How to Celebrate Love in All Its Forms

Love Is Already All Around You

Right now, I’m not in a relationship. No partner to buy me flowers, no one whispering soft things over the dinner table, no plus one for weddings I’m secretly dreading. And yet, if you asked me whether I feel loved, the answer is an immediate and slightly emotional yes. Loved beyond measure, actually. Loved in ways that have nothing to do with my relationship status and everything to do with the people, animals, and small daily moments I’m surrounded by.

There’s my family, who know me at my most chaotic and love me anyway. There are my friends, the ones who send memes that read me to filth, who text “you ok babe” without needing a reason, who show up for the version of me that isn’t curated. And then there’s Lulu. My fluffy black boy cat, demon spawn, hellion in cat form, who looks at me like I personally invented sunlight. He yells at me from the hallway when I’ve been on my laptop too long, and sits on my chest like a warm, furry paperweight when I finally lie down. I have chosen to read this as devotion.

So no, I’m not lacking. I’m not sitting here writing this from a place of romantic deficit, frothing at the idea that love only counts if a man hands it to you. Love is love. It comes from partners, friends, pets, family, strangers, and yes, from yourself. It is all equal, all worthy, and all deserving of being celebrated like the genuinely big deal that it is.

Stop Ranking Love Like It’s a Reality Show

We’ve all done it. Whether we admit it or not. We’ve placed romantic love at the top of an invisible podium and shoved every other kind of love into supporting roles. Friendship love? Lovely, but not the headline act. Family love? Background music. Self love? Apparently optional, judging by the way most of us treat ourselves on a Tuesday. And the love we get from a pet? Filed under “cute” and never given the weight it deserves.

This ranking system is doing us all a disservice. It tells us that if we don’t have romantic love, we’re somehow loveless. It tells us that the friend who has driven you home at midnight because you couldn’t face the train is somehow worth less than a man who hasn’t texted back in three days. It tells us that the cat who has decided your lap is a sacred location is just an animal, when really, that’s a creature choosing you every single day. Babe, that’s love. Recognise it.

The first real step in celebrating love in all its forms is dismantling the hierarchy entirely. No tier list. No gold, silver, bronze. Just love, in its different shapes, all valid and all deserving of attention. Once you stop measuring love against a romantic blueprint, you start seeing it everywhere. The colleague who saves you the last good pastry. The mum who texts you a weather warning because she’s heard it might rain. The friend who remembers the name of the guy who ghosted you in 2019 so she can hate him on your behalf in 2026. That’s all love. Let it count.

Make Love a Verb, Not a Vibe

Here’s where the advice gets practical, because it’s all well and good to recognise love conceptually, but love that isn’t expressed tends to wither in the corner like a houseplant you swore you’d water. Love is a verb. It has to move. It has to be done, not just felt. And the easiest way to celebrate love in all its forms is to actively, deliberately, slightly annoyingly turn it into action.

Tell people. Out loud. With your actual mouth. I’m not talking about grand declarations or movie monologues. I’m talking about the small, casual, unprompted moments where you say, “I’m so glad you’re my friend,” or “I appreciate you,” or “you make my life better.” It feels strange at first. Slightly cringe. Vaguely Hallmark. Do it anyway. People are not mind readers, and the assumption that they know how much they mean to you is one of the great quiet tragedies of modern friendship. Tell them. Watch what happens.

Show up in ways that don’t require a special occasion. Send the voice note. Book the catch up. Drop off the soup when she’s sick. Like every single photo your nan posts to Facebook even when they’re sideways and slightly blurry. Pat Lulu while telling him he is the most handsome boy in the Southern Hemisphere, even though he is currently sprawled across my keyboard like he owns it. These tiny gestures are how love is actually celebrated. Not on Valentine’s Day. Not on anniversaries. On a Wednesday, for no reason, because you felt like it.

Build Rituals That Honour the Love You Already Have

Romantic relationships get the rituals. Date nights, anniversaries, weekend getaways, little traditions that couples build around themselves like a fortress. Meanwhile, the other loves in our lives get whatever scraps of attention we can fit between appointments. That imbalance is fixable, and the fix is rituals. Small, repeatable, slightly sacred little patterns that say, this love matters enough for me to make time for it.

I have a standing fortnightly nail appointment that doubles as a check in with myself. I have green tea in the morning, every morning, in the same mug, because that’s how I say good morning to my own nervous system. I have friends I message every Sunday with a chaotic recap of my week, and they message back, and it has become a thing we both rely on without ever having formally agreed to it. None of this is grand. None of it is Instagrammable. All of it is love made repeatable.

Pick something small and make it consistent. A weekly call with your mum. A monthly dinner with your closest friend. A Sunday afternoon with your pet where you do absolutely nothing but exist in the same room. A nightly five minutes where you do your skincare slowly and tell yourself you’re doing a good job. Rituals turn love from something you feel occasionally into something you live in. And once you start living in it, the question of whether you’re “loved enough” stops making sense entirely. You’re already swimming in it.

Love Yourself Loudly, Because You Were Never the Side Character

Here’s the bit no one wants to do, but it’s the one that holds the whole structure up. You cannot celebrate love in all its forms while leaving yourself off the list. Self love is not a yoga mat aesthetic. It’s not a bubble bath. It’s not whatever Instagram has decided self love is this week. It’s the willingness to treat yourself like a person you actually love, in the same way you treat the people around you.

Would you let your best friend talk to herself the way you talk to yourself in the mirror? Would you tell her she’s behind in life, that she’s not doing enough, that she should have figured it out by now? Absolutely not. You’d tell her she’s incredible. You’d remind her of how far she’s come. You’d defend her honour against her own brain if you had to. The bare minimum of self love is extending the same energy inward. Talk to yourself like she’s your friend. Because she is. She’s the longest friendship you’ll ever have.

Celebrate yourself the way you celebrate everyone else. Buy yourself the flowers. Book yourself the appointment. Take yourself to the new café and order whatever you want without negotiating. Lock in the matcha. Wear the outfit on a Tuesday. Sit with the discomfort of being kind to yourself if it feels foreign at first, and keep doing it until it doesn’t. Because at the end of all of it, the love you cultivate inwards is the foundation everything else gets built on. Family, friends, pets, future partners. They’re all guests in the house. You’re the one who lives there. Furnish it like you love whoever’s coming home to it. Spoiler. It’s you.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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