I may have lacked in many aspects but I will always stand beside the fact that I had loved truly and it was a love without pretense and without condition. What I needed to learn, however, was it doesn’t matter how much love I give or how well I love if that isn’t the person I’m meant to give it to.

And so I surrendered my insecurities to God and asked for Him to fill me up with so much grace that there wasn’t any room for any hurt, bitterness, or resentment. Each morning I told myself that there are places to see and people to meet and coffee to drink and that I deserved to be here. Soon enough, a new hope was born in my heart and instead of relying on affection from others, I began to give myself the assurance that I once yearned from someone else. Looking at the mirror became less of a hassle and more of a treat as I began to appreciate the features that someone may find lovely someday; I forced myself to realize that just because someone cannot appreciate my wavy hair/pale skin/petite stature does not mean that beauty isn’t there. But even more so, beauty only compromises the superficial aspect of why a person stays in love – the rest is significantly deeper.

And so began the process of falling in love with myself. If love is patient and kind, then I must be tolerant of my own misgivings and gentle with myself in time of frustration. If love does not delight in wrongdoing, then I must learn how to forgive my shortcomings and others transgressions against me. If love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things, then I must hope when things look bleak, have faith when all I am is weary, and continually try to understand why the world works the way it does. If I ever hope to give love to another, then I had to first learn how to give love unconditionally to myself.

There is an indescribable satisfaction in choosing to pursue yourself, in taking all your energy and investing it back into your own persona, in actively seeking ways to please yourself rather than depending on others. Falling in love with yourself requires a personal confrontation on the most intimate of levels and being honest about all intentions even when it would be effortless to lie. Unconditional love necessitates acknowledging all faults and imperfections not to make light of them, but to affirm that they exist as darkness and that darkness can be embraced, too. Love of self demands respect, fortitude, patience, and unwavering understanding in spite of how apparent your humanly flaws can be.

My worst is separate from my weakest but I can never achieve my best without accepting that all compromise who I truly am. Learning how to love all those elements is what I hope will allow me to love another again one day; the ability to love myself completely and absolutely is what I hope will prevent me from settling for someone who cannot do the same. I cannot reiterate enough how liberating it is to understand one’s own worth and use that as a standard to how you let others love you because there are too many lackluster things in this world to let love be one of them.

So let it be known that love is not the reason for heartache but rather the remedy for it. But also let it be known that love can be created from within and crafted to fill the crevices of what a broken heart had left behind.

I may not have someone significant to call my own this Valentine’s Day but I do have the hope that it will happen someday. If I know one thing, it’s this: Love never fails.

Janelle.