This guest article from YourTango was written by Jianny Adamo.
Everyone wants love but not everyone finds it. Interestingly enough, when you love or are in love, you know exactly what it is. Love paints our view of the world and bestows purpose and meaning to life. Somehow, when love is absent or lost, amnesia sets in. It’s hard to define love; you wonder if it’s even real. You are either on a journey toward love or on a journey to defy it.
Love is fluid, offering different flavors and depths. In the attraction phase, being in love is an emotion producing, strong affection for some and an obsession for others. It’s driven by chemistry racing around your brain and body, an experience many poets and artists have written about. It’s euphoric and cannot be understood unless you have experienced it yourself.
This experience is a hallmark of new love, marked with preoccupation with your beloved and making the world around you disappear. It transcends time and commands your attention.
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As detrimental as I believe that demonizing anxiety is, so it is that I find it humorous that we glorify the most anxious of emotions in our arsenal.. Love. First off, people, as you do here, often pick up the story well into the meat of the beginning of it. By whatever means you decide to look for “love” you have already set the stage. The first thing that happens is that you visually, audibly, and sometimes nasally sense a person. This sends stimulus to your brain. The brain matches that stimulus with what you know to be positive healthy stimulus from your past. Our primary care givers really set the opening definition of “love”. Thus, we often marry our parents as Freud observed. What makes for a really strong honeymoon phase is when sensory information is missing. Our minds are left to make up the rest of the picture. If we want to see this person in a positive light, this can be a very strong driving emotion. Our minds get that picture, and release chemicals that say, “trust this, this is good, this is healthy”. But we do it on such little content of knowledge about that person. Those first days/ weeks/ months are just a snapshot of the person and only viewing their conscious self. Once we get to learn their subconscious, their moral and ethical code, the image becomes sharper. (Ever seen one of those pictures that up close makes it look like a naked body part, but when the camera pans back its the beard of a biker?) How we rectify this expanding reality with that snap shot we “fell in love” with determines how the relationship will progress.
On the sappy emotional side, I have always said if I could paint a picture of “love”, it would be tow people who have reached into their chest and are holding their hearts out as an offering to each other saying simultaneously, “I offer you my heart as a sign of my vulnerability. You have a unique way to hurt me that nobody else does. I have only your word and good will to protect me from harm.” I feel the long version of saying “I love you” is to say, “I long to put your wants and your needs in front of my own”. Not that I have put much thought into this topic. But if my daughter is going to end up marring somebody like me? I had better dam well make sure I act like the kind of person I would want her to marry. Peace.
I agree! Love is Dying to self.
You still have not got to the essence of what love is, since real love, perfect unconditional love, has nothing to do with relationships. Relationship or romantic love is only the entry level of love and it is not perfect by any means. One has to go much deeper to discover Perfect Love.