What Is Love, Really? And Are You Living the Love You Long For?

So many of us long for love. But how many of us have actually stopped to define what love means to us?

What is love to you? What does it look like? How does it feel? How does it express itself in everyday life? And perhaps most importantly: How do you know that what you are experiencing is actually love?

Because there is something profoundly important here.

When we have no conscious definition of love, we tend to live according to the version of love we learned growing up. The love we experienced in our childhood. The love we had to adapt to, work for, long for or somehow earn.

We carry these experiences into our adult relationships and often find ourselves repeating familiar patterns.

Perhaps we believe love means being needed. Always being there. Understanding, accommodating, giving a little more and having just a little more patience.

Perhaps we associate love with intense passion, longing and emotional highs and lows. Or with being chosen by someone whose love and approval we feel we have to earn.

And before we know it, we have built our relationships around strategies for getting love rather than developing the capacity to live in love.

Love Is About Seeing and Being Seen

In its deepest sense, love is the capacity to see another person as they truly are. Their personality, strengths, limitations, dreams and humanity.

To meet that person with love while allowing yourself to be seen in the same way. It means allowing yourself to be loved for who you are, rather than for everything you do, give, achieve or contribute.

Our relationships are a profound arena for practising how to meet one another, share our light and allow that love to ripple out into the world.

For love to flow, however, both vessels need to be nourished. Love is a movement of giving and receiving. It cannot be sustained when one person is constantly giving without also receiving. Both people need to feel seen, met, valued and nourished by the connection.

When we feel empty and try to fill that emptiness through giving, our generosity can become a strategy for seeking security, validation and belonging. On the surface, it may look like generosity, while underneath there is a deep longing to receive something in return.

That is hunger wearing the mask of generosity.

Real reciprocity grows when two people take responsibility for their own inner lives and meet from a place of greater wholeness.

This is a love that can sustain itself over time.

Our Relationships Are Our Classroom

I see our relationships as one of the soul's most important classrooms.

The soul is here to grow, evolve and transform. And relationships are one of the most powerful arenas in which this transformation can take place.

This is where our patterns become visible. Sometimes painfully visible.

Here we discover how we try to earn love by pleasing others. How we abandon our own needs to maintain closeness. How we try to control, change or manage another person in order to create the security we long for.

We may discover how much of our energy goes into reading the other person, anticipating their reactions and trying to keep the relationship in a state where we feel safe.

And in the middle of all this, we have an opportunity to ask a completely different question:

What would happen if we stopped trying to create love through our old strategies and started learning to live in love instead?

This is a profound shift.

From trying to earn love to allowing ourselves to receive it.

From adapting ourselves to expressing who we truly are.

From managing another person to taking responsibility for ourselves.

From trying to be chosen to consciously choosing.

How Do We Recognize Love in a Romantic Relationship?

Love becomes visible through our actions and through the way we actually meet each other over time.

Ask yourself:

• Is my partner genuinely curious about my inner world, my needs and my dreams?

• Is there room for both of our feelings and perspectives?

• Can I express my needs and set boundaries while feeling emotionally safe?

• Is there reciprocity in care, responsibility and initiative?

• Can we navigate conflict with a willingness to understand each other and repair what has been hurt?

• Do I feel more like myself in this relationship?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

Do I feel safe enough to be fully myself, or am I spending much of my energy managing the other person's emotions and trying to keep the relationship functioning?

A loving relationship involves two people who are both willing to meet themselves, take responsibility for their behaviour and contribute to the growth of the relationship.

We can invite growth, inspire each other and evolve together. But each person has to take responsibility for their own capacity to love.

So I want to leave you with a few questions:

• What have you learned that love is?

• Which of your beliefs about love come from your childhood and past experiences?

• And if you were to define love anew, from the person you are today and the love your soul longs to experience and express, what would that love look like?

  
  

Let your transformation begins right here. With the courage to define love for yourselves. And then choosing to live your life in alignment with that definition. 

With love

Beatrice