What is love? It’s probably one of the most complex and misunderstood things in our human world. Since February is the month of love I thought I would share some of my own thoughts on this crazy thing we call love.
To me, love is more than just an emotion or feeling and I honestly don’t think I’ve always truly understood that to the level I feel I do now. Life is full of ups and downs when it comes to love and like anyone I’ve had my fair share. It’s important to remember the lessons that the ‘downs’ teach us and to practice gratitude for those lessons. At the same time, those ‘ups’ are the moments that tell us what kind of love we want and need and this helps us grow more maturely in love as we move through life.
I’ve put together five ideas to describe what love is to me. You may agree or disagree, but either way I hope you find something in this post useful or inspiring. It may help to trigger some ‘ah-ha’ moments for you, so enjoy reading my thoughts on love!
Love is a Force
I consider myself a spiritual person. It would be hard not to be in a way, considering my Catholic upbringing. I went to church every Sunday until I was about 17 years old. I would go with my family – my dad, my two brothers and my mum. It was mostly my dad’s decision to bring me and my brothers up Catholic. My mum was baptised in the Church of England, but she was not as interested in her faith as much as my dad was is in his.
Adolescence saw me lose interest in going to Church. I was more interested in my social life with friends and that often involved having other plans on a Sunday. When I was 18 I also had a weekend job, which meant I was rarely able to go to Church on a Sunday, so I stopped going. Despite this I have never completely lost touch with my faith. I’ve definitely questioned things about my faith as an adult, which has challenged what I feel I really believe in. One thing I do know for certain is that Catholicism, along with other well known religions, were built out of love for a greater being, to worship the divine. A church is a place filled with love. Within the Catholic community you are surrounded by people who praise love, and being in a church surrounded by people who praise love, in other words God – It does make you feel something deeper. I get this feeling every time I walk into a Cathedral or a Buddhist temple or most other religious establishments around the world. I have been lucky enough to travel to quite a few places so far in my life and one place that I really felt love, was standing in Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, completely in awe of the architecture and the art that went into creating that incredible building. I find it impossible to stand in a place like that without feeling something greater than myself. This is what I mean when I say that love is a force.
In saying all this I also don’t believe you need to be religious to be a spiritual person. I am lucky to have been introduced to spirituality through my upbringing and know that many others haven’t had that privilege. If you are someone who isn’t interested in religion, you can still be a spiritual person. It makes life so much brighter – at least it does for me anyway.
You are not in control of Love
What I mean by this is that you can’t decide to love, it just happens. Think about your family. You haven’t made a conscious decision to love them (or not), you simply just do (or don’t). It may sound obvious but when you really think about it, everything you truly love has not been your decision. Feelings of love can also take us by surprise. Perhaps you’ve felt sympathy for a person who has committed a terrible crime and it’s all over the news or perhaps you’ve felt a profound connection to someone for something they are going through? Empathy is a truly beautiful part of being human. I think of love as beyond our control whenever I’m struggling with feelings of regret or grief about past relationships, whether it be a lost friendship or a breakup with a romantic partner, because it helps me to stop blaming myself, in a way for loving them, which brings me to my next point.
Love can cause pain but also help us heal
By pain, I mean those emotions we often wish we couldn’t feel, like grief for someone who’s passed away, or someone you’ve lost touch with. It’s also that longing feeling of missing someone, if they go away for awhile and you know you won’t see them until they come back. I call this pain because it does, to certain extent cause physical pain. For me it’s a tight, often burning sensation in my chest. I suppose a cliche explanation for this is a broken heart. These emotions are, in my opinion, impossible without love. Sometimes I think we can mistake these for feelings caused by hate, especially if someones actions upset you. In these situations, all you can really do to feel better is to forgive. Forgiveness is again, a form of love. Hate doesn’t solve anything, it just fills you with anger and frustration, whereas love through forgiveness allows you to move on gracefully, with a positive outlook. Hate makes the pain last longer than it needs to, but love heals pain. You can’t control love, as I mentioned before, but you can always tap into it’s power. Love is constant. It is always there when you need it because it is within you. I think hate is simply a negative emotional response to situations where love has caused you pain. Sometimes you do have to allow yourself to be angry and sad for a little while, but you have to be strong and not allow it to take over. After the anger and frustration has subsided, choose love so you can forgive. And it’s not just others you should forgive. You must always forgive yourself in order to move on and grow into the best version of yourself. You must show yourself love too through forgiveness. Love can bring you to your knees, but in those moments it’ll also take your hand and stand you back up again. I recently had a thought that came to me in a moment of sadness about things that have happened in the past and it was simply a feeling of gratitude. I thought to myself, how lucky am I, to feel so deeply because I love so deeply, and my sadness began to feel lighter.
Love is different and the same for everyone
Everyone usually knows what you mean when you say you love something. Whether it’s another person or a piece of art or a genre of music. Everyone has felt love in some way at some point in their life. This is how love is the same for everyone. It is the same in how it brings us joy. It is different though for everyone in terms of what and who we love and how we express love. For example, a couple who are in love who choose to get married, are not necessarily more in love than a couple who choose to never marry. I personally have a problem with how society puts a label on love as a form of validation. A couple may have been together for 3 years and be married and be considered more ‘serious’ in terms of their romantic relationship than a couple who have been together for 20 years, with a family of their own, but are not married. Love itself is beyond labels. True love can not be defined simply by a shiny ring around someones finger. In saying this, I am not against marriage at all. I think marriage is a beautiful expression of love. So let’s be respectful and not judge people for who, what and how they love, because even if they love differently to you, it is still the exact same love that you feel and that should bring us together, not tear us apart.
Love is forever
I mean this on a deeper level than just a simple romantic statement. Even in the hardest moments, when you don’t feel love, it is there hiding in your subconscious. Love is in memories that can be triggered by sounds and smells. Whenever I smell Carex soap, it still to this day takes me all the way back to being a young child with dirty hands and my mum cleaning them with blue Carex soap – a simple act of love. Whenever I go back to my hometown of Woking I get butterflies as I recognise places – that feeling is love. Woking is the place where I felt love for the first time. Love for my parents as a child and then for the friends that I met and the relationships I formed. Love lives forever in your memories and in the memories of others. Then love is passed down through generations, because each of us are created from love and if you have children, they too will have been created from love and the chain continues, forever.
So there we have it, my five ideas about what love is. All in all, love is bigger, more powerful and more complex than we can really comprehend and as much as we try to understand it in all of it’s beauty it will always surprise us. So if you do anything today, surrender to love and allow it to guide you, heal you and bring you peace and joy.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes about love, by Dr. Seuss, whose books were a part of my childhood.
‘We’re all a little weird, and life’s a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.’
– Dr. Seuss
To the people in my life who’ve taught me what love is, thank you, you know who you are.
Thanks for reading. Have a beautiful day.