Can we educate ourselves and the other in love? Is it possible to make love be born in ourselves and in the other? Can we develop and nurture love, as we do with intelligence? Love is something that cannot be taught with formulas. But we can create the necessary conditions for it to be born in the other.
Knowing some facets of the nature of love is important to create a suitable climate in the couple that facilitates the growth and development of love..
Trying to define love is an idea as artificial and illusory as trying to enclose the wind in our hand or trying to empty the ocean with the help of a bucket. And yet man has always tried to define love.
In all mythologies the theme of love is found. Love has made rivers of ink flow throughout history. It has been written that love consists of sublimating sexual energy. It has also been said that it is the tendency to wish the good of the other. Eternal disquisitions have been made about the limits between love, charity and eroticism.
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Despite all the love, it is still a great unknown. We have all ever wondered: does he love me? How does he love me? Do I love him? If I were truly in love, would I behave like this? This incessant search for answers is rarely fully satisfied..
The need to be loved is a primary need of the human species, particularly in the child. This need must be fulfilled for other needs to appear, such as the need to love. Being loved and loving are two concepts that go very closely together, but the priority falls on the need to be loved, especially in the child..
Those who have never been loved can spend their whole life searching for an answer to this need. You can do it in the form of countless sexual adventures. It can also cling desperately to everyone in its path. Preoccupied with this need, these people forget to develop their own resources and skills. To love you need to love yourself; to love yourself you have to be, or have been, loved.
There is no doubt that love is primarily a feeling. Love is an emotion that we detect through our own knowledge and that we express through gestures and actions. But love is not really knowledge or gestures or actions. It is not loved because flowers are given. We love and give flowers. The flowers that one offers are the manifestation of a feeling: their love.
Love is subjective and internal. There are some people who deny love because love cannot be measured how the amount of glucose in the blood is measured. Denying the existence of love is the same as killing it. Other people disfigure love by trying to quantify it based on the number of sex, money spent, or gifts obtained.
Our love requires both our own freedom and that of our partner, in order to develop. It is important that we set the other free and even that we encourage them to free themselves. This way we can better appreciate his individuality, his originality, what makes him unique. So we all need to feel free so that our love is constantly strengthened and revitalized..
When you love to possess and treasure, to hang onto the other, love is gradually being killed. In fact, it seems that many people have some difficulty in differentiating between "love" and "have." They think that loving is having the other, possessing him exclusively. This tendency usually comes from our insecurity in the face of the risk of losing the other. Now he who truly loves cannot lose anything, since he possesses nothing..
To awaken love in the other, it is first necessary to induce him to love himself. Only when you love yourself can you come to love others. Now, the main condition for one to love oneself is that one feels loved. We are faced with a universal experience: The love we receive from the other revalues, in a certain way, our own qualities and inner richness.
Love is something that cannot be taught in the same way that mathematics or chemistry are taught. Love cannot be explained by formulas. But nevertheless, we can create the necessary conditions for love to be born and develop in the other.
Thus, the more we instill in the other the respect for his own person, his inner wealth and his humanity, the more we will be encouraging him to love himself and the more we favor the birth of his love for others. By taking an interest in the wealth of others, you attract their love.
On the contrary, whoever mistrusts himself pushes the other to mistrust others. If you can't trust yourself, you can't trust others either. For love to be born in us, it has to overcome mistrust in others.
Love is like breathing: autonomous, spontaneous and constant. It is a rhythmic and pendular movement, between oneself and the other. In this context, it is important to encourage the other to express their own emotions..
Regardless of loving or being loved, love is something that cannot be bought. Love is free and this quality makes it so beautiful. Likewise, love is, at every moment of its existence, a new and surprising creation.
Indeed, we all know that love is neither bought nor sold. It is free and spontaneous. However, every time we fall in love, we are surprised and amazed to see this fact again..
To maintain love, you have to take care of your spontaneity. A restrained or contained love weakens and ends up withering. Stiffness is a lethal toxin for love.
To love is, in a way, to surrender to the other. When we open ourselves to the other, we become sensitive and vulnerable. The other can enter our interior to enrich it, but it can also hurt us deeply. From this quality of openness towards the other, another consequence follows: the possibility of changing, developing and improving. This can collide with our need for stability, for permanence, to remain the same. In summary: the encounter of one love with another usually carries the possibility of being transformed, and that is sometimes scary.
If we take a look at literary history we are surprised to see how often writers and poets complain that there is no happy love. Is love necessarily unhappy?
It seems that the main reason for the misery of some loves lies precisely in the fact of seeking happiness in them. People who think that only in love can they find happiness, despair when they do not find it and sinks into sadness.
They don't realize that happiness is something that comes and goes. Dedicating all our energies to it only serves to poison our existence, since one has to continue living with or without happiness. Many men and women aspire to the utopia of total and perfect happiness, consuming all their energies in this dream.
All loves, to varying degrees, involve a certain amount of suffering. Faced with the prospect of this suffering, there are those who reject love or control themselves so as not to love too much. It is a deceptive solution, as they can avoid suffering, but also all the happiness that accompanies love..
Suffering in love has different sources: That the other person does not correspond to your love, or even that they reject it after having accepted it. Pain can also be the result of the inability to show the other the love we feel, for fear of being rejected.
Although there are generalities, humans experience love in many different ways. Not everyone has the same capacity to love. Some love passionately, others cautiously. Some are capable of loving several people, while others only love one. These particularities do not depend solely on the different affectivities, but on all dimensions of the personality.
When a person begins to truly love, it is as if the pleasure of loving invades his entire consciousness. His love transforms you and alters all your perceptions. He is kinder to those around him, he savors and enjoys nature, he is able to perceive what was previously unnoticed. Radiate and release your love and happiness to everyone around you.
An important condition for self-love to emerge is that we value who we are and what we can become. We must love our body and our life, our ideas, our fantasies, our decisions and everything that has to do with us.
This does not mean that we should stagnate and become unchanging. We can always change what we like least about ourselves, improving and developing it. However, we must be realistic and accept that there will be things that we cannot change. Accepting the qualities that we cannot change is also a way of loving ourselves, because we will not waste energy fighting uselessly against what we do not like..
Getting to know yourself is not achieved overnight. Knowing our points for improvement and accepting the inevitable is a long and sometimes risky road. In order for one to come to know oneself, it is necessary to accept in advance what one risks discovering.
In love, however paradoxical it may seem, you have to keep a certain distance from the other. When we are attached to the other for too long, there comes a time when we no longer see it and we are not able to contemplate it..
A popular saying goes: "Those who sleep on the same mattress come back from the same condition." This and other sayings express that two beings who love each other are one heart, one body and one spirit. They express a facet of love, a tendency to identify with the loved one and become one.
When this occurs in an exaggerated way, we take the risk that our love will make us lose our own identity. We could say then that excess love kills love. In reality, it is the absence of a minimum safe distance, which ends with love and our identity.
It is sometimes said that there is no greater proof of love than that of giving one's life for those one loves. However, it would be better to say that the one he loves should rather protect his life for himself and for those he loves..
Your loved ones deserve that you continue to live and develop your life. In this way the benefit they can get from it will be even greater. The person we love deserves that we live our life to the fullest in order to love him more and better. This means developing our life, protecting it, making it fruitful and sharing it..
The loneliness of one of the members of the couple, can produce alterations in their relationship. Sometimes the loved one needs solitude for different reasons, to be sad, to reflect or simply to be alone.
There are people who do not accept this right to the solitude of the other. They consider their constant presence to be an act of love. It is evident that a certain dose of presence is necessary in any relationship, but the fact of flooding the other with our continuous presence is a proof of our lack of confidence in him and in his own resources.
This need for omnipresence often hides our own need to be important and essential..
Learning to love the other begins by loving ourselves, by respecting a series of rules and creating a fruitful environment for love. Love is such a precious commodity that any effort we make to improve it will always be welcome..
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