What is love? How do we fall in love? How do we know it’s love? How do we stay in love? Does love come with an expiry date? What happens to the love you have for a person when they’re no longer in your life?
I’m often plagued with the feeling that I don’t know anything about love. I’m 33 years old and everything I know about love is from my family, friends, books, movies and TV shows. I grew up a romantic, forever dreaming about falling in love. I often look back and wonder where that craving to be loved and to love came from. I wasn’t an unloved kid, I had a family that doted on me and friends who loved me. Yet I spent a lot of my life craving that one love?
So what is love? I used to think of love as being selfless and putting someone else’s needs before your own. I learnt this definition from my family but realised after failed relationships that this definition doesn’t work. It leads to relationships where you bend over backwards to make sure other people are happy. It means being unhappy but trying to make other people happy.
After understanding how wrong my understanding of what love is, I started on a journey to make my own definition of what love is. Along the process I lost people that I loved and it made me feel angsty about the love I had for them that I didn’t know what to do about. I looked around me hoping to understand love from the relationships around me but it just confused me more. Watching how some family members behave, listening to my friend tell me why she’s choosing to stay with an abusive partner, watching people around me fall out of love, watching friends fall in love with every new person they dated…argh confusing. The journey of finding my own definition of love has led to no conclusion and it feels like with unlearning what love is, I have also forgotten how to love. I feel lost. I feel broken. I feel loveless.
So here I am, asking you to help me figure out what love is. What is love to you? What helps you stay in love? What do you do with the love you have for someone that is no longer in your life?
PS: I hope you are all doing well. Life’s been in a bit of transition for me and that’s why I’ve been missing from here. ❤️
Happy Panda 
Hey di! I missed you.
For me, I don’t think I know enough to have a definition of what is love yet, nor do I have much experience with such relationships, I’m just waiting for that kind of love I guess that probably exists only in my imagination. Sometimes i wonder what would it be like to have a teenage love like cute and caring type in dramas, but for now I don’t wanna focus on these things, for my studies and career are my main priorities right now. Hopefully that love will come by my way and stay when it is the right time.
Sending love 💞
LikeLike
love is four fold
so do not get lost
nor forget that cost either
LikeLike
The first step I have learned to discovering healthy love and what it is, entails teaching ourselves to like and then to love ourselves, without passing negative judgment upon our every action and to practice speaking kindly and gently to ourselves and then to others.
When we practice these steps, we then can gently place our boundaries in place so we don’t allow anyone to destroy what we have arduously built up.
Our boundaries may create some pushback, but those are the very people the boundaries are to protect us from!
When we practice loving ourselves in a healthy way, we then accept no less from those around us, and if they are unable to love us in a healthy way, they may not need to stay in our inner circle lest they try to lower us to their negative levels.
I have observed that the longer I practice the above steps, the less the negative people want to be around me because I’m no longer vibing with them, so they move on to find someone who fits better. I have also found that the people who stay in my life are those who are also working on themselves!
These are my people I choose to be around, they see my worth and I see theirs. I feel loved when I am around them!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Am ten year older then you and I don’t it know myself. If you find out what love is, please let me know.
LikeLike