What is true love?
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What is true love?
What if what we have come to know about love is the opposite of what true love really is?
Growing up as young women with people, books, social media and movies we have come to understand that love is having butterflies in our stomach about a boy or a girl, not being able to stop thinking about them and wanting to be with them all the time. Love has been romantacised into finding ‘the one’ that completes us and makes not just our day, but our life.
When we believe there is one true love for each of us and all we have to do is find them or wait for them to come into our life, there is a narrowing of love that reduces its magnificent vastness down to something we may share with a scant few individuals over an entire lifetime, blind to what love actually is but living with a feeling that something is missing – even when we seem to have it all.
It is no accident that the most google searched question of 2014 was ‘What is Love?’ [i]
How love really works
True love is a livingness and a way of being with ourselves. All we need to do is to let our guard down and we are love and then everything we do is from love.
It is like we have been told, as one drop in an ocean of drops, that there is only one other special drop that is our true love and a few other drops, like family and close friends, that we can share love with while we’re waiting for our ‘one’ to arrive.
Even when the one does arrive, 71% of divorces are from first marriages [ii] Does this mean that most of us fail when it comes to love or is it that the sold version of what is true love has failed us?
What if there is no ‘special’ drop to find and merge with at all, but that we are in fact submerged in love 24/7 and that every drop we bump up against is equal to all others in specialness and one we can share a loving relationship with – for 30 seconds or 30 years?
Could it be that love doesn’t come to us, it is us?
This would mean that love is available to us, within us, in every instance and instead of waiting to get it from someone special, we can be it ourselves with everyone – from the grocery check out person to the people at work or school, equal to the person we choose to partner and the children we share – no more, no less. Not in a hippy, free love, or feverishly religious way, but in a way that is based on interactions of equal respect and care for each and every drop, every person, that flows through our daily life – some once, others a million times.
Suddenly love becomes fathomless with possibilities for the tenderness, playfulness and openness we would usually hold back and reserve for a select few, to flow freely with no off switch or favour, no sorting or measuring of who gets it and who doesn’t.
If what we have come to know about love is the opposite of what is true love, then each and every one of us is the love we have been looking and waiting for. There is no ‘special one’ to fulfill us; after all, a drop of water is already full by its very nature.
It’s time to appreciate that love is a romance that starts with us and extends out from us and when the blinkers that keep us blind to this fall away, the grandness of each and every drop of love we are drenched in can be seen and enjoyed.
Filed under
Love, Making love, Marriage, Romance, Relationships
