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Double Dare: Choose Love (59/60)



I Dare YOU:

Love is a tricky thing.

When it's going well, it's about the best thing that ever happened to you.  You feel brilliant and beautiful, wise and witty, and best of all invincible.  Nothing can hurt you because you have someone who loves you.  Someone who cares what you think and feel and worries when you don't come home on time.  There is such comfort in good going love.

And I haven't even mentioned how lovely it feels to be thought beautiful and attractive and wanted and needed.  It's addictive in how good it all feels.  We want more and more and more of it.  If we are lucky, this wanting turns to things not just physical, but emotional and mental.  Attraction becomes something deeper and more meaningful.

But when love is not going well, oh Lordy, how bad that can be.  It's like the you've been sent to Siberia without a jacket or Alaska without a snowmobile.  You feel utterly abandoned, isolated, alone, and usually equally super duper mad and sad at the same time.  It's horrible and confusing.

But still . . . I want to tell you, despite seeing both sides, and experiencing both sides, still choose love.  Choose to make yourself vulnerable, even if it fails, to love and show affection and say yes to companionship.  There are no guarantees ever in life about anything.  Chances are, in love, it will fail you or at least hurt really bad, but what else are you going to do with your life?

Stay in your house with your cats and computer games?  Why not, even if it's for six days, have the most delicious crush ever?  Let the magic of those fresh emotions fill your whole body and feel the hope of the potential love.  Dive into it.  Embrace it.  Even if it fails . . . because that's what living bravely is about.  It's not about staying safe, it's about putting it all on the line.  It's about risk and sometimes taking the same risk over and over again and having your heart broken . . . but one of those times, it's bound to last a little longer and you will have days of joy. It's worth it.  It's worth feeling so vividly alive.

And for those of us old marrieds where years and years have gone by, don't give up on love.  Don't forget the magic of that crush.  The shivers you get when you hear their voice or the electric shock you feel when their hand brushes yours.  These simple things, that was the spark that started all this . . . remember that.  Reignite it.

Choose love.  Choose to forget the thousand and one things that made you upset today--put it down--and go sit beside your other half (and they are your other half), wrap your arms around them (even if they don't really want it) and hold onto them and tell them why you love them.  Don't let go until you've said at least three things . . . or four or ten or fifty.  Then look right into their beloved face and smile and say these exact words:  "I love you."

What you do after that . . . well, I'll leave that up to you, but I can tell you, it rarely ends badly.

So for all of us, despite how dangerously terrifying it is, take a risk, throw caution to the wind, take a chance and above all .  . choose LOVE.

It may hurt.

It may make you feel crazy.

But it will 100% remind you what it means to be alive.

And what use is this life if we've forgotten how to live?

So go . . . live.

Love.

You've got this.




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