What Does Love Mean To You?

Mar 15
17:02

2007

Neel Raman

Neel Raman

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Love is eternal. It is always within us and all around us. Love is an expression of what is really in our hearts and who we really are.

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Love has been hijacked.

Love has become a word to describe how we feel about food and new technology and television programmes and pizza. It seems so easy to love everything these days. We're in a mad dash for the feel-good factor and instant gratification. Our daily existence is bombarded with ways to achieve the easy option by simply buying into what advertisers want us to buy and love and not be able to do without.

We say it all the time,What Does Love Mean To You? Articles unthinkingly.  All of us – “I love this… or I love that...”

Saying it creates a one-way dependant relationship between yourself and what you say you love, and in so doing, trap yourself in a continual need or desire for it. Having it, or experiencing it, satisfies a need in you for comfort. Not having it exposes a space that needs to be filled.

Strangely, we're less inclined to say it to one another. It’s easy to say it about a new sweater, but not quite so easy to a friend or a lover.

Maybe you've been in a relationship with another person and they felt so important to you that you wanted to reassure yourself that this good feeling would stay. And so you said 'I love you'.

Did you want to hear it said to you in return? Did you want to believe, or know, that this person was connected to you strongly enough that they wouldn't leave? Somehow, that little word 'love' became a magic talisman to ward off danger, loss and loneliness, rather than a simple expression of warmth and caring.

Or maybe when you hear the word 'love' in a relationship, those alarm bells kick into action in a big way. "He loves me? Whoa! Commitment! Marriage! Kids! Wait just one second! I'm being asked to reciprocate a feeling I'm not even sure I understand let alone feel!"

Think about this. Love cannot be a commodity that you barter. Love cannot fill those empty spaces to keep loneliness and emptiness at bay.

Love is like air. It’s like sunshine. Love is energy. Love doesn't ask that you do or say anything in return. Like the universe, it is just there. It's the expression of how, when you truly open your heart to life and the world, and accept people for all their failings and idiosyncrasies, you can offer goodwill, care, tenderness and acknowledgment without judgment or control. Free of hooks and lines that bind them to you. Friends and lovers can truly be themselves, realise their own dreams, and fly like birds in the freedom of being loved without restriction or condition.

If you truly love, others can truly be.

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