
Love Has A Different Meaning To Each Person Involved
by Boom Shikha
Whenever I ask someone about what their definition of love is, I always get a different answer. Every single time. Everyone has a different way of looking at love and that's fascinating to me. What is your definition of love? Photo by Surface on Unsplash
Transcript
Hey guys,
I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.
My name is Boom Shaka and I welcome you to my channel,
To my podcast,
To wherever you guys are listening to me from.
I really appreciate all the support that you guys have been sending my way.
This is going to be a little bit of a tough video for me to do because I'm actually just really figuring things out for myself as well.
I just wanted to share my thoughts with you guys and my pontifications and my reflections on the subject matter.
I thought it would be interesting for us to have a diatribe on it.
And so basically for the last few weeks,
For some reason,
Love has been a major thought process in my head.
What is love?
What does it mean?
How do I express love?
What kind of love do I have in my life,
Etc.
I think it's because I felt so loved when I was with my parents and I felt so grateful that I have such amazing parents,
That I have such amazing family,
My brother and sister and my parents and just being around them.
It just made me feel really good and it really made me feel loved.
Not that I didn't feel loved before,
But I felt love from my family in a true sense for the first time.
And I was able to receive it in a way where I was able to receive it without guilt.
I felt good about it.
I didn't feel like I was unworthy of it.
I didn't feel like I was undeserving of it.
I was able to accept their love and receive it wholeheartedly.
And that was a first for me specifically.
Because in the past I would always think to myself,
Oh but they're great parents and I don't deserve them or I don't deserve this love,
I'm not a good person,
Etc.
Whereas this time around I was like,
Yeah,
I'm pretty cool and I'm awesome and I deserve this love because I love them back as well and I've given them as much as they've given me.
And so it's not a one-sided thing anymore for me specifically.
In my head it wasn't like that.
And so as I said,
All of this kind of caused me to think a lot about what is love and what is love for me specifically.
Do I have the right kind of love in my life?
Should I or could I be looking for more of the partnership kind of love in my life?
Am I even interested in that?
If I was looking for it,
What would it look like?
And all of these interesting questions started popping up in my heart and my head.
Mostly in my head.
So I'm reflecting on it and I'm thinking about it and one of the reasons why I asked you guys obviously,
I've asked a bunch of different people the same question.
What does love mean to you?
I've been messaging a lot of different people asking them,
What does love mean to you?
What does love mean to you?
And I've noticed that every single person has their own interesting definition of love.
Of course a lot of it's based on their life experiences,
The kind of love they've had in their own life,
The kind of people that they've had in their life,
The kind of hate that they've had in their life obviously that reflects it as well or indifference.
And I've had a lot of interesting definitions being thrown at me of love.
Every single definition,
Interestingly enough,
Was absolutely different from the previous ones.
No definition of love that I've received from my friends,
Family and acquaintances has been similar to each other.
No one has said exactly the same thing.
No one has said to me that,
Oh I think love is commitment and someone else says,
Oh yeah I think love is commitment too.
Every single person had their own interesting definition of love.
That was actually interesting to me specifically because that meant that I did not have to go looking outside myself,
Looking at the world for my definition of love because my definition of love could be,
Is specific to me and it does not have to reflect anyone else's opinion of love.
It does not have to be similar to anyone else's opinion of love.
It can mean whatever it means to me and if it means creativity then it can mean creativity.
If it means solitude then it can mean solitude.
If it means travel then it can mean travel.
It can mean whatever it means to me.
I don't have to feel guilty because it's not similar to societal standards of love.
Now of course a lot of the people that I asked with the meaning of love were INFJs and INFJs have this kind of different way of looking at love so maybe that's not really a true sense of the word but I did get a sense that everyone has their own opinion of love and they're happy with it.
And so that gave me a little bit of a sense of relief because I did not necessarily have to say,
Oh love means quality time to me or love means being next to my family because that's one of the things that I feel guilty about all the time is that I'm not next to my family.
I'm far away from them living in different countries around the world.
Countries that I love and I enjoy living in all these interesting countries and moving around all the time.
It doesn't necessarily mean that I don't enjoy being with my family but this is my path right now.
I want to move around the world.
I want to travel.
I want to be a digital nomad and I want to experience the world as much as possible before I die.
I don't want to be stuck in one place but that obviously has the other side of the equation to it which means that I can't be next to my family,
My parents,
My brother and sister all the time.
I console myself with the fact,
Saying to myself,
You've spent so many years,
30 plus years with your family next to them,
Always spending time with them.
I spent a lot of time with them in the past and now I'm living in a different way and not spending time with them but I feel like it should kind of balance each other out.
I've spent so much time with you guys.
I've kind of done my duty or I've done my thing with you.
You've spent enough time with me and now it's time for me to explore and go out in the world and really see what the world is all about.
Also though,
That causes me a little bit of anxiety and a little bit of guilt because I think to myself,
A lot of people seem to imagine or seem to think that love means being next to each other all the time.
That's one of the reasons why I really hate when people say that they love me because I really don't understand what their definition of love is.
What do you mean when you love me?
Do you mean that you like my hair?
Do you like the way I look?
Do you like the way I speak?
Do you like my personality or do you like the fact that I'm tall or do you like the fact that I'm an INFJ?
What do you like?
Why do you love me?
It's confusing to me because as an INFJ or as an individual,
I really want to know what is it exactly that you like about me because it just confuses the hell out of me why anyone would like me obviously,
First of all,
But also what is it exactly that you like about someone?
What is your love all about?
Because I really need to understand it in order to assimilate it into myself because if your love means that you need to spend time with me all the time and if I can't give that back to you,
Then that means that we can't be in love with each other anymore,
Right?
And one of the reasons why,
One of the many reasons why my last relationship failed was because of that.
We had completely different views of what love is.
To him,
Love meant that we'd spend time together in one place and doing and looking in the same direction,
Perhaps doing exactly the same things and for me,
Love meant that I wanted to travel around the world,
Move around all over the place,
See new places,
Meet new people and doing all of that.
Obviously that was not an alignment and we fell apart because of it,
Right?
Obviously love changes as well.
You start off loving someone and you have the same goals and you look in the same direction and all of a sudden you realize that they're kind of moving away from that goal or moving away from the way that you were thinking previously and so you're not in love anymore.
But all of this to say that I've really been enjoying my reflection on love and what love means to me.
It's been really,
Really interesting to me specifically because I've been looking at what love means to me and how it has changed for me over the past few years.
When I was in my early 20s,
Love obviously meant sex to me in a lot of different ways.
The more sex I had with an individual,
The more they loved me.
It was an interesting definition obviously and it's not true anymore.
As time moved on,
Love changed for me and it kind of meant being with a person who likes to travel and who likes to move around the world and who would want to go to all these interesting places with me.
So that kind of was my definition for the longest time,
I think in my late 20s.
In my early 30s and even right now,
I feel like love has completely transformed in a way where I actually am so confused about what love means that I've been kind of pulling myself back,
Being single,
Not being in a relationship and trying to figure things out on my own before I actually go out venturing into the world looking for a partner,
Even if I do.
The reason I wanted to share this with you guys,
Not because I have an answer obviously,
I do not actually have an answer yet.
I still don't know what love means to me.
I have certain bits and pieces of it for myself and I know what love means to me in certain manners and certain situations,
But I really of course don't have an answer at all.
I really actually don't even know if I want to be in love and that's one of the other things that I always worry about is that everyone else wants to be in love,
But I don't know if I actually want to be in love.
I don't know if that's the emotion that I want for myself,
At least in this moment in time.
I'm in love with my life,
I'm in love with myself,
I'm in love with my creativity,
I'm in love with Chiang Mai and I have a lot of loves in my life,
But are those truly love in the real sense of the word or is it just like or is it lust?
So I hope that sharing these ideas with you guys,
Sharing these different thoughts perhaps will trigger something in you and make you think about.
A word love is just so commonplace nowadays.
Everyone just uses love for everything.
I love my toes,
I love my iPhone,
I love this and that.
I feel like it's such an overused word that maybe it's completely lost its essential meaning and that's again why I think I'm going back to the essence of it.
What is the essence of love for me?
What does it mean to me and how can I bring more of it in my life if I want to or realize that I have so much of it in my life if I already do?
And so that's the reason I wanted to share this with you guys.
Again there are no answers specifically and even if I had the answer for myself it would not be the answer for you anyways,
Right?
Because love as I said means different things to different people and so if I found an answer for myself,
Hooray for me but I don't think that would matter to you necessarily because you would have your own answer for what love means.
Again I hope this makes sense.
If you guys liked the video or liked the podcast let me know if it resonated with you or if it triggered something in you.
I'd love to hear from you guys.
All my contact information is in the description below.
You can email me or Facebook me or whatever you prefer and I shall see you guys in the next episode and the next time around.
Bye for now.
