Let's Talk About Love

Hey, it’s love month already! Time flies so fast like a bird. Last night, we were talking about “falling in love”. My husband told me about this pretty girl down their neighborhood. He was only 13 then and he remembered having such an enormous crush on her. They moved to Texas and had never seen her again but her lovely face kept flashing back. There was a secret longing of seeing her face once again. Yet, it never happened. Then, on his Mom’s funeral (few years ago), the girl’s Mom was invited and she came with her. All of a sudden my husband became so interested and at last that longing was fulfilled after all these years. Much to his dismay, she never looked that attractive at all! She looked like his sister, he said, lol!

According to Dr. Peck of “Road Less Traveled”;

Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that "falling in love" is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is "I love him" or "I love her." But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the,experience of falling in love, is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex-unless we are homosexually oriented-even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades. On the contrary, real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act lovingly despite the fact that we don’t feel loving.

Love has a lot of dimensions. It is indeed very complicated and most difficult to understand. “Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word "judicious" means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision-making”, Dr. Peck mentioned.

Well, I decided to post more “love” articles for this month to remind myself, to learn from my mistakes and to constantly recognize and appreciate the gifts of love every now and then.