What is Love?

Opening Insights: What is Love?

Society has taught us that you: FALL IN LOVE, YOU NEED TO FIND LOVE, YOU NEED TO FEEL LOVED, LOVE IS A HAPPY PLACE, LOVE IS BLISS, LOVE IS PLEASURE, LOVE IS WHAT LIFE SHOULD BE.  All but the last statement are false.

The biggest lie we have learn, is that love is a feeling and not a state.

Informational Insights: What’s the big deal, you may wonder?

Well, the problem is when we think and believe love to be a feeling and not a state, we live our lives at the mercy of what other people think, feel and believe about us, as our need for love is based on external validation rather than logical and practical choices.

Believing that love is a feeling, dis-empowers us and takes away our ability to choose who and what we value and love. When we base our lives on how we feel there is no logic or reasoning process behind why something or someone brings we joy, it is merely an impulse, a biological response and a chemical reaction. The experience while momentarily intense and satisfying will eventually fade like the sunset and if we are unable to place any real value on the experience beyond our feelings we just end up seeking the next feeling – we learn nothing.

Additionally, when love becomes a feeling, love becomes a never-ending quest for attention. When this happens, we learn that love is when people talk to us, at us, about us, see us and give attention to us whether it is good or bad.

WHEN LOVE BECOMES PAIN

I don’t care what you say about me,
as long as you say something about me,
and as long as you spell my name right.
GEORGE M. COHAN

Experiencing REAL and TRUE Love (the state of love) requires three elements:

• Attention – a process of not judging, but seeing things just as they are
• Respect – a process of not trying to change people, places, and things but accepting them as they are
• Appreciation – a process of not devaluing, but placing value on all of life’s gifts

When we learn that LOVE is only about “attention,” love becomes about what we feel  and what we can get, rather than who we are and what we have to give. When love is only about “attention” we become dependent on anyone for attention because we are searching for respect and appreciation… to be valued. We may find ourselves seeking relationships that are unhealthy or self-serving and wondering how we got into this mess again?

When this occurs, love becomes a disease, a disease of attention… and we become obsessed with being the center of attention. This results in situations where we find ourselves constantly seeking the approval and validation of others to affirm our existence and importance (good or bad):

• If we are driven by success we may seek to impress people, act bubbly and cheerful.
• If we are driven my failure we may seek to appear depressed, angry and look for ways to create chaos in people’s lives.

When we seek only attention, we have no respect or value for the participation or contribution of ourselves or others.

• When we experience no attention, respect or appreciation for ourselves, we bring no attention to ourselves and only seek the attention of others (as a surrogate for respect and appreciation).
• We objectify other people as we show them no respect or appreciation, but only momentary gratification for the attention we receive / feed off of.

When we are not the center of attention – receiving praise or the attention of others – we experience no respect or value for ourselves. Our participation and contribution is minimized and devalued by our minds, and we continue to seek our next attention fix to make us feel “important,” and “alive.”

This kind of love becomes painful.  In this situation, LOVE = PAIN.

Love in the form of attention becomes an addiction.

Love in the form of attention is a form of immaturity that affects and infects our minds and lives. It impacts our relationships with ourselves and others. Untreated, this addiction results in low self-esteem and the driving force of co-current addictions.

The ANSWER to this PROBLEM is clear:
we need to find a way to
unlearn love as we know it attention (feeling)
and re-learn love as it is (state).

Possibilities for Consideration: Must Have Structure

To effectively implement a solution, we need a structured process of unlearning, relearning and learning – a proven process that supports our cognitive and emotional development and maturity.  This process exists within the PWI Co-Lab community and process.