I feel like growing up we were never really told that it was okay to say i love you to your friends. It was always your family, your loved ones or the people you would be in a relationship with or grow to marry. Nobody ever told me “you should love whoever you want including your friends and tell them you love them too if you want to!”. So as I got older I started hearing it more from my friends and at first it would catch me off guard like wait what? Then it clicked. We are SUPPOSED to love the people in our lives. We meet people and create these incredible bonds and friendships with the connections and we feel close to them and we KNOW we love them even if they are just friends so why don’t we tell them more?

I think it is healthy to love multiple people at once. We have always been taught “family is everything” and While I might agree to an extent I also genuinely believe we create our own family too. We love people and they become part of our lives and family and sometimes the people WHO ARE our family end up leaving or we leave them. We should remind ourselves to love more in life, we are sent these connections and relationships so why CAN’T we love them? and tell them? it was always “unless you are in a committed relationship or family you don’t tell people you love them” THAT SEEMS SILLY DOESN’T IT? So we are being FORCED to only love a few people in life? That doesn’t make sense. I want ALL of the connections in life. I want people in my life that I care DEEPLY for. People I can turn to and call when I need. Someone who has my back and I have theirs. I want MULTIPLE people like this. I want to be able to look at my friends and say “I LOVE YOU GUYS you mean everything to me” I wish I knew that it was okay growing up, so many people even temporary entered my life and made a HUEG impact on me that I loved. I wish I would have told them that.

Telling someone you love them feels REAL like once you say it is said. There is and always has been a lot of pressure behind the word LOVE when really it is just a deep connection, a feeling that we have. A way to remind someone “I care for you and our connection is real” it doesn’t matter if it is intimate, as a friend or a spiritual connection, saying it means something and it matters. I think we go through a lot of connections in life and sometimes the connections are short lived but most of them are long term. We meet people and it just CLICKS there is that bond and connection that turns into a deep friendship and that person is one of your people.

You care for them deeply and know in your heart that the bond is real, tell them. We need to be better about expressing our feelings towards the people in our lives. The people in our lives NEED to know how much they matter to us, it seems essential. It seems like it needs to be said every day. I LOVE YOU and you are so important to me!

To all of my friends, i love you. I am grateful for you.