Have you ever been asked to describe what love feels like or what it means to you?
Love in all forms,
Romantic and otherwise.
I've been asked this question before and I've recently come to discover what I believe to be the true definition of love.
And this wasn't my answer a month ago when I was asked and it certainly wasn't my answer when I was younger.
It's a new revelation for me.
I came from a family of divorce,
Like in a really big way.
I used to tell people I had an almost 100% divorce rate in my family.
No joke,
Even my grandparents on my dad's side got divorced,
Which isn't really even that common for their generation.
So my beliefs about love were built around this idea that love always fails,
That people don't stay together,
That healthy relationships are really rare,
That you ultimately end up really disliking your partner and needing to remove yourself from them,
That love is painful and disconnected.
But what I'm learning now is that there is so much more involved that I didn't recognize.
It isn't that relationships with others are hard.
It's that relationships with ourselves are hard and they require a lot of work.
And without a good relationship with ourselves,
We cannot have a good relationship with anyone else.
So it seems what I have been subconsciously taught and what I have emulated for all these years is the inability to be a complete healthy human.
In order to be whole and healthy,
We have to do the work.
We have to be willing to really dive deep into ourselves and look at our behaviors.
We have to meet our own needs.
We have to heal our own emotional wounds.
And without this crucial piece,
There's no way that we can have a healthy relationship that lasts.
And when we try without it,
We create such suffering and disharmony in the process.
What I know now to be true is that I have to love myself so much more than anyone or anything else.
I have to have really strong self-worth.
I have to make myself happy.
I have to take care of myself and fill my own needs.
I have to feel so full,
Satisfied,
And content with myself and my life first.
I have to choose these things,
And I have to be willing to take on the responsibility of the lifelong commitment to be the best I can be.
Then I can allow someone else who has done the same work and continues to do the work to meet me in that space.
This is where love blossoms.
This is when you can truly love another the way love was intended to be experienced.
It's just that I've always seen love in a different light.
I thought romantic love meant someone else needed to make me feel safe,
To make me feel trusting and reassured,
And to make me feel stable.
That those things should come from outside of me.
And I'm not saying love can't be those things.
It definitely involves those things.
But what I've come to find out is that those feelings need to be given to me from me first.
It's like if you had a Valentine's Day card in grade school and you filled out the little to and from sections,
It would say to me from fucking me.
And then I can truly receive those things from someone else with no strings attached,
With no expectation,
Without longing,
Because I know that I fill my own cup.
So any extra from someone else is just nice.
Wow,
Thank you.
I can feel grateful and appreciative rather than disappointed.
Because in the old model where we believe someone has to make us feel a certain way,
Oftentimes we end up feeling resentful because we develop expectations that can never be met.
We love conditionally.
We don't fill ourselves.
And then we expect someone else to fill us and to do the work for us.
And when we don't get what we want,
We suffer.
We think our relationship sucks and that there's something wrong,
That the person doesn't really love us.
But it doesn't work this way.
This is part of the reason that so many relationships fail.
If we could all just step back and really look at ourselves,
Really commit to doing the work,
To getting it all out there,
To exploring ourselves and our emotions,
Why do we do the things that we do?
What are our stories?
What are our beliefs?
Where did they come from?
And are they really serving us?
Do we want to believe them or do we want to develop our own beliefs?
Maintaining the slate and freeing ourselves.
If you had the ability to truly give yourself everything you needed,
You could love freely.
You could truly love unconditionally.
Your happiness would never be reliant on anyone else.
You've got your back.
You don't need to rely on or expect someone else to.
We could just love and enjoy our partners.
Can you imagine the simple,
Magnificent freedom and beauty in that?
God,
That feels so refreshing and empowering.
This is the love that I want and the love I want for everyone.
True love is freedom.
It's allowing the other person to live their life for them and just being so excited for them and then being so excited that you're doing the same thing.
And then you choose each other.
You choose to support one another.
You choose to show up for each other.
You choose to adventure together.
You choose to love and to be loved.
And this goes for non romantic love too.
We release the hold we have on others.
We stop blaming and complaining and we start taking responsibility for our own shit.
True love is infinite,
Expansive,
Limitless.
True love cannot and will not blossom and grow where there is suppression,
Restriction and expectation.
We have to allow one another to be free and we have to free ourselves.
