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Love
- - What is it? First, let me tell you what it isn’t.
It’s not a something we fall in or out of. It’s
not a dreamy, blissful state where all fears, doubts, and
worries melt away as we merge into one flesh. And it’s
not those glorious first moments of your first love when you
were swept away in a wave of ecstasy. I know that’s what
the music industry and Hollywood would like us to believe.
It’s interesting how we use language. Think about this
- "we fall in love." Fall means to stumble,
trip, lose your balance and be out of control. And equally
as mysteriously, we fall out of love. It’s as if we’re
pushed down a long black tube into a loveless pit. Isn’t
that kind of strange? How does this happen? It’s like
taking an hallucinogenic. A person suddenly reaches a euphoric
state and then just as quickly it wears off and, lo and behold,
it’s reality as it was before - - dark and bleak. If
this is what love is, then it’s not surprising that relationships
have such trouble.
It’s just not possible to
trip every single day of your life into a blissful fugue state.
So, maybe we need to come up with a better definition of what
love is, one which will give us an opportunity to understand
what relationships are and how relationships can really succeed.
Love is not falling. It’s
giving. Love is a verb, not a noun. You don’t fall into
love, you create love. You act lovingly. In other words,
you give to your partner. As a function of giving, we create
love. The more of yourself you invest into anything or anybody,
the more attached you feel to that other thing or other person.
A house you build with your hands is a house you feel very
attached to.
Love is the same way. Most of
us wait passively to let love act upon us. It doesn’t
work that way. We need to choose love and we need to act
in ways that produce loving responses. In other words,
love is about taking a quantum leap from being self-centered
to other-centered. To quote the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan,
"Love is achieved when your partner’s needs become
at least as important to you as your own."
That may sound rather simple,
but putting it into practice is something else. It takes time
and work to finally accept the fact that marriage is not about
getting all our needs and wants fulfilled. The great challenge
for each of us is "to ask not what my partner can do
for me but ask what I can do for my partner." This is
how we create genuine, deep love.
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