Love Letters & Love Songs

Oct 11, 2023
5 min read

I hope you receive all the love you deserve. And in the meantime, I hope you fall in love with being alive!

I woke up this morning to a wonderful message from a good friend of mine, she had attached the song she wants played at her wedding, and she wanted to share this special part of herself with me! It's important to note that neither of us have any prospects for a husband at the moment, but it is so lovely to dream. A truth I am coming to discover with each passing day is that a majority of college men are not the greatest for a girl like me searching for profound romance. While I could let this fact make me upset, I've been lucky to have some eye-opening conversations lately, and I would love to share my findings with all of you!

I, like many young women my age, was raised on Disney Princess movies. I do not think this is a bad thing, and being told I was a "real life Disney Princess" was one of the highest compliments I have ever been paid. The one flaw I see with some of these movies is the outdated notion that our lives do not start until we have fallen in love with our soulmates. I am proud of the direction contemporary Disney movies such as Frozen and Brave are taking, but the classics impacted me deeply when I was at my most impressionable. While I still believe my soulmate is out there somewhere, it is unfair for me to spend my time searching and waiting and wanting in the meantime. We must teach our girls that we will only be truly ready to fall in love only after we have fallen in love with ourselves.

Self love is hard. It's so much more than the billboard sign advertising body confidence or achieving a new personal best at the gym or deleting FaceTune; self love is a journey, not a destination. Like all things that are worthwhile, self love is a constant work in progress. When we are most content with who we are and focused on pursuing our own passions, that is when we will attract all of the people who were meant to be in our lives all along. We must go in search of life, and love will find us along the way. Now, I understand that this is much easier said than done. I "fall in love" with at least ten new men every week, and I have no problem appreciating their beauty. But when I find myself focusing on what I think they must think of me rather than what I think of myself, that's when I trap myself. Who cares if these guys I see in passing like me? Do I like me?

When we finally stop searching for love is when it finds us. In the meantime, I am seeking the passion projects that make me excited to be alive. I am researching topics I once thought would make me a nerd, and I am scheduling meetings for things that make me excited to get out of bed in the mornings. I like to pretend I already died and asked God to send me back to Earth so I can swim in the sunshine and see the sunsets and get my heart broken and love my friends and cry so hard in the bathroom and go grocery shopping 1,000 more times. And that I promised I would never forget the miracle of being here and being able to fall in love with being alive all over again.

One of my more recent passion projects has been getting very into Pinterest vision boarding. I like to visualize where I would like to be because it motivates me to work that much harder now. I personally am very proud of my wedding board, it makes me excited to someday share a sacred moment with a man I consider to be my equal, my life partner, my soulmate. In the meantime, I am content to wait. My favorite pictures to pin are the ones where the couples are brimming with such radiant joy that I can feel it through my phone screen. While I am happy to support those I care about through situationships and talking stages and heartbreak, none of it appeals to me because I would rather wait to be authentically loved than pretend to be someone I'm not. It is both a blessing and a curse to care so deeply about everything, but I believe we all deserve nothing less than extraordinary love! I also acknowledge that these great loves find us when we are ready, and some people take longer than others. So if you have been oh so lucky to find that person who knows your thoughts before you even think them and makes even the worst days better, please know how happy I am for you! But if you are anything like me, please know that there is no shame in taking longer. Good things take time, and embracing this does not mean there is anything wrong with you. On the contrary, what a wondrous opportunity this is to get to know ourselves, exactly as we are.

Something about me that will always be true is that I am such a dreamer. I spend most of my time daydreaming about the things that make me happy. Two of my most favorite things in the world are love songs and love letters! My friend's song that she shared with me this morning has quickly become one of my new favorites, and I have an idea I would like to share with all of you: I would like you to take a moment and picture yourself happily in love. Whether you are dancing at a wedding or in the rain or on the beach or in the living room, I believe everyone has that one song that reminds them of what it must be like to be happily in love. If you would like, I'd love it if you would share that song with me so I can put them all in a playlist to share in next week's blog! The thought of all the people I love being happily in love brings me more joy than anything else in the world, and I want to share that joy with all of you! When you have a spare moment, please consider sharing your song using the Let's Chat feature which is the little orange text bubble on the bottom right of this screen or DM my Instagram page @glimpses.of.gracie! I so look forward to listening to each and every one of these songs!!!