Love rules

Don’t be misled by the headlines: it’s love, not hate, that rules the world

Watching television news, reading the daily headlines or just scrolling through social media, it is easy to believe that hate is the emotion that colours our world now. There are talking heads screaming abuse through tiny windows on the TV screen. The headlines are all about hate crimes perpetrated across the length and breadth of the country. And social media is crawling with trolls whose default position is to spew abuse at and about everyone. 

So yes, it is easy to come to the conclusion that hate rules the world. 

But you only have to step into the real world to realise that you’ve got this all wrong. Hate may be what we encounter in the media but in the world we live in we are surrounded by love wherever we go.

 

Nowhere do you see this love manifested more plainly than when you visit a hospital. The waiting area is teeming with families, some old some young, but all tearful and sick with worry as they wait for news of a loved one. Grief, they say, is the price we pay for love. You only have to spend an hour in a hospital visiting lounge to know the truth of that. It is love that turns these folks grey with worry; it is love that puts a smile on their faces when they get good news; and it is love that makes them spend the night on an uncomfortable chair because they simply cannot bear to be apart from their loved one lying in the hospital bed a few doors away. 

Airports are the other place where I am often overwhelmed by the love on display. It’s the harried parents of a toddler who put aside their frustration to coo at their child, trying hard to keep him/her entertained as they struggle through the security queue. It’s the middle-aged man greeting his wheelchair-bound mother at arrivals, touching her feet before he enfolds her in an embrace so tight it feels as if he will never let go. It’s the large family group come to see off a newly-married couple, peering through the plate glass windows of the airport to wave one last time at their daughter as she heads off to make a life abroad, smiling through their tears so that she is not too sad about leaving everything familiar behind. 

Walking through a park you can’t help but be gratified by the many manifestations of love on display. There is the most obvious, of course. The young lovers who try and hide away in little nooks and corners — on a secluded bench here, behind a sprawling tree there — so that they cuddle each other in what passes for privacy in their lives. But then, there are the others. The groups of middle-aged women hanging out with their girlfriends, laughing and giggling their cares away. The grandparents who are slightly unsteady on their feet being led around by loving grandchildren who reduce their pace to flank them in a protective pincer movement. The school parties who have been brought out for a special treat and are giddy with delight as they walk around arm in arm with their best friends. 

Even doing something as mundane as shopping in a mall will showcase love in so many different ways. You will see it in the young man who diffidently enters a luxury store to buy his girlfriend a pair of designer sunglasses with the money he has probably saved over months. You will see it in the mom who has brought her teenage daughter bra-shopping for the first time ever. You will see it in the elderly couple who spend ages dithering over what to buy their kids, whose grown-up lives are now beyond their comprehension. 

The truth is that love is everywhere you look. It is love which rules our world. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.