Mantra with Jemma Sbeg - I Know Love Has Many Forms

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

This week’s mantra is: "I Know Love Has Many Forms." Love isn’t limited to romance, it shows up in friendships, family, chosen community, and the quiet ways we care for each other every day. This episode explores how to recognize and cherish the different kinds of love that enrich your life, even when they don’t fit the traditional mold. Knowing that love has many forms allows you to feel more connected, more supported, and more whole. This mantra is a reminder to celebrate the relationships that fill you up, even if they don’t come with a fairytale label.Mantra is an OpenMind Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to OpenMind+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Mantra! Instagram: @mantraopenmind | @OpenMindStudios TikTok: @OpenMind Facebook: @0penmindstudios X: @OpenMindStudios YouTube: @OpenMind_Studios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Open Mind. Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your mantra. I know that love has so many forms. I'm Gemma Speg and every Monday I give you a simple but powerful phrase to consider and bring into your life, a philosophy to guide you in the week ahead and hopefully even beyond. In each episode, you guys know I unpack what our mantra really means, how it has shown up in my own life and how you can bring it into yours with journal prompts, tips and psychological strategies to help

you take this mantra and put it into action. At Open Mind, we value your support, so please make sure to share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow mantra to help others discover the show. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access and ad-free listening, join our Open Mind Plus community on Apple Podcasts. Each month, I also respond to your questions and comments in our special bonus episodes, so please leave a comment on this episode or DME on Instagram at Mantra Open Mind if you would like to be included. But stick around. We'll be right back after this short pause. Get no frills delivered.

Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. Okay, let's get right into it. It is time for this week's mantra. I know love has so many forms. This is our final episode for this season, my friends.

And so I wanted to end with a mantra that I personally would say is my biggest source of comfort and one that I come back to time and time again. When I first, you know, decided that we were going to make this podcast and that we were going to talk about mantras and how they help us and ground us and affirm our beliefs, this was one of the ones I most certainly knew I wanted to do. And I saved it to the very last episode of this season. reason to bring it to you as a nice way to round out what we've talked about so far. So I cannot wait to talk about this with you guys.

I love this mantra. I love this topic. I love having this conversation with my family members, with my friends, with strangers, with listeners, because it makes me feel so good about humanity and life in general, getting to talk about all the love that surrounds us and comforts us and holds us. And I think we don't talk about it enough. I think we are obviously very focused on romantic love as our sole source of love, especially as we get older, not realizing that love can be a stranger, silently helping you out. It can be the universe or God or the source, you know, silently pushing you in the best direction.

It can be your parents asking if you've eaten. It can be the newspaper articles, your grandparents still cut out and send you in the mail. It can be your pet curling up next to you, saying they feel safe. There are so many forms that love comes in. When we think about love, you know, just to return to that original thought, you know, it is natural for our minds to naturally wander towards love of the romantic kind. Movies, books, music, even casual conversations have trained us to equate love with passion, partners, heartbreak and soulmates.

We live in a culture that has most certainly elevated. romantic love to the very top of the pyramid. It is like the final boss of human connection. Part of this obviously comes from like centuries of storytelling and traditions and fairy tales. And this idea that every one of us has a happy ending and that happy ending involves finding the one. It's the narrative that we have had since childhood for many of us. And because of that, our brains have now been trained. to recognize and seek out romantic love as the most important. Sometimes, not always, but I would say often, at the expense of noticing

the other vibrant, equally essential forms of love that surround us every day. There's also a social and biological layer to this. From an evolutionary perspective, which I know we talk about all the time, but it is important, society's benefit from stable bonds between two people, because it ensures reproduction, the survival of families. You know, romantic love has been mythologized as the glue that holds all communities together and secures the future and is best for the child and is best for everyone. So naturally there's a huge emphasis on celebrating it.

It also feels amazing, obviously, but family love and friendship is just as essential. Community, the love from community is just as essential for these bonds. and for this environment and for day-to-day happiness as romantic love is as well. But over time, we've kind of only seen one shade of this. And all those other components have kind of shifted out of our orbit. Another reason that we prioritize romantic love is because of the way we measure worth and milestones around being in a relationship. Think about how many cultural markers are tied to romance, weddings, anniversaries, Valentine's Day.

Compare that to the recognition we give for deep friendships, for sibling bonds or community ties. It's like little to none. There's a world friendship day. And the only reason I know that is because, you know, companies use it to market two-for-one deals to us. There aren't the same cards. There isn't the same culture of gift giving. Now, one's getting chocolates on World Friendship Day. I think most of us wouldn't be able to tell or remember what date it is,

but we all remember Valentine's Day. We all remember the day that we met our partner or engagements or anniversaries or milestones of that nature. We are also rarely asked at family dinners how our friendships are going, but we're almost always asked about our dating lives. You know, we rarely talk about love that we receive from our neighbors, or how our pets have helped us through a dark time, or how a co-worker has remembered how we like our coffee. But people are very, very intrigued by that guy we met a couple of weeks ago, who actually wasn't that great, or when we're going to start dating again, or what love feels like.

That emphasis signals to us, sometimes unconsciously, that what counts is finding a partner. The rest of it is just background noise, even if it is equally or more sustaining. When we only see romantic love as the highest, most valid form of love, it can create a deep sense of inadequacy for those of us who don't have it. People begin to feel like they're missing a fundamental piece of life, even if they're surrounded by other nourishing relationships. This emotional tunnel vision can foster loneliness. can foster shame, or the belief that you are behind in life or your life is incomplete or not as

good just because you don't have this person. In reality, you are probably rich in community, rich in family, rich in creativity, rich in friendship, rich in passion. But if society has told us that that doesn't count as much, it's easy to overlook it and to focus on the one thing we don't have. I'll be honest with you, and I'm sure many of you know this. Romantic love. doesn't guarantee happiness, nor does it guarantee a life without loneliness. Some of the loneliest and saddest points in my life have been when I have been in a relationship, and I relied on it too much to fulfill my emotional and social needs. It also creates an unhealthy dependency on this other person, when we expect one singular

individual to be our lover, our best friend, our therapist, our co-parent, our biggest cheerleader, our family. We put enormous pressure on that relationship. If we don't have it, we may feel incomplete. And if we do, we also may become disillusioned when that person can't meet every single need that we have. This is very emotionally risky because it overlooks the importance of having a diverse social support system and a diverse offering of love. So how do we expand our definition to really care about those other forms of love that we receive, to care about friendship, community, family, even self-love and self-compassion.

How do we honor platonic love, I guess, with the same depth that we reserve for romantic love? I think to truly honor platonic love with that same depth and celebration, we need to ritualize it in the same way society has ritualized romance. I'm talking friendship anniversaries. I'm talking love letters to friends. I'm talking commemorating milestones like a decade of knowing each other, maybe with a party.

If you've ever seen New Girl, great show, but one of my favorite episodes is when Nick and Schmidt for like an anniversary party for their 10 years of friendship. I'm like, that's so beautiful. I want to do that with my friends, even if it feels silly. There's also small gestures like prioritizing a friend's birthday, prioritizing a friend's birthday, prioritizing, their great achievements, noticing things about them, being there for them that we need to do more of. This makes friendship visible, celebrated, worthy of pride. It brings it up to that same level as a romantic partner normally has. What if, as well, we also began to treat self-love in the same way. All forms of love, I believe, ultimately stem from the way we relate to ourselves.

If we believe we are unworthy, it shapes how we show up in relationships, how much we tolerate, even how deeply we are able to connect. Psychologists often describe this through the lens of our self-schema. This is the internal blueprint of how we see ourselves. Now, when that blueprint is grounded in self-love and deep compassion and deep respect and admiration for ourselves, it means we aren't desperate for a connection that doesn't mean our standards. When we practice self-love, not just through superficial means, but deeply practice and celebrate it, it also means that we set a higher bar for those around us, and it means that a rising tide lifts all ships,

a rising sense of self-love lifts and elevates all our other relationships. It means that we will just feel happier. It is not a substitute for other kinds of love. It is a foundation. We know this. time again, research on attachment theory, research on relationship formation, research on what makes bonds last, all comes down to how we at times really think about ourselves. So we need to practice that. We need our weekly check-in walks. We need a solo dinner every now and again. We need to pause

to celebrate our own growth. We need to do things alone so that we strengthen our internal attachment system. So when we begin to look at love through a wider lens, we do begin to notice in the most spectacular way how it weaves into our daily lives. And obviously, that's something that we should do more of. When we come back, I want to also talk about some further ways that we can make that a priority and how this mantra has shown up in my own life. So stick around. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back. Now that we've looked at the meaning behind today's mantra, I know love has many forms. It's time to get personal with you guys and share some of my own insights and

reflections about this phrase. So there have definitely been times when I have neglected the many forms that love has come in for romantic love. I remember distinctly, because it wasn't that long ago, dating someone who, you know, I thought was amazing and who I thought could fulfill me. And because of that, neglecting all of my other friendships. I feel like this is a tale as old as time. We have all experienced it. We have all seen someone else go through this where they meet someone falling in love, the butterflies and the excitement and the energy is contagious. And suddenly they're not at the social gatherings. Suddenly they're no longer free for Saturday night wines. Suddenly you haven't heard from them for weeks because they're in their little

love bubble. You know, I could make excuses for why I did this at the time. I could tell you that, you know, friendship has always been kind of hard for me. I never had very deep meaningful friendships early on in life. I could tell you that this relationship was pretty toxic, that he kind of isolated me, but a lot of it really did come down to my priorities. I didn't have great self-worth at the time. And that meant that romantic love, having been the thing that everyone idolizes, when I got it, when I got someone who liked me or was attracted to me, it was addictive. It just felt like everything I'd ever needed. And the effect of that was that, like I said, I neglected friendships. And I obviously ended that relationship, looking around and feeling extremely

lonely and realizing how little I had prioritized what was truly going to sustain me whether I was in this relationship or not. And what was really important to me. You know, I was someone who really valued community and really valued and admired people who had these broad social networks where friends were like family and family was just as important as partners. And it felt like there was this gap between how I was behaving because I was in this relationship and what I actually expected and wanted from my life. There's also a couple of other things that we lose with this romantic love is the only love mindset. I think that we, especially if you're heterosexual, especially if you're straight,

we stop being able to prioritize male-female friendships. Tell me if you've noticed this as well, but when I was deep in the I need romantic love to fulfill me, I need a partner to be happy mindset, every guy was someone who I could date. Every guy was the possibility within them was the possibility to take away my singleness. These were incredible men who contributed greatly to my self-knowledge and to my knowledge about the world. And a lot of the time those relationships got cut short because these expectations of romance were kind of placed on them. And we see this time and time again. we lose out on the friendships that can come about between men and women or between anybody because we want to put some kind of narrow-minded label on it

and because we are willing to kind of kill the friendship and kill the beautiful love that's contained in that for the small possibility of this romantic love that we've been told to prioritize. I think it also means that grand gestures of love, especially in the romantic form, become the only kind of love that shows up on our radar. The small quieter things, the small moments, the acts of service, the words of affirmation, the things that we don't even notice people doing for us don't matter as much. And so we don't see that love is all around. If we only see it in those big things,

it feels very much absent in daily life. It also means not recognizing that sometimes friendship can be the greatest love of all. And sometimes being single is deeply rewarding and deeply valuable. And you could be okay in that state for the rest of your life. I love hearing about stories of people who are in their 60s and 70s who were never married or divorced and who live with their best friends. Those stories to me are deeply romantic. I have this friend who I talk about a lot, my best friend Aaron, and we were talking about this concept the other day, which is, why don't we move for our friends? We move for partners. We move for work. We move for romantic love. Why don't we move to be closer to these equally important relationships and these equally

important people? Why don't we make that same choice? This is why we need to put more of an emphasis on community. Falling in love is a very individual thing. It's two people, and it's It's magical, but what if we chose someone new to fall in love with every month or every day in our broader life? Every day, we could show love to a new person, and that could reinforce that love has many forms. And I think thinking that would make us despair less and not having met the one yet, or maybe never meeting the one, it would make us less lonely, it would make the world seem more beautiful, it would give us more empathy, and it would allow us to grow and meet so many more people and

have a new worldview. When I say fall in love with a new person every day, it's basically about choosing someone to really appreciate and to do something nice for and to feel gratitude for that relationship. It's choosing someone to take all those deep feelings that you know you possess that you're waiting to give to someone in a romantic form and giving it out every day in smaller parcel sizes to people who you think deserve it and who make your life better. Noticing all the wonderful things about them that can be both a source and a point of fascination for your love. This is something I'm trying to do more now, the older I get, is just to really have appreciation and really, again, ritualize the love I have for all these other people in my life rather

than just my partner. Okay, when we come back, I want to share a few other ways that we can take this mantra and turn it into action and how we can really embody this as a deep life philosophy that we have don't go anywhere we're going to talk about that and so much more after this short break welcome back we are going very deep on this week's mantra today which is i know love has many forms and of course our deep thought of the day has to come from none other than bell hooks Bell Hook said There are many kinds of love

As many kinds as there are people And I remember reading this for the first time And it feeling deeply comforting I think it reminds us that love is not a one-size-fits-all experience Just as every person is unique The way they give, receive and express love Is equally distinct Love can obviously take the form of friendship,

family, romance, mentorship, community the fleeting kind of love that we experience from a stranger, and no forms of love are more important or less important than the next. I also think the reason that I found this very comforting at the time is that it reminds us that this is not a scarce thing, especially with romantic love. I think we get fixated on who we're with now or who we were with in the past or who we could potentially be with. And we tend to have this idea that if that doesn't work out, if for some reason it fails or it has failed in the past, there's never going to be anyone else. There's never going to be anyone better for us. What we forget is that we probably will meet someone new.

They may not be better, but they may be better for us. Love is never going to be the same every single time. Falling in love with your ex is going to feel different to falling in love with maybe the person you are with now and the person you are with in the future. There is good in all of those situations. So I think it would also allow us to let go a little bit easier when we know a relationship isn't working because we know that there are so many other people who would be able to fill our cup, even if it's different. Again, there are many kinds of love, as many kinds as there are people. Let people love you in different and new ways. Don't just cling on to what is comfortable or familiar so far.

Of course, we also have to talk about our weekly journal prompts. These are an opportunity for you to connect a little bit more personally with this mantra and really invites you to think about how it's showing up for you, not just how I'm talking about it. So let me talk you through our journal prompts for today. First, when has non-romantic love carried you through a difficult season of your life? Next, how do you show yourself love in small everyday ways? and how could you do it more?

And finally, what forms of love do you want to notice and nurture more intentionally in the future? How can you make that a priority? Let's give our minds a moment to rest for a second and maybe reflect on those questions a little bit more. In just a second, you'll hear a custom music track. I encourage you to take this time to just process this week's reflections in whatever way feels right to you.

And if this isn't something you connect with, that's totally okay. Just skip ahead about 30 seconds. But as you settle in, please just keep our marcher for today in mind. I know love has many forms. All right, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to share a few final thoughts about this mantra. I know love has many forms. I just love that this mantra invites a mindset of abundance. abundance. Abundance in the sense that we always know that there is more coming for us. There is more

around the corner. If you are in a season right now of feeling very lonely, maybe you've lost someone, maybe you've recently been through a breakup, it can be easy to not believe in love anymore. It can be easy to think that this is like something that people have made up, that it's a fairy book story that sells well. That's not the case. Don't let a limited definition. of love keep you from seeing it all around you every single day every single second don't let it stop you from searching for it it is there it is waiting for you there is already probably so much of it in your life that we could all do better to appreciate more just let this mantra be an invitation be your sign to honor every form of love that sustains you knowing that each one is equally

worthy of your attention and that there is always more around the corner. Thank you for joining Mantra, an exclusive Open Mind original powered by Pave Studios. At Open Mind, we really value your support. So please share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow Mantra to help others discover the show. For ad-free listening and early access to the show, make sure to join Open Mind Plus on Apple Podcast. I'll share another mantra with you next Monday, until then, keep showing up for yourself and your journey.

Mantra is hosted by me, Gemma Spag, and is an open-mind original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the incredible mantra team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Stacey Warren Kerr, Sarah Camp, Jen Passavoie, and Paul Lieberskin. Thank you for listening.