14 Shades of Love, Valentine's Day: From The Experts Mouth

#1 – Many Hearts, Many Shades of Love

14th February is celebrated as Valentine’s Day and everyone seems to have their own opinions on how, and if, this day should be celebrated. So, in keeping with our multi-disciplinary approach that allows different strokes for different folks, we present to you 14 shades of love on this Valentine’s Day.

I think…if it is true there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

#2 – The Valentine Love

The typical shade of love that we associate with Valentine’s Day is the romantic love between couples. Thanks to the massive advertising campaigns by marketers over the years, this is the first image that we think of when we hear the word “love.” The romantic love is based on the idea of a “fairy tale” love. Let’s just call this Valentine Love, and move on to explore the other shades of love.

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
Emma by Jane Austen

#3 – Love for the family

The most prominent shade of love, that continue to flourish even if there is no Valentine’s Day equivalent, is the love for the family. Our love for our family most truly reflects the true meaning of love and the reason why we are here in this world.

While we have special days for celebrating some of our relationships, such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc., how about celebrating our love for the entire family each day, including this Valentine’s Day.

In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Related Read: A touching read about grandparents and elders in society

#4 – Loving Others

Apart from the love that we shower on our spouses or significant others in a romantic way, and our love for our family, we could be loving others as well. Others could be interpreted in a narrow sense, such as loving our friends, loving our neighbours, loving our colleagues at work, etc.

At yet another level, we could abstract this love for others at a higher level and treat everyone in the world as part of one large family – our very own family that we truly love.

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.
Maya Angelou, author of ‘I know why the caged bird sings‘

#5 – Self Love

If we love everyone else in the world, we only have one person left to love. This is the one person that we so often take for granted. Yes, we are talking about the art of self love and taking care of ourselves. In particular, with the spate of changes around us in the New Normal, there is a crying need to take care of our Mental Health.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
Ernest Hemingway

Relevant Video: Top 10 Questions to gauge your mental health

#6 – Love for Travel

Love need not be directed towards human beings only. We could love experiences such as travel. Travel provides us with many opportunities to interact with different people and places, and to learn more about ourselves. With travel opportunities having been severely restricted over the last couple of years during the pandemic, the love for travel is a strong contender for the strongest shade during this festival of love!

Traveling is the great true love of my life…I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel the way about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby – I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me.
Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat Pray Love

Related Read: Students’ plight on account of travel restrictions on World Tourism Day and Lessons learnt from hiking the Tatra Mountains

Relevant Video: Find your true light this Diwali

#7 – Love for Work

Not everyone is a travel buff, though. There are the workaholics, or the ones who have found their passion in what they do. It may seem out of place to mention love for work, as one of the shades of love on the occasion of Valentine’s Day. But, let us be inclusive in our approach and accommodate this rare species. If they didn’t love their work so much, would they still be toiling away at work much more than is reasonably required? Before this train of thoughts leads to addition of another employee to The Great Resignation, let us move on to the next shade of love.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Steve Jobs

Related Read: Steve Jobs’ exclusive biography by Walter Isaacson and also a fresh perspective on his famous Stanford speech.

Relevant Video: Transformational Insights by Steve Jobs

#8 – Soulmates

For most people, the love for work sticks out like a sore thumb in the shades of love mentioned so far. So, let us recoil and get back on the most pristine shade of love. A love that is so pure, that it connects one soul to another.

It may not be as fashionable these days to speak about soulmates when it comes to our relationships. However, we do embrace spirituality in other spheres of our lives. As we know, fashion is temporary, but class is permanent. The body is ephemeral, but the soul is eternal.

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

#9 – Finding Love

While love between soulmates is pure, it is extremely rare too and finding true love can be a challenge. Yet another shade of love represents a significant proportion of our population, who are or have been in a journey to find true love.

A lot of people have had the experience of being in a relationship that didn’t work out. Some have even gone through the experience of being in multiple relationships and breaking up with someone after every few weeks or months. We tend to think that we will never fall in love again and that we should just try to live a happy single life. However, there is a big chance that we may find love again if we have the courage to give it another go. If we truly want something, the universe will conspire to make it happen!

So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.
Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist

#10 – Expressing Love

Even if we find our perfect soulmate, there are multiple shades of expressing love. Love may be a universal emotion, that binds people across the world, irrespective of age, gender, caste, religion or nationality. However, cracks develop in the relationship because we speak different languages while expressing love and expect others to demonstrate love differently.

It is important to understand each other’s love language and allow each other the space to love each other in our own ways. At the same time, since relationships are a two-way street, one should also try and communicate in the love language that the other prefers or understands.

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
Jane Austen – Pride & Prejudice

Related Book: If you are intrigued by this concept, read The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman

#11 – Perfect Love

As we can see from the various shades of love, the idea of the perfect companion or ‘made for each other’ that has been touted in the media and many literary works, probably does not exist, or at the very least, is a rare phenomenon.

However, the trick is not to find the ‘perfect’ partner, but to develop that perfect love, where the love persists despite all the imperfections!

You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.
Jodie Picoult – My Sister’s Keeper

#12 – Love in Adversity

While the idea of loving someone despite their imperfections is a romantic one, tough times can be particularly challenging. This is also when love is put to the ultimate test. Adversity can be challenging across all facets of life, be it career, finances or health. However, it can be the silent killer that eats away at relationships. So, this shade of love on Valentine’s Day is dedicated to celebrating the spirit of sticking together through thick and thin.

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

Related Read: 7 Steps to Dealing with Adversity

#13 – Conditions for Love

We have read through a dozen shades of love, and the temptation after reading through so many diverse aspects, might be to include various elements as conditions for giving and receiving love. However, love belongs to the heart’s domain, and not so much in the domain of the mind. Conditional love is not true love, but merely a transaction. With this penultimate shade of love, let us proceed to wrap up the 14 shades of love.

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.
Kahlil Gibran

#14 – The Conclusion

All good things must come to an end, as does this post on the 14 shades of love on this Valentine’s Day. In parting, let us talk about parting, because just like human beings, relationships cannot be immortal, at least in the physical world. So, how can we make our love last longer? More importantly, is there a way for love to become everlasting and transcend the boundaries and limitations imposed by the tenets of the physical world? As we said in the beginning while introducing the 14 shades of love, each to their own! Enjoy the spirit of love on this Valentine’s Day and beyond.