Don’t Go Looking for Love, Go Looking for Things You Love To Do
It’s almost February and it seems everything already switched to Valentine’s Day today, and so it feels appropriate to share one of my most important lessons on Love. The great love story of my life begins in a wide-open field in a park in the city of Atlanta…
…filled with tables, pop-up tents, and beer taps. Probably not what you were expecting, but I met my husband at a beer festival. I wasn’t looking for love, I was looking for a fun time doing some day drinking with my girlfriends and hopefully discovering a new favorite craft beer. In fact, I may have been so focused on myself, my provisions for the potential rain downpour in the forecast, and my friends that I failed to notice what I now see in hindsight as the first actual touchpoints of my relationship with my husband and how our relationship began. In a large group of friends and acquaintances of friends, my now-husband sat next to me on the way to the festival, our knees and ribs touching as we crammed into the backseat of a taxi van. He conveniently wanted to go to all of the beer tents I was going to, and later in the day, when it started to rain, he asked, “Can I put my cell phone in your Ziploc bag?” My attention to the forecast had paid off. I do love a good daytime festival, and I didn’t notice many of my future husband’s attentions at first, because I was doing something I loved doing with a few people I already loved, not looking for love.
Beer festivals may not be your thing, but start thinking about and identifying the things you love to do. Maybe that’s joining a running club because you love to run and exercise, going to painting classes because you want to improve your art skills, or attending an industry networking event because you care about nurturing your career. This is a great time in life to work on finding a new community or a new hobby, to focus on yourself.
Instead of just focusing on myself, I spent much of my early twenties longing to be in a serious relationship, often thinking too much about how and where I’d find my life partner. Would he be the guy I serendipitously rode in the office building elevator with many mornings, or the guy behind me in the checkout line at the grocery store? The idea here is that if you find yourself critically reviewing and interviewing every person you come across as a potential candidate for the job of spending the rest of your lives together, you aren’t likely to find someone, and the search can become both exhausting and depressing. However, if you dedicate your energy and resources to enriching your life by finding new hobbies, growing the ones you love, and strengthening your existing relationships with people you already care about, you are more likely to find your way into a romantic relationship with someone you love and care about.
Whether you are just married or don’t ever plan to be, or you are tired of swiping left and looking for a partner left and right, the “Love” chapter of Don’t Wear Shoes You Can’t Walk In highlights that at all stages, action—chasing, changing, losing, pursuing, and choosing—is necessary for love. So let your first action be that you are getting busy doing something you love to do. Running, painting, planting, exploring, or whatever it may be. An added bonus is that if you find someone you love while doing something you love, you’ll likely already have something in common. Maybe you ran a race together, maybe you both prefer a specific type of art supply, or have complementary business skills and find yourselves working on a freelance project together. Or, in my case, maybe you both love a good hoppy IPA and connect because you both like to take good care of your things. Hopefully you’ll learn that this word we’ve been told is LOVE, doesn’t always look, sound, or feel the way we imagine.