Does Love Equal Happiness?

A few weeks before Christmas I called my sister and asked her to choose one of the following: love, good luck, happiness, long life or wealth. She chose love and went on to say that if you have love then you have happiness. I immediately jumped on that statement with total disagreement. I’ve had love and I’ve had happiness. However, I have been in love and been totally unhappy and have been happy without being in love. Here is a warning for those of you who believe that romantic love equals happiness, please don’t read the rest of this blog. For the rest of us more jaded types, please read on.

Happiness is a word we throw around so much that it hardly has any meaning. If you were to ask most people what they want out of life or what their main goal in life is they would tell you it is to be happy. Yet, what does that mean exactly? Merriam Webster defines happiness as a state of well-being and contentment. So, maybe the bigger question is, are we ever really content? Believing that love is the answer to our own personal happiness and personal contentment is a scary thing to believe. I wonder what happens if you never find love, does that mean you will be unhappy the rest of your life? Also, trying to find contentment outside of your own skin can be difficult. You have to learn to be happy in your own life and then having someone else to love you is just whipped cream on the already delicious caramel sundae. Love from a significant other should enrich us and not define our happiness. Not to mention how much pressure is it to put on another person for their love to make us happy? That sort of expectation can be crushing and create more problems. It also makes it easy to cop out and not take responsibility for our own happiness. This notion makes it easy to blame our own unhappiness on the one whose love is supposed to be making us happy.

What about love conquering all? Regardless if other parts of our life are falling a part as long as we have that special someone that loves us we can overcome anything? Love brings a lot to our lives. It can make us better more humble, caring people many times, but it shouldn’t be equated with happiness. Love is only part of what makes us happy and content people. We can be happy and not be in love.

What my sister didn’t realize at the time was that I was actually buying a Christmas present for her. I would have loved to have given her all of those things as a gift. Then her life would probably be content. However, I was picking out necklaces with Chinese symbols on them that represented one of those words. Little did she know at the time that I had already purchased mine and put it in my online shopping cart. Yes, I picked love over all those other things. Because deep down after all of my own heart breaks, disappointments, tears and brokenness I still want to believe in love.