Kay:

Hey Questers, it’s episode 333, which I just love number’s like…

Shi:

Hello.

Kay:

Hello, this only happens every 100 episodes. So, this is a pretty cool thing. Welcome back. It is Wednesday, April 14th and we have a really short but really solid quote for you today. It’s from the one and only Shirley Temple and she says, “There’s nothing like real love, nothing.”

Shi:

Just imagine her little curls and her little face saying this. “There’s nothing like real love. Nothing.”

Kay:

But then in real life, she ends up turning out to be a super B.A. lady diplomat, political ambassador. She was cool.

Shi:

She was. She was also a child star in the thirties. Everyone knows the name, Shirley Temple. Many of us have drunk Shirley Temples as children growing up and enjoyed always of course the cherry. But the cherry on top for this quote is that real love, this idea that there is no higher purpose. That love is the answer. Like the Beatles all you need is love. Shirley Temple is reminding us of that same basic, simple to understand, but sometimes hard to implement principle that there’s nothing like real love.

Kay:

Well, Shirley Temple may have played a character in many movies and one thing that contributes to many of our ideas of how love goes down is movies. Not going to lie, like #ConfessionSession gang, I was probably 16 when I finally figured out that the whole Prince Charming thing and marriage castle business wasn’t real. Not that I was necessarily delusional about how it all went down, but the media definitely fills our heads with the idea of true love without really giving a lot of descriptors as to how much work it takes to be in a relationship.

Shi:

Happily, ever after but the truth is happily ever after after you get married.

Kay:

Is choosing every day.

Shi:

It’s years and years and years and hundreds of thousands of dinners and showers and trips and different things in your life and whether or not we’re talking about relationship love or plutonic love the indicator in this quote that we found so profound was that four-letter word R-E-A-L. Then really uncovering, “what do we mean here?” because she could have said there’s nothing like love, nothing, but she says there’s nothing like real love. So, what does real love really mean?

Kay:

Real love is unconditional. It’s that feeling of care for someone and giving that to them without your own conditions layered on top of that. So, it’s really an interesting phenomenon because we don’t truly offer unconditional love to too many people in our lives – least of all ourselves. Most of us really only feel that for our kids.

Shi:

Yeah. Right? It’s even hard not to place conditional love on them sometimes. I was thinking about, okay, who do I love unconditionally? And I practice unconditional love as much as I can. But it is harder than it sounds and you’re likely nodding along saying, “yeah, it is.” I was thinking, okay, maybe the dogs, but then I’m like, nope, because I’ve got conditions on them. I get mad at them and frustrated and wish they would behave differently and of course love my husband, my children, my dogs, my sister, my people around me. It’s easy to display good character and good values and good love when times are good. It’s always exponentially more difficult as your challenges begin to build and mount up. So, experiencing that real love, that unconditional love, that feeling of support no matter what is a beautiful thing that is meant to be cherished.

Kay:

So, not true, not new love, real love. We’re talking about that steady, steady (it might wax and wane through the ways of the humans), but it steadies forever. Be it a partner, a sister, a best friend, whatever that looks like in your life. Like Shirley Temple tells us, “There’s nothing like real love. Nothing.”

Shi:

So, that means it is a #LoveQuest today. For today’s quest, we want you to perform an act of true, real love. Yep. That means it will Shirley, (see what we did there), be an act of selflessness. So, get out there and show someone that you love them through a random act of selfless kindness. Are you ready?

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!