"Love is still the most powerful force on the planet." It's a phrase that I wholeheartedly believe in and think everyone should adopt in their own way. But at the same time, I don't think of love in the same way that a lot of us do. I don't think love should be confined to the four walls of a romantic relationship. I think love is much bigger and much more powerful.

Without love, we are nothing. When I think about what happiness means to me, it's defined by a couple of things — first and foremost, helping other people. But following right behind it is love in all of its forms. It's giving and receiving love from the friends and family I choose to spend my time with. It's meeting strangers and loving them based on the spark within them. It's eventually finding someone I love (yes, romantically) to come home to at the end of the day. It's even a dog that I snuggle up with at night and give my whole heart to.

All of this carries so much weight in my life. But I think that we, as a society, seriously overvalue romantic love and seriously undervalue platonic love. The latter is so important and integral to our well-being as individuals and as a cohesive population.

We need to be able to feel comfortable expressing our emotions not only to those that we are in romantic relationships with but arguably more importantly, to those that we are in platonic relationships with. We cannot and will not have all of our emotional needs met by our partner, and that's totally fine. We need other people. People need other people. And not just one person.

The whole idea that we need to consistently be in some kind of romantic relationship is not only unhealthy but also extremely unrealistic. Following the ideology that romantic love is the most important love of them all, the times when we are inevitably not in a relationship leave us feeling unworthy and unloved.

We are never unworthy and unloved.

We aren't going to consistently be in a romantic relationship at every moment in our lives. There are going to be months and years that we spend single. But those aren't months and years that we spend alone and without love.

Learn to find love. Learn to defy the lie that we need to be in a romantic relationship to love and be loved. Learn to love, no holds barred.