Share the love with everyone

By Dustin Woods
Visionary Columnist

I love bacon, I love my dog, I love my boyfriend and I love my mom. We use the same four letters to represent feelings that are similar but have drastically different meanings.

We love the word love and use it a lot. We also want to be loved, and we want to give love as well. We are positively enamored with the emotion of love, and perhaps that is why we use the term to describe so many feelings.

Valentine’s Day is the holiday that is the most about love but not every kind of love is celebrated by the holiday. For the most part, it is romantic love this holiday celebrates. The “I love my boyfriend” kind of love.

Lovers share gifts ranging from the erotic to practical, children give candy and cards for valentines and the fictional character Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation has Galentine’s which is celebrated the day before and is all about honoring the love women should share for each other.

The holiday is celebrated in many ways by many different people, and so I say why don't we push the envelope a little further. In the vein of Galentine’s, but without the gender or date restrictions, I think we should all search deep within ourselves and work to show love for everyone: strangers, family and even those people we don't like.

I contend that we should show love as much as we use the word and, perhaps, we would all benefit from the increased positivity that would be the outcome of a world with more love.

As a community LGBT+ people are accustomed to showing familial love to each other (the “I love my mom” kind of love); perhaps because many in the community have had to turn that community into their family because they were rejected by their biological family.

Normally it takes a while to treat a non-biological family member like a biological one unless you’re in the LGBTQ+ community.

I can only speak from experience about the G in the community, but I've seen platonic relationships grow to family status in a few weeks. We LGBTQ+’ers have a great capacity for accepting new people into our love sphere, and I think we could leverage that skill to show the world that love for love's sake is a goal we should all share.

This February, we should think about love on a larger scale. Find the well of it inside yourself and share that love with as many people as you can. It can be a cold dark world sometimes, and you could change someone else's if you bring a little light of love into their lives.

Copyright The Gayly – February 13, 2019 @ 9:15 a.m. CST.