OK, the title of this blog post may have been a little dramatic, of course I know what love is, I feel it myself & work with people every week who are dealing with issues in relation to it! my point is, however, that I can't define it for anyone else, and so I don't.
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''How do I know I'm 'in love'?'' is a question I'm sometimes asked, equally, I'm sometimes asked how someone can tell if they ''love'' someone or if someone else ''loves'' them. The truth is, I can't answer those questions for another person, I can only ask them what their definition of ''love'' or ''in love'' is, perhaps help them explore & define that, and ask them if that's what they feel. It's not the job of a therapist to tell people what to think, feel or believe, nor is it our job to agree with someone, necessarily, on their personal definitions. Of course there's a lot written and said about love, lots of poetry & research data, but ultimately we have to understand what it means to us personally & feel it in our bodies to know that it's real for us.
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Many people confuse limerence for love - click here to read a pretty good article on what limerence is & how it differs from love - and the reason why people do that, I think, is because we are 'sold' a romantic ideal in mainstream culture in the 'western' world that, essentially, glamourises limerence & places it as a romantic ideal. This same ideal does not exist in most other parts of the world. If 'it' doesn't have the hallmarks & misty-eyed fireworks of limerence then it's not romantic love. However, limerence fades, always, & if love is present that is what will be left, or not, when limerence leaves. If nothing's left after limerence leaves then it wasn't love to begin with. Of course people stay in relationships after love leaves too or sometimes perhaps love was never really there to begin with & they stayed for other reasons but that's not what I'm talking about here.
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So, the question for you, dear reader, is, ''what is love for you?''.
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Of course, there are different types and natures of love, different flavours & textures of it. What we feel for our children, our siblings or parents will be, as it should be, different to what we feel towards our romantic sexual partners & lovers. So, from this alone we can extrapolate that we feel sexual 'love' for some people & not for others. This may lead to asking the question, ''is it possible to feel love for more than one person at a time?''. The answer is yes, of course, it's not a supply limited to a finite number of people in our lives!
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As a species, we vary hugely in how we feel & experience life & living, including our relationships. What works & what feels good to one will not feel good to others, what offers one person freedom will feel like a cage to others. The key here is can we accept that others will have differing experiences & needs when it comes to their experience & expression of love? Can we accept their experience as being as valid & worthy of respect as ours? As long as it's within the law, I hope so.
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For me, love is.... well, love is many things. I can distinguish differences in the texture of love I feel for my friends vs the love I feel for lovers. With my friends, family too but more of that in a minute, there is a desire for their happiness, a desire to be in their company, to share life's joys & sorrows both theirs & mine together. There is care, a lot of care, for their wellbeing, for the smoothness & ease of their life. If I can give something to make their life better, I will. We are connected.
With family, and for me this is mostly people who are not blood relations, there is an added loyalty & an enduring nature to the love I feel for those people over the course of decades or maybe my whole lifetime so far. It runs deeper in my body & being. It is a more intimate love because our relationships are more intimate, that doesn't mean it's always easy but it is enduring. We are not just connected, we are bonded.
With lovers, the addition here is sexual experience & expression and a space in our relationship where that has & gives life to us both individually & to the relationship between us. It is a burning fire deep in the belly, it is an explosion in the heart, it is also a connection to the source of all that is. It is where all of me finds expression & is not just accepted but actively invited and desired. It is the most intimate of spaces & therefore also the most vulnerable. We are not just connected, we merge & flow in and out of oneness.
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Love isn't always easy, it requires us to sometimes put our own needs second, to compromise, to find a place between two people where both of those people show themselves to each other, both people are 'seen' & understood. Love demands that we, increasingly over time, see more of the whole person, their flaws & failings as well as their triumphs & bright light, & we want the best for them still, we still want to be close to them & know them even more deeply, if it's a sexual relationship we still desire them, we are still on their side despite the parts of them we dislike, despite the parts they dislike about, or maybe even don't see, in themselves.
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Of course, what I haven't spoken about here yet is the necessity for self-love & self awareness in loving relationships. We are limited in relationship, regardless of the nature of that relationship, by our own awareness of our own motivations, beliefs, desires & needs. If we do not know ourselves we are limited in how deeply we can know others as well as how deeply we can explore & experience the relationship between us & others. Equally, if we are lacking self love we run the risk of tolerating 'bad' behaviour in others and of not knowing what love should feel like or how it should be expressed. We can become confused about what love should look like, often accepting poor imitations of it in the process.
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I want to leave you with an interesting definition of love that I heard recently, ''love is what you feel when you are in sync with the whole of who you are''. It doesn't ring true to me for the love I have for friends or family, but for intimate sexual romantic love? yes, it does. If we can show up in our intimate sexual romantic connections in the fullness of who we are, free & invited & accepted & desired as that, then surely that is love in it's fullest form.
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I'd love to hear your thoughts on love, please feel free to share them with me on social media on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Last updated: 09/08/2022
