A letter from our founder, Wendy Strgar:
When I founded Good Clean Love decades ago in my kitchen, my unwavering mission was to expand the experience and awareness of love in the world. Despite skepticism from business investors who questioned its validity, I remain convinced that fostering love is not only our ultimate hope but the singular, essential work we must undertake now.
Our capacity for love is an inherent human potential, not a given. It demands continuous, dedicated nurturing to flourish. My first book, Love that Works, delved into cultivating loving skills within intimate relationships. Frankly, I wrote it to find solutions for my own struggling marriage, determined over five years to break the cycle of my parents' unhappy union for the sake of my children. Loving is arduous, precisely because people are endlessly challenging, complex, and enigmatic, from infancy to old age.
Just as good things develop gradually and bad things strike swiftly, loving behavior builds slowly but can be instantly shattered by violent trauma. Loving is a continuous uphill battle, a monumental effort that we undertake knowing it will inevitably break our hearts. Indeed, the more profoundly we love, the more our hearts will be broken open.
Remarkably, it is through these broken-open hearts that we connect most deeply. Beyond the love we feel for close family and friends, we gain profound glimpses of recognizing and honoring the pain of strangers. Compassion emerges from our own heartache and from the powerful realization that our personal suffering and traumas are fundamentally similar to those of others, both known and unknown.
Perhaps the most mysterious and beautiful aspect of a broken heart is the grace of forgiveness that can unexpectedly fill us, even when we imagine only anger, disrespect, or hatred. Forgiveness cannot be willed into existence through logic, but it can be allowed to enter by keeping our broken hearts open to its possibility.
We are relentlessly bombarded by media that pushes us to emotional extremes, yet ironically, it never touches our hearts. This divisive landscape fragments us, reducing us to caricatures, regardless of our position on the political spectrum. This misrepresents who we are; it fails to capture the intricate tapestry of our lives and hearts. We are humans with broken hearts, and this relentless division compels us to close ourselves off, making us fearful of confronting our own pain, let alone the pain of others.
I have long asserted that the only force capable of saving us is the expansion of our awareness and capacity for love. It is the very reason for our existence, and in our final moments, it is the sole destination we gravitate towards: who we loved and who loved us in return. Even Jesus, in his dying breath, implored his father, "Forgive them, they do not know what they do."
Instead of vowing vengeance, let us commit to opening our own hearts and embracing forgiveness.
