Something about LOVE

What is love? Well, this is a very gigantic topic…. Countless books have written on it, songs and poems sing about it… everyone seems to have a different opinion of it. Well, this is my perspective of it after 10 years of marriage. I’m still learning of course and I’m sure if I were to write about it again 10 years later, my perspectives may change as well but learning is a dynamic process and we can only grasp what we are mentally ready for at the moment. I hope you will be able to identify with some of the things I’d like to share.

Theoretically, there are many kinds of love – love between a person and God, love in a family, love between friends, love between a man and a woman, and other ways of categorizing love. I’m not going to dissect love theoretically but I’ll talk about it through practical experiences.

1. How do we love ourselves?

To know what love is, try starting by looking at how we treat ourselves. When you see a photo of a group of people that includes you, who do you look for at first? I think many, if not all of us, will look at ourselves first. We’ll want to check if we look presentable, is our hair in place, are our pimples visible, do we look fat or short, are our clothes right, etc….? We are naturally watching out for someone – that someone is “me”, which means we love ourselves the most. The exception may be when we are in love or having a crush on someone else then perhaps we’ll look at that other person first… so we think we love another person more than ourselves. Well, it may happen for a while but do you know of anybody who can do that for a lifetime? I think eventually, we’ll go back to looking at ourselves. If there’s anybody whom we can love for a lifetime, it’s going to be ourselves.

How do we love ourselves? We listen to our needs. If we’re hungry, we feed ourselves, if we’re tired, we rest. When we’re bored, we amuse and entertain ourselves. When we don’t like something, we rebel to protect ourselves. When we’re unhappy, we look for ways to feel better. We’re constantly trying to improve ourselves; we practice games and hobbies that enable us to be good at something. We feel proud and good when we achieve high performance in something. When we fail, we feel down but we try to console ourselves or allow others to console us so that eventually we’ll be able to try again. We don’t easily give up on ourselves. No matter how tough life is, we’ll try our best to ensure our own survival. We don’t just do this for ourselves for one week, one month, one year, or ten years only, we’ll do it for our entire lifetime until our very last breath. Can anyone of us honestly say that we can do all that for another person? I can’t and I would admit that I love myself the most. We are all naturally born to do that. If not, we won’t survive.

I must add here that there are people who have stopped loving themselves. Somehow, some experiences have made them start to hate themselves. This is of course very sad, because when someone really stops loving themselves and even hate themselves, they will die. If we don’t love ourselves and do not have any reason to love others then the only thought would be to die. Why live? The end of love is death. If we don’t love ourselves anymore, we won’t feed ourselves. We’ll hate our bodies. If we don’t love someone else anymore, the relationship ends. When we don’t love a sport or a study or a hobby, that pastime ends. Full stop. The end of love is death.

2. LOVE is loving others as we love ourselves

Christianity teaches “love others as you love yourself”. Buddhism may have a saying that goes “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you”. There is a lot of truth in these sayings. To test whether we love another person, all we have to do is to check whether we are able to share our “first place” with another person. If a house has only one toilet available and you and your brother both have a bad tummy ache and need to “go”, who will go in first? Will you fight for that privilege? A mother will let her child go first. This is a demonstration of love. If we have a favorite movie on TV and another person has another favorite movie to watch on the same TV, would we give in? If yes, how many times are we able to give in? How “stretchable” is our love? Are we willing to use our time for others instead of for ourselves, say give up an exciting football game to have dinner with someone? Now, we might be able to say yes to some of these things to some people for a short while, but if we’re honest, we’ll realize that we cannot say yes for a long time.

There’s a saying that goes “charity begins at home”. The best test is our own brothers and sisters. They are people we grow up with for most of our lives, for good and for bad. Are we able to give them first priority frequently? I think we get tired with giving them first privilege. We don’t get tired with giving ourselves first privilege, but we’ll get tired of giving others first privilege. This brings me back to a very important point – we love ourselves the most. When we fall in love with another person, we think we’ll be able to give up ourselves for the other person, but that is an incorrect estimation of ourselves. Eventually, people will return to loving themselves more and then the relationship will die. It happens very frequently.

It happens because we love ourselves too much. This is where it gets very “chim” (deep)! First, we have to love ourselves. Second, we have to understand how we love ourselves. Third, we have to apply the way we love ourselves, they way we give ourselves first priority, to another person in order to love them. Fourth, the only way to love another person for a long time or a lifetime is to begin to slowly let go of loving ourselves too much. If we don’t let go of our own priority, how to give another person priority? The fourth one is the hardest to do, but it is the most beautiful. Have you seen a mother give up her privilege, her life for her children? Love is the greatest gift we can give to another. It involves giving up ourselves but strangely, it has very high returns. The feeling to see someone else grow, benefit, receive joy because of your gift of love is inexpressible. No amount of money can buy it, it may come through pain and suffering, but you would do it all over again. It is the richest moment in life.


3. There is no such thing as conditional love

Those of us who have done computer programming will understand the concept of conditions: “IF….. THEN……., ELSE………..” Does love have conditions? If you love me, I will love you, else, too bad. If you’ll sleep with me, then I’ll know you love me, else, you don’t love me. If you give this up for me, I’ll give this up for you, else it won’t work. If you obey me, then I’ll reward you, else you won’t receive my approval. If you do well, I’ll love you, else you’re nothing. Do we say these things to ourselves or do we say it to others?

I don’t think we’ll reject ourselves even when we don’t fulfill our own requirements. We don’t reject ourselves when we’re not looking very nice, we see how we can improve. We don’t reject ourselves when we did poorly in something, we try again. We don’t reject ourselves when we did something wrong like blow out in anger, say the wrong things, did some very bad things, etc. Somehow, slowly we find ways to forgive ourselves and work towards a better outcome. Like I said, very few of us give up on ourselves no matter how frequently and badly we mess up our own lives. We hold on, because we love ourselves. We have standards for ourselves, standards to help us improve, but our love for ourselves is not conditional, it can overcome almost all failures. Love keeps trying.

Real love for others is not conditional either. If we really love someone, we would love them regardless of whether they love us in return or not. A parent would love their children even if their children reject them. They will wait, for a point of return. Divorce happens because of conditional love. If love is conditional, it can never last. No human is perfect; there will always be failures to fulfill a condition. Some people fail more than others but everybody fails some time. If we limit love to 3 times of failure, 3 chances only, then how can it last? Love is patient, even for a lifetime. That’s how we love ourselves. Can we love others like that? The fact is, not many people can answer yes. There are parents who have conditional love too. It is very painful when there is conditional love because conditional love is not real love. It causes pain. It cannot last.

However, if any of us have received unconditional love, we will know how precious and beautiful it is. When we have done something wrong, say sneak out our parent’s car, accidentally crashed it and our parents forgive us and are more concerned about our safety, how does that make us feel? When a man cheats on his wife, his wife finds out and there is a lot of hurt, but in the end she is willing to forgive and she does not hold that against him, how would he feel? When we accuse someone of doing something wrong but find out later that they are innocent and they forgive and still treat us well, how does that make us feel? Some people can take this unconditional love for granted and keep on hurting others but I believe, when the time is right, they may realize how much sacrifice has been made for them. When they come to that point, they will repent and want to love in return. Those of us who have very unconditional and loving mothers and fathers will know that their love causes us to want to love in return. There is no greater force and motivation to love as unconditional love. If we cannot recognize unconditional love or to respond to it then it means that our hearts are hardened and our soul is dead.

Can we love others unconditionally? If we cannot, then we cannot say we have love at all. Selfish love is not love at all. It is evil in disguise. Evil is a strong word but the more honest we are with ourselves, the better the chances of learning the correct thing. If we’re not honest with ourselves, we’ll always blame others and situations when our relationships fail. The truth is, love is a choice from within our hearts. Nobody and nothing can take that away without our own consent. Unconditional love is very difficult because as mentioned earlier, we love ourselves too much. We want others to make us happy before we can love them in return. To love unconditionally, we have to put others’ interest before ourselves. Their well-being becomes more important than our well-being.

Is it worth it to love this way? Well, you’ll never know if you never try, but I think it is very sad for a person to live his entire life loving only one person, that is himself. A person who divorces and marries many times in life demonstrates only one thing – he doesn’t know how to love anybody else but himself. Actually, he has never known real love at all. If you know love, you’ll know how to make it last.

Relationships are the training ground for love. We learn to love in the context of our own family, then we expand it to friends and sometimes to strangers. Some of us learn about love through marriage and having our own children. All these people in our lives give us the opportunity to grow in love. We learn how give up our own priority, we learn how to forgive and to accept forgiveness, we learn how to be patient and persevere even through tough times. If we run away or keep changing partners when things are not smooth, then we’ll learn nothing. Be careful to recognize what is real love and what is counterfeit love. “Sex is love”, “Size is important”, “Outward beauty brings love”, “Image brings recognition”, “Money buys love” are all counterfeits. Counterfeit love is everywhere … it will cause relationships to die. If we don’t learn the real thing, our lives will be ONE BIG LIE.