Today is Valentine’s Day. It’s the one day out of the year when it is customary to let your sweetheart know you love them. Typically you run out for flowers, candy, dinner and hanky panky for dessert.
The thing is this. Love has nothing to do with chocolate or wine. It isn’t needed for sex. You don’t need it to make babies. We don’t need to be in love to be married. It’s easy to pretend to be in love and it’s easy to confuse love with lust. So on Valentine’s Day, when I looked around the restaurant I went to on my date, I wondered how many people were there because they were celebrating real love, or going through the motions.
These things I have learned…
1. Love isn’t instant. Lust is. Karma is. But real love takes YEARS to develop between two people.
2. If there are conditions put on another, it is not love. There’s no way around this. If you think your conditions will be met by someone else, you’re deceiving yourself and lying to the one you say you love.
3. Never, ever think for a minute you can change someone. It’s not your right to do that to anyone and especially not your place to change someone you say you love.
4. Jealously has no relationship to real love. If you are jealous, you are not loving. You are trying to possess and control someone.
5. Real love honors the growth of the one you love. When they fall, you nurse their wounds or let them heal on their own terms. They may not be ready.
6. Love is not ownership, power, a tool for manipulation and never violent, spiteful or hateful. If someone says they love you and then systematically destroys your existing life, all your friendships, your career and your home life, this is not love and you’re a wimp for permitting this to happen to you.
7. Love grows. Real love can only expand, deepen and intensify.
8. You can never lie to the one you love.
9. Women underestimate the emotional nature of men.
10. It’s indeed possible to love many people and have enough room in your heart for a gang of loves. A wise person knows how to cherish them all.
With gratitude,
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