Learn To Love 101 - Understanding True Love

So many people today fall in and out of love at the drop of a dime. The world has become so self-centered that no one wants to take the time to grow anything with a solid future. It’s all about “me” and “now”. People are not really interested in love but rather self gratification. “As long as you can make me ‘feel good’ then we can kick it.” The fundamental problem with love in relationships today is that no one knows how to nourish it. Love is like a child in the sense that in order for it to grow to its full strength you MUST nourish it. To nourish it means to feed it, to take care of it, to value it. If you don’t know the value of something then abuse is inevitable. How then do we learn what love is? It’s simple…we must be taught. You can not know anything that you have not learned and you can not do anything you don’t know how to do. The way the process is SUPPOSED to work is that children learn what true love is from their parents. Watching dad love mom and watching mom take care of dad…that’s the way it should be. The family is the foundation of life. However, instead of learning how to love correctly, parents have been the wrong kinds of models for their children. Now we have a generation of lovers who really don't know what love is. It is the result of ‘bad love modeling’. I remember just like it was yesterday my dad telling me that women are only good for one thing. I also remember my dad saying that “women ain’t nothing but trouble.” I know women who have said that their mothers told them how to use a man. While this may or may not be your experience I am convinced that this unfortunate reality is repeated more than we'd like to admit. The end result of this bad teaching is a people who build their hopes on a love they have heard about but have no idea what it looks like. They have heard what love is supposed to do and what it is supposed to feel like but for some reason they end up singing that song “Love don’t love me.” After disappointments and let downs you start to wonder if this love thing is really all that it is hyped up to be and if so why can’t I find it? Afterall, the only reinforcement you are getting is the negative affects of love. However, it is highly possible that love was in your possession and you let it slip away because you did not recognize it. Or, you may have blamed love for something it did not do and now you don’t want to ever see love again. That too is a sad situation because at the core of who we are is a need for love and companionship.

The big question then is, “What is true love and how do I get it?” But before I answer that, let me tell you what true love is not. Scenario: It’s Friday night and you are at the bookstore reading a magazine. This handsome guy approaches you and engages you in a conversation. You talk for a couple of hours and then exchange numbers. You talk on the phone for hours at a time and you both know that there is definitely a connection there. All you do is think about him. When your phone rings and you look at the caller id and see it’s her you get butterflies. You have never felt this kind of connection with anyone before and you feel like you are floating on air. After about 2 weeks of this you both declare your love for each other and decide to become an exclusive couple. Three months into the relationship your phone calls have shortened from hours to a few minutes. When you see her name on the caller id you don’t get excited like you used to. Every week he seems like a different person because you find out something else about him you do not like. You are now second guessing the relationship. What happened to the love you proclaimed two weeks after meeting? Wasn’t this true love? Unfortunately, no. This is what happens all the time in relationships. The time frames may change but the results are usually the same.

The problem with the scenario above and most situations alike is that the love that is professed is done so based on how one feels. Feeling "in love" and the act of loving someone are two different things. “In love” is an emotional high we experience when our innate need for love connects with another person. Gary Chapman, author of "The Five Love Languages" calls it our "emotional love tank." Loving someone is not about how you feel, but rather a choice. The only effective way to make a love choice is to know someone because you can't really love who you don't know. The only way to know someone is to spend time with them. You can develop the emotional high of feeling in love very fast, however this is not the time to make life altering decisions. Relationships move in 3 stages: Euphoria, Reality and then Offense. Euphoria is when you first meet someone and everything seems perfect. This is where the butterflies are born. This is when every thing about that person seems right. You should NEVER make life altering decisions about a person in the Euphoria stage because things are distorted. We have often heard ‘when you first meet people you don’t meet them you meet their representative’. While I believe this is true, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It is human nature to put the ‘best you’ out in front. The reason we call him/her "the representative" is because we tend to think people change over time. In reality, most people don't. You do have some people who try to be someone they are not so that you will like them, but for the most part people are themselves. The problem is that we are usually in a hurry to "label" them and so we define them in our mind based on what we see initially. What you see initially may very well be a part who they are, but it is not to totality of who they are. Usually people are not funny, or mean, or gentle, or fearful, or silly, or serious, or horny, or have a bad mood ONLY. No, it is usually AND instead of OR. What I mean is that no one can be defined by one characteristic, but usually will exhibit a WIDE range of characteristics based on the situation. This is why it is so important to spend time with the person you are getting to know because what you see on the first date at the carnival (good or bad) may be different than what you see on the 10th date at the museum. Usually, you meet someone that seems like someone you could be with because in your subconscious mind you already have an ideal “somebody I can be with” schema. Since you don’t know the person, your mental schema fills in the blanks and creates a perfect image and tells you “I’ve finally met him.” But as you get to know the person, piece by piece your “ideal mate” is replaced with reality and your feelings start to change because that’s not the person you fell in love with. The purpose of the Euphoria stage is not to start a relationship but rather to peak your interest enough so you can continue to get to know the ‘complete’ person. Love may begin to develop here but it is not the place where love can grow or survive. You must build a friendship foundation. The Euphoria stage is like a jump start for the relationship. Too often people try to build relationships based on how they feel in Euphoria not understanding that this feeling is not meant to be a foundation. The life span of this stage really depends on how much time you spend together. After the Euphoria stage comes the Reality stage. This is where true love is supposed to find its home. Before this, most of your actions are based on how you feel. Your feelings, emotions and actions are on automatic. It takes NO effort to feel giddy about someone, to think about them all day or to long to be with them when you are in Euphoria. But in the Reality stage it’s not about how you feel, it’s about a choice. This is where you start to find out the not-so-good things about a person. The more time you spend with a person the more you learn about their character and personality. The real test of love is being able to love someone when you know their flaws and short comings. That’s when you say I choose to love you because I see something in you worth loving even though you are not perfect. I’m not saying that love is totally disconnected from how you feel about a person but how you feel does not control how you love. The ultimate goal is to love in Reality with some euphoric feelings and avoid the stage of ‘Offense’. But for most people, the Offense stage comes swiftly after the Reality stage because the relationship was built based on the feelings felt in Euphoria as opposed to a solid friendship. Now that Reality has set in and you are no longer in love and you have to try to detach your feelings and emotions from someone because you moved too fast and intimately connected yourself to someone you are not compatible with. If you had simply taken your time you would have known that he curses you out when he gets upset, or that she doesn't talk for three days when she's mad. The Offense stage is different than having hard times in a relationship. The Offense stage is where there is constant conflict and tension because of false expectations which. The best way to stay away from the Offense stage is to understand the purpose of Euphoria, take your time to build a solid friendship and love in Reality. Love is an action, which leads me to my final point.

How do we walk in true love? Assuming you understand the stages of relationships, you are in a committed relationship and you want to make it work, the secret to experiencing true love is this: You must have two people that are totally committed to the other person. In order to walk in true love you have to become completely selfless. You must understand that love is not about you, but rather it is about the person you are loving. If you are 100% committed to your man’s needs AND he is 100% committed to your needs then you create the atmosphere for true love to happen. It becomes like a circle. His whole goal is to meet her needs and her whole goal is to meet his needs. He doesn’t have to worry about his own needs because she is taking care of that. This means he can totally focus on her needs and vice versa. This is how it should be. You must become a student of your mate. Take the time to LEARN how to love them the way they need to be loved and not how you think they ought to be loved. You can’t love your mate based on what the typical man or woman would like…learn what he or she likes specifically. You must know the difference between what I call “generic” love and “unique” love. Every person is unique and is maximized when they are treated as such. True love is a lot of work, but I am convinced that it does not have to be hard work. Great relationships do not just happen. You have to work at it. True love does exist. You just have to know how to recognize it and how to nourish it. You can’t have a true love relationship with everyone but everyone can have true love. You must be patient. A true love relationship takes time to build and deep friendship is the foundation. With knowledge comes responsibility. You have to decide what you are going to do with the information in this article because now there should be no misunderstanding.