Have you ever wondered why we love love when love doesn’t love us? Many of us are in search of that other person to fulfill the existential void in our lives, that person who makes us happy and makes us feel that we have a purpose in life. Many of us long for a partner in life who really gets us; someone who allows us to be ourselves, someone who challenges us to be the best we can be and loves us through our ups and downs. We want someone to make us complete or at least feel complete.
But are we chasing after something that really isn’t there? It’s this most sought after, intangible emotion that has us feeling foolish, crazy, and happy all at once-love!
Broken hearts are hard to mend, and miscalculated love is the means by which this happens. How do we continue to get it wrong? How can we miscalculate something so essential? I’m begging love to love me, but why won’t it?
The problem is that we should exert more energy in learning to love others the way we wish to be loved, just like the old saying, “treat others the way you wish to be treated.” Instead we only crave to be loved, that being our only concern.
If we learn to love others first, we may have a chance at experiencing true love without having to go through hell and back. Many relationships can be based on deception or just an illusion, because that other person isn’t being completely honest and is in it to gain.
You will know you’re truly in love when you know there is nothing to gain in the relationship; you just want that individual’s genuine love and nothing more.
So the question goes: Why do so many of us lose at this game called love? The reason why is that we need to become selfless in love, which is something not seen too often. More often than not, we see relationships resulting in broken hearts, which is the unfortunate reality. By no means am I saying stop loving yourself. Just make sure you have that person’s best interest at heart if you really love him or her, and hopefully the feeling is mutual, thus constituting the definition of real love.
Some of us can’t move on from a love that once captivated our hearts in the past and find it hard to move on from that. Moving on is hard to do, but we do it all the time without even realizing it sometimes as we grow and learn from our past. We leave all kinds of things behind in life, like jobs, relationships, friends, homes, schools, and so on and so forth, but does this mean that we have really walked away from things? Just because we’ve walked away from it doesn’t mean that we have let it go for good.
More than likely you’re carrying what you thought you left behind, or what you want or meant to leave behind. Sometimes it gets so hard to walk away and leave things where they are-broken. Sometimes we just have to grieve and pray that things will be okay in the end, and most times they will be, even when you feel that love isn’t on your side.
If true love still hasn’t been found for you and you are reading this article, give it time. You’re still young and have a lifetime to love ahead of you (or let’s hope so). Understand that there are a lot of people in this world, and trying to find your “missing puzzle piece” in a world with six billion people is going to be a challenge; I mean that’s six billion different personalities and possibilities! Be patient and love will find you.
Just remember that in order to be loved, you must learn to love first!