Understanding Love
Love is not a feeling, not even a state of being or a finished product, but a constant state of becoming, it’s live and beating, like our heart, all the time. When you truly love somebody your thought I have done enough for this person and he/she is not responding gets replaced with the thought I haven’t done enough for this person and would like to do more. Even if you have done enough for this person, it has become the past, but your love right now is judged by your willingness to do more in the future. If that willingness has died your love has died.
When you truly love somebody your thought I have done enough for this person and he/she is not responding gets replaced with the thought I haven’t done enough for this person and would like to do more. Even if you have done enough for this person, it has become the past, but your love right now is judged by your willingness to do more in the future. If that willingness has died your love has died.
Love should always be seen as one-sided and often unrequited; if someone withdraws their love just because it is not reciprocated or one is waiting for its reciprocation before one lets their love flow in its full force, perhaps one hasn’t loved.
True love should not be confused with romantic feelings. I have seen in my clinical practice – where couples describe romantic feelings becoming less intense but the love between them becoming stronger.
When you love someone you are not doing a favor to that person, in fact, you are doing a favor to yourself, because the moment you create love in your heart, it brings a sense of happiness and takes away feelings of loneliness. It is self-fulfilling, whether the other person can benefit from your love or not depends on their receptivity and their destiny.
Sometimes people find that it is replaced with hatred, the presence of hatred doesn’t negate love, but the presence of it. If there is no love, to begin with, there is no need for hatred. We don’t hate all the psychopaths and criminals in this world.
Love doesn’t mean you will burn your house to provide light to the other person, but it means if you have a meal on your table and there is a hungry person, animal, or bird sitting next to you, you will share it with them.
Why do we fall in love with a particular person? (Taken from a book – how to find love, see reference)
An instinct of completion: the other person has qualities that are lacking in us. Introverts get attracted to extroverts, emotional people to calm individuals.
The instinct of endorsement: those who understand us, get things quickly, they read our souls
The instinct of familiarity: who are like our parents, it’s our comfort zone, the known devil is better, we can deal with it. Sometimes one goes in the opposite direction (recoil dynamic)- sadly this can create an allergy to good things as well. If a parent was very clever but humiliating; now we can’t stomach anyone clever. Maybe a parent was good at business but emotionally cold; now we can’t stomach anyone who succeeds in business. We, therefore, lose out on qualities that had nurtured us as a child. Sometimes we ask – how someone so creative, whose mother was too – could be with a partner like that.
The problems
We get attracted to people who can help us learn new things and grow – but the problem is once with them we don’t want to change but want them to change according to our thinking and lifestyle.
The other person can’t fully understand us, and we start sulking. We sulk with people we believe should understand us instantly and they can’t.
Some people are driven to seek out unhappy circumstances if the affection they knew as children were related to some sort of pain. The problems come later when they are not able to cope.
Loving oneself
Loving oneself: It’s a myth that loving ourselves is what we can do only when we are totally pure and that loving another is what we can do only when someone is perfect, yet we are, of course, all deeply flawed. Its origins lie with parents who could not tolerate their children’s shadow/negative sides, somewhere in the past a child had to be perfect to deserve affection. Tantrums, bad habits, and nasty thoughts had to be banished. The child became outwardly good and inwardly ashamed and lonely.
We need to move towards a more humane and mature model of complex love, a love that tolerates imperfections and ambivalence, that accepts that we have faults and love ourselves and can see the faults of another person and still love them.
We often mistake love for romance and are always searching for the same intensity we felt when we first fell in love early in life. When that is missing, one concludes that they have fallen out of love, only to realize later in life that the love was still living inside of them but in a different form.
The solution to the problem of love doesn’t lie in finding true love but in becoming in love. When you can not love, you are love, you are not looking for reciprocation. Just as the sun cannot shine, it is in the definition and the nature of the sun to shine.
Why do we fall in love with a particular person? (Taken from a book – how to find love, see reference)
An instinct of completion: the other person has qualities that are lacking in us. Introverts get attracted to extroverts, emotional people to calm individuals.
The instinct of endorsement: those who understand us, get things quickly, they read our souls
The instinct of familiarity: who are like our parents, it’s our comfort zone, the known devil is better, we can deal with it. Sometimes one goes in the opposite direction (recoil dynamic)- sadly this can create an allergy to good things as well. If a parent was very clever but humiliating; now we can’t stomach anyone clever. Maybe a parent was good at business, but emotionally cold; now we can’t stomach anyone who succeeds in business. We, therefore, lose out on qualities that had nurtured us as a child. Sometimes we ask – how someone so creative, whose mother was too – could be with a partner like that.
The Problems
We get attracted to people who can help us learn new things and grow – but the problem is once with them we don’t want to change but want them to change according to our thinking and lifestyle.
The other person can’t fully understand us, and we start sulking. We sulk with people we believe should understand us instantly and they can’t.
Some people are driven to seek out unhappy circumstances if the affection they knew as children were related to some sort of pain. The problems come later when they are not able to cope.
Reference
How to find love (2017) school of life, London
When you truly love somebody your thought I have done enough for this person and he/she is not responding gets replaced with the thought I haven’t done enough for this person and would like to do more. Even if you have done enough for this person, it has become the past, but your love right now is judged by your willingness to do more in the future. If that willingness has died your love has died.
Love should always be seen as one-sided and often unrequited; if someone withdraws their love just because it is not reciprocated or one is waiting for its reciprocation before one lets their love flow in its full force, perhaps one hasn’t loved.
True love should not be confused with romantic feelings. I have seen in my clinical practice – where couples describe romantic feelings becoming less intense but the love between them becoming stronger.
When you love someone you are not doing a favor to that person, in fact, you are doing a favor to yourself, because the moment you create love in your heart, it brings a sense of happiness and takes away feelings of loneliness. It is self-fulfilling, whether the other person can benefit from your love or not depends on their receptivity and their destiny.
Sometimes people find that it is replaced with hatred, the presence of hatred doesn’t negate love, but the presence of it. If there is no love, to begin with, there is no need for hatred. We don’t hate all the psychopaths and criminals in this world.
Love doesn’t mean you will burn your house to provide light to the other person, but it means if you have a meal on your table and there is a hungry person, animal, or bird sitting next to you, you will share it with them.
Why do we fall in love with a particular person? (Taken from a book – how to find love, see reference)
An instinct of completion: the other person has qualities that are lacking in us. Introverts get attracted to extroverts, emotional people to calm individuals.
The instinct of endorsement: those who understand us, get things quickly, they read our souls
The instinct of familiarity: who are like our parents, it’s our comfort zone, the known devil is better, we can deal with it. Sometimes one goes in the opposite direction (recoil dynamic)- sadly this can create an allergy to good things as well. If a parent was very clever but humiliating; now we can’t stomach anyone clever. Maybe a parent was good at business but emotionally cold; now we can’t stomach anyone who succeeds in business. We, therefore, lose out on qualities that had nurtured us as a child. Sometimes we ask – how someone so creative, whose mother was too – could be with a partner like that.
The problems
We get attracted to people who can help us learn new things and grow – but the problem is once with them we don’t want to change but want them to change according to our thinking and lifestyle.
The other person can’t fully understand us, and we start sulking. We sulk with people we believe should understand us instantly and they can’t.
Some people are driven to seek out unhappy circumstances if the affection they knew as children were related to some sort of pain. The problems come later when they are not able to cope.
Loving oneself
Loving oneself: It’s a myth that loving ourselves is what we can do only when we are totally pure and that loving another is what we can do only when someone is perfect, yet we are, of course, all deeply flawed. Its origins lie with parents who could not tolerate their children’s shadow/negative sides, somewhere in the past a child had to be perfect to deserve affection. Tantrums, bad habits, and nasty thoughts had to be banished. The child became outwardly good and inwardly ashamed and lonely.
We need to move towards a more humane and mature model of complex love, a love that tolerates imperfections and ambivalence, that accepts that we have faults and love ourselves and can see the faults of another person and still love them.
We often mistake love for romance and are always searching for the same intensity we felt when we first fell in love early in life. When that is missing, one concludes that they have fallen out of love, only to realize later in life that the love was still living inside of them but in a different form.
The solution to the problem of love doesn’t lie in finding true love but in becoming in love. When you can not love, you are love, you are not looking for reciprocation. Just as the sun cannot shine, it is in the definition and the nature of the sun to shine.
Why do we fall in love with a particular person? (Taken from a book – how to find love, see reference)
An instinct of completion: the other person has qualities that are lacking in us. Introverts get attracted to extroverts, emotional people to calm individuals.
The instinct of endorsement: those who understand us, get things quickly, they read our souls
The instinct of familiarity: who are like our parents, it’s our comfort zone, the known devil is better, we can deal with it. Sometimes one goes in the opposite direction (recoil dynamic)- sadly this can create an allergy to good things as well. If a parent was very clever but humiliating; now we can’t stomach anyone clever. Maybe a parent was good at business, but emotionally cold; now we can’t stomach anyone who succeeds in business. We, therefore, lose out on qualities that had nurtured us as a child. Sometimes we ask – how someone so creative, whose mother was too – could be with a partner like that.
The Problems
We get attracted to people who can help us learn new things and grow – but the problem is once with them we don’t want to change but want them to change according to our thinking and lifestyle.
The other person can’t fully understand us, and we start sulking. We sulk with people we believe should understand us instantly and they can’t.
Some people are driven to seek out unhappy circumstances if the affection they knew as children were related to some sort of pain. The problems come later when they are not able to cope.
Reference
How to find love (2017) school of life, London
