How To Love: Part 2

Wrote this part 2 to bring some clarity and expansion on my last post on love. Enjoy.

I seek to experience love in the greatest capacity possible here on earth because experiencing it in any capacity, eventually becomes inevitable. The “feelings” that love brings upon us will eventually serve as a directive in our lives. We hear all around us what love could do for us. We hear about people becoming fearless,-we hear about how love could be life changing. A lot of us hear the good consequences of letting love rule-discovering it and operating under it, but at the same time many of us only have experiences with the negative consequences it yields.

So why is it that so many of us seemingly have this life defining factor-love- in our lives, but many of us deal with the short end of the stick? I want to say from my own personal mission to understand this myself, the basis on which we are defining love will ultimately drive our experience.

The basis in which you are using to define love and all it’s characteristics, will determine your fate with it. In other words, your philosophy on love will hold the key to your experience with love itself. Needless to say, when I talk about love, and the next person speaks on the subject, we may not be using the same paradigms-we may be looking to understand the same thing, but the content will differ tremendously.

However what I am trying to discover here on this earth, and I’m sure you wouldn’t mind stumbling upon the same, is real love. That true love that is life changing, and goes beyond a feeling, but will shift your perspective and there on out, your focus.

With that said I want to suggest there is a favored, even absolute, blueprint to love. What I am not suggesting is that there is only one way to express and receive love. In fact I am a believer of love languages. In Gary Chapman’s study on love in marriages, he draws out 5 different ways people communicate love-acts of service, physical touch, gifts, quality time, and words of affirmation. His study reveals that each of us show love usually how we receive it best. And because we are all different your love language- and the way you give and take love- may differ from mine. However, what these troubled marriages had in common prior to understanding their love language and their partners love language was that there was unavoidable tension and rift developing. They understood that stress, if anything, should be dissolved by their love for each other, not have the ability to divide it.

I tried to find another way to make sense of this in my head, and I came up with parenting. There are many styles of parenting, you have authoritarian,  there is authoritative, and permissive. While these parenting styles differ, I think being a parent or not, anyone would agree there is just characteristics to parenting as well as flat out unjust characteristics to parenting. I’d like to apply that same bubble of thinking to love. While there are different ways to love, there are right ways to love, and wrong ways to love as well. Also like parenting, the way you ultimately carry it out is a philosophy and a choice.

What I am concluding is that the saying “love makes the world go round”, yeah that isn’t necessarily a solid tagline being that so many of us have developed our own style of love. However, the nature of that love-the patience, the kindness, the durability-that is what should remain consistent from person to person. If not, I would challenge you to look at your philosophy. What are you using to reference love? Is it the way your parents loved you? The way they displayed it to one another? Did you just start taking swings at love in the dark, going with what sticks and feels right? There is a definite nature behind its spirit. Even though it might look different from person to person, its aim and operations remain the same. If not, stop taking swings in the dark, be patient with yourself, and learn how to love. For with love comes faith and hope, but love covers them both.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
-1 Corinthians 13:13

Short link to How to Love Part 1:

How to Love