“When
you look at love, you're looking into the face of appreciation.”
 What is Love?
For some reason, throughout the history of mankind, we as
a world culture have made love out to be mysterious, complex, difficult, and un-definable.
It’s the subject of endless poems and literary works. There is an enormous amount of
material available out there about love, allot of it contradictory.
We’ve been given the impression that defining love is a near to impossible task.
Maybe there’s a fear that if we define it, it would somehow be less powerful...less
impactful...less exhilarating. Maybe we like the mystery of it. But is it really that
complicated? Perhaps the complications surrounding love come from all “stuff” we
add on to this powerful emotion. Lets drop all the baggage
surrounding relationships and define what it is we are experiencing in the moment of
love.
Basic Components of Love
What do you feel when you love someone? If distilled down to it’s core components,
what would those be? Yes, love is an emotion, a feeling, a wanting, and a
“being”. We know it feels good, but what specific feelings, wantings, and beings
are present when we feel love? Here are the common denominators of love...
Love is accepting.
Acceptance is labeling someone as "okay" and
having no particular desire to change them. Who they are is perfectly fine with you. You
pose no condition on whether you will love them or not. This is call unconditional love.
When your love IS conditional, the moment they step outside your set of conditions, love
evaporates.
Love is appreciating.
Appreciation is one step beyond acceptance. Its when your focus is on what you like about
another. We look at them and feel this sweeping appreciation for who they are, their joy,
their insights, their humor, their companionship, etc. When someone says they are "in
love" with another, they mean their appreciation is so enormous for this person that
it consumes their every thought.
Love is wanting another to feel good.
We want those we love to be happy, safe, healthy, and
fulfilled. We want them to "feel good" in all ways, physically, mentally and
emotionally.
How
do we express love?
We don’t always express our love. Love is a feeling and
the expression of that feeling is separate. It’s an action. There’s a practical
reason we don’t always express our love for another. It’s an issue of TIME. We
only have 24 hours in a day. (if you make it up that way.) If the expression of love was a
core ingredient to love, we would have to be stingy with who we loved. Because there
simply wouldn’t be enough time to love everyone! If you see the distinction between
the feeling and the expression, you can then love endless numbers of people.
Love expressed is when you give your attention, your time, your focus to someone.
Webster defines attention as “the giving of one’s mind to something, i.e. mental
concentration, notice, thoughtful of others.”
There are many ways in which we give our attention to another. We use our five
senses. Our ears to listen. Being completely present with the one who is speaking. Our
eyes, watching another, undivided attention. Tasting/smelling? (I’ll let you figure
that one out). Touching, giving a hug, holding a hand, a caress, or sexual expression. It
can take the form of thoughts, thinking about another, or gifts, both the thought that
went into the gift and the actual physical giving of it. How you express your love depends
on the type of relationship.
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