Some people who will be alone for the holidays are just hoping to endure. But there are some ways to manage this experience and find joy.

Picture this: It’s one of those rare occasions when you actually get to use that second language you acquired in school or on your mission, but you’re bumbling through with a rusty vocabulary and your tongue is sitting thick in your mouth, feeling all kinds of awkward as it tries to wrap itself around words you once pronounced with ease.

While young single adult wards can be a great place to make new friends and meet new people, there are a few tell-tale signs that you've become a veteran young single adult. See how many of these you relate to and share the ones we missed in the comments below!

During his surprise visit to SVU, Elder Dallin H. Oaks joined Sister Kristen Oaks on stage, sharing his personal daily routine that allows him to stay connected to the Spirit. During the address, he admitted, "Kristen is the enforcement mechanism for family prayer . . . it is not at all unusual for her to chase me down the hall after I've gone out the door and summon me back to have family prayer. It's not that I don't value it, it's just that I have been praying and studying all morning and I'm susceptible to forget it."

Whether you’re single, in a relationship, or married, there are always ways you can improve your love life to increase the happiness of yourself and your (current or potential) significant other.

Understanding that Jesus Christ has been forgiving and merciful to us can help us forgive and extend mercy to others. “Jesus Christ is our Exemplar,” said President Thomas S. Monson. “His life was a legacy of love. The sick He healed; the downtrodden He lifted; the sinner He saved. At the end the angry mob took His life. And yet there rings from Golgotha’s hill the words: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’—a crowning expression in mortality of compassion and love.”

Much of the happiness and unhappiness you will experience in mortality will be related to a powerful emotion—love. In the scripture quoted above, the Lord tells us that love is to characterize our relationships with each other. In the New Testament, we are even told “God is love” (1 John 4:8). It is my belief that He wants all of us to experience love in its deepest and fullest sense. On the other hand, Satan seeks to prostitute and distort love—making of it something tawdry and destructive. Many young people have been deceived by the counterfeit descriptions of love that are evident all around us. Perhaps you have known people who one day announce they are “in love” and the next that they have “fallen out of love.” You must be extremely careful also not to think of love as it is portrayed in the majority of TV sitcoms, movies, and romance novels. It has been said that there is a difference between Hollywood’s “reel love” and “real love.”

Ten utterances. Ten words.

This is an excerpt from “The Law of the Harvest: As a Man Sows, So Shall He Reap.” Elder Howard W. Hunter. BYU Devotional. March 8, 1966. From my own experience in business and as a lawyer and church worker, and from my firsthand observations in this country and other countries of the world, there appears to me to be a trend to shift responsibility for life and its processes from the individual to the state. In this shift there is a basic violation of the Law of the Harvest, or the law of justice. The attitude of “something for nothing” is encouraged. The government is often looked to as the source of wealth. There is the feeling that the government should step in and take care of one’s needs, one’s emergencies, and one’s future.