Real Love

Valentine Day is just around the corner.

This is a time for romance, love, passion, happiness and dare I say it….. Letting Cupid’s arrows find your heart and flinging a few arrows around yourself.

One of the most important aspects of love is that it cannot be one sided…you cant expect to be loved if you don’t love in return and it really doesn’t work unless it is mutual. Love flourishes when it is reciprocated, when it is returned with passion, affection, fun, respect and intensity.

My cousin Barbara hit the nail on the head when she recently wrote about her relationship with Bruce (I do have Barbara’s permission to reproduce this!):

“Another blessing in my life is my wonderful partnership with my heartner Bruce…we are very happily unmarried! Since we started our relationship 6½ years ago, my experience of life has intensified in countless interesting and learningfilled ways. I have reached the conclusion that it is a rare thing to be appreciated and loved as much as he does me. I am constantly in awe of the power of a love that is given and received freely without conditions attached. Long may it last!”

Doesn’t that give you goosebumps.

Please don’t kill Cupid. Don’t attach terms & conditions to your love. You cant resent love if it’s not returned or has conditions; don’t squander and waste your love on someone who can’t or won’t return it.…..

I am reminded again of this extract from: The Reason of Things, Living with Philosophy by A C Grayling (I have published it before on Happiness Soup)

“… if one is frugal with one’s emotions – limiting love in order to avoid its pains, stifling appetites and desires in order to escape the price of their fulfillment – one lives a stunted, muffled, bland life only. It is practically tantamount to a partial death in order to minimize the electric character of existence – its pleasures, its ecstasies, its richness and colour, matched by its agonies, its wretchedness, its disasters and grief. To take life in armfuls, to embrace and accept it, to leap into it with energy and relish, is of course to invite trouble of all familiar kinds. But the cost of avoiding trouble is a terrible one: it is the cost of having trodden the planet for humanity’s brief allotment of less than a thousand months, without really having lived.”