In Pursuit of Love

Love...the most sought after feeling. We pursue its endless romance and idealism of happiness. But is love what we are really searching for..or is it more?

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” Henry David Thoreau

As I sat to write this I discovered there is the pursuit of love as a feeling and then the realities of love being broken. So today I write about the pursuit of love...

In Pursuit of Love: Part 1

Love…. a word with so many meanings. I grew up thinking love was some unicorn feeling that I would experience with one person. I truly had no idea that it was so much more than that. I was not raised where the word love freely flowed from anyone’s lips. Which is why I had so much confusion with what it meant and how it was found. I mean I knew I loved my family, my animals and peanut butter sandwiches but I had no idea there was a feeling or emotion behind it. Maybe that is why I struggled so much with knowing it and allowing it to happen.

I often confused love with infatuation, lust, desire and thought it was the ultimate key to happiness. Man was I off a hundred degrees. After enduring some “love” and “loveless” relationships I see it in a different light. I see that love is not solely confined to being connected to one person in a commitment. I also see that everyone can love differently but feel they mean the same thing as another. That was a tough one to swallow in all honesty and may have been a down fall to a relationship in which I failed to accept that.

Yes, everyone is in pursuit of love, the feeling, the emotion and even the thought that love will bring them happiness. I have learned that love has many forms as well as levels. Accepting the fact that love doesn’t always bring happiness was the hardest, I expected it to be rainbows and butterflies. If only we taught our children more about the meaning of love and not the fairy tale of it, some of us might not grow up completely unaware that love is surrounding us.

While what we think is love can bring us so much joy it can also break us down, leaves us lost, damaged, broken. All because we did not learn to see that love comes in many levels and shapes. Love is an intense feeling or deep affection, taking pleasure in something and as a verb it is to feel a deep romantic attachment to someone. When used as a noun it is an identifier but as a verb it is an action word. So now I understand why people say you can say it but not show it. Because saying a word is totally different from showing it, which can give it meaning to many. I also am learning that it takes more than saying it to prove to another you mean it.

I read a book called love languages and it truly is a read I suggest for everyone. I learned a lot about how one shows it and understands what love is. While I may take care of you, make sure you have everything and shower you with affection, another may not reciprocate in the same manner, yet they still love you. So, when we fall in love and we get upset that it isn’t what we thought or that the other person doesn’t love us as much, that is purely on us for our level of understanding on what love is. Our idealism of love is thoughts and ideas we placed into our head based on situations we have been in or things we may have seen. I have seen couples who have a picture-perfect relationship on social media, and they aren’t truly in love on a verb level.

As we pursue the idea of love, we cannot forget that there are variations of love. We need to be open to the idea that love can exist on many levels. We cannot expect to have happy lives just from being loved but to have that love compliment our already happy lives. Love needs to be a noun and a verb when in a relationship, while also understanding each person’s love language. We must also remember to extend love even when we don’t see love because sometimes that is when someone needs it the most. By that I mean, loving all humans and animals even beyond our differences because we are kindhearted humans.

Love is truly a bridge that can gap so many people no matter the situation. Love is also the key to a lasting relationship if you can understand each other’s love language and be happy with the love that person is reflecting onto you because like you it may be the only way they know and understand love. If we can’t extend grace to someone, we love how can we expect their love to be enough.