I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately.  What it is, what it means, what’s it’s like to have it, and what it’s like to not have it in your life, and of course the different kinds of love.

Lets start with the types of love.  There is the love you share with friends, there is passionate love, there is romantic love, familial love and unrequited love just to name a few.

I’m lucky that I have lots of love in my life.  I have great friends, and I have two amazing and wonderful kids.  I am rich when it comes to love.  I’ve had passionate love and romantic love and I’ve even had unrequited love.  And all of them are good.  Yes, all of them – even the unrequited love.

I had crushes on boys when I was a little girl.  Boys who didn’t even know I was alive, and I had crushes on movie stars and singers.  Yes David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, I’m talking to you.  And yes, as an adult, there have been people I loved deeply, with all my heart that just didn’t love me back.

At first, I thought unrequited love was a horrible and terrible thing.  Here I was, seven years old, holding my Partridge Family lunch box waiting for David Cassidy to drive up and his limo and take me away, and he never came.  And when I was older, Scott Baio never came, and that cute boy in my study hall never did ask me to the prom.

This got me to thinking, is unrequited love a bad thing?  My automatic response was “Heck yeah, it’s bad, it hurts!  Of course it’s bad.” But then I started to really think about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that unrequited love is not a bad thing at all.  Any type of love is good because the more we love, the bigger our capacity to love is.  The more we use our heart, the more it expands, and the more it expands, the more love it can give and received.  Kind of like the Grinch’s heart on How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

But it’s not just unrequited love that makes your heart grow. It’s every kind of love.  Love is good, and love is expandable, and love, well it grows exponentially.  The more love you have, and the more love you give way, the more love you get.  So open your heart to love, and share that love and watch and cherish the love that comes back to you.