Let's Start with a Favorite Quote: A universal truth, I find.

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves"

 

- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

 

There are always those moments when we stop and take a deep breath, as if for the first time, moments that exist between the stress of the daily grind and sweet solace of deep slumber. These are the moments one might call "thinking" time or "me" time. We examine ourselves and our lives. Teenagers, adults, even kids take the time to do these individual evaluations. We take a sort of mental inventory of what is going on in the world around us and in our own personal worlds. These are the seconds, minutes, hours, in which we question, whether consciously or subconsciously, who we are, what we're doing, where we're headed. It is in human nature to dwell on the inter-connectivity, or lack-there-of that we experience as people. We all want to be loved. A child may feel the absence of love if his parents are on the verge of divorce, he has a new baby sister, etc. Someone older and in a relationship may evaluate that things just aren't working out. There are countless other examples

For all of the self-help books that exist, an over-arching goal is being able to find happiness in life. Personal happiness. However, a main source of happiness, as Hugo so astutely pointed out, is love. And without love, finding happiness is often not so simple. Sure, it may be a combination of teenage delusion and the media that makes adolescents feel as though they won't be happy if they don't have a boyfriend/girlfriend, but in many cases, knowing that we are loved or are capable of being loved is enough to turn that perpetual, proverbial frown upside-down. More than just being loved for ourselves, we often find that our deepest, if unspoken, desire is to be wholeheartedly loved, flaws and all.