What It Means to Love

“The greatest gift you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance”.
While many of us may have sensed it intuitively, there is now science behind the statement that “Love is all you need.” While love seems to be a universally valued attribute, defining it in behavioral terms can be a challenge. I learnt that two essential ingredients that proven to correlate with a happy existence: “One is love”. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.
They say your heart pounds when you’re in love. While many of us believe we would like to be in love, we face many hurdles in taking the actions that allow love to flow freely throughout our lives and relationships. We have many ways of defending ourselves against love and can struggle to give and receive love with ease, openness, and vulnerability.

Finding love felt like every day an uphill struggle. One doesn’t know the absolute security of another’s love, hear someone telling me everything would be okay and that they’d be there for you, whatever life threw your way and likewise.
With love being so closely connected to meaning and fulfillment, it’s valuable for each of us to define love as an action or series of actions we can take to bring us closer to the people we value.

Be There
Love doesn’t grow and flourish because you dress up or make yourself up. All it needs is for you to show up, to be fully present. Someone is ready to love you. They’re out there. And they’re looking for you right now. But you have to show up fully to connect with them.
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence”

Be Open
Love is a powerful force, but you can’t share it if your heart is closed. I learned that you don’t need to expose the deepest parts of yourself all at once to be open to love. You just need to let your defenses down long enough to let someone else in.
“The greatest asset you could own, is an open heart”

Be Honest
It takes being the real you, the wonderfully imperfect you to be truthful. Pretending to be someone you’re not or disguising how you feel sends a worrying message to the person who loves you. We as human have an inbuilt alarm when we sense someone isn’t telling them the whole truth.

Be Kind
Being kind in love means accepting that people can’t always meet your expectations and giving the other person leeway in how they act and respond. It means looking after the other person’s heart even when you’re disappointed.

Be a Listener
Love needs to be heard to flourish. Because love is a conversation, not a monologue. when you listened, you learn valuable insights into the other person each and every time. You hear their concerns, self-doubts, and their words of love.

Be willing to understand and accept
Being willing to listen is only half of learning the language of love. The other half is understanding what you hear. And that means being open to a different perspective, even an opposite view.
Love doesn’t have a complicated vocabulary. All it wants to hear is “That’s okay. I love you for who you are.” To let love in, you need to believe you’re worthy of love, that you truly are enough for another’s heart to fall for. You have to learn that you didn’t need to be perfect and you have to accept that about the other person too. You have to step back and see that no matter how large the mess or miscommunication, they’d gone into the situation dripping with good intentions and love. Accept that in a relationship you’re one of two wonderful, separate, yet intertwined individuals. You can be the amazing you that you are, and they can be their wonderful self too

Be willing to forgive
Whenever there are two people involved, there are going to be mistakes and misunderstandings. That’s a given. Every time you forgive the other person, you’ll find the compassion to forgive yourself too.

Imagine opening up your heart and allowing love in. Imagine feeling more confident in who you are. Confident enough to be open, honest, and kind in a relationship. To be willing to listen, understand, accept and forgive.

This is what it means to love…..

Much Love
RK