Love is a Startup!

Welcome to our journey!

It’s December 31st2014. I am sitting in the plane from Düsseldorf to Marrakech. Today I will propose to the woman I love. And she has no clue that I am coming over. She is expecting my instructions for a shared day of surprises arranged via SMS to celebrate the new year together from a distance — when really I couldn’t be any closer. My messages will guide her straight into my arms. And by dawn our love would find the promise of eternity manifested in a beautiful white-gold ring with a crown of diamonds. The materialization of something we both already knew. My heart is full of love and satisfied calm. It has been a long way until here.

“We have not come to take but to give the world all of us.”

Since she washed my head and heart with unconditional love I see life so much more clearly. I humbly trusted her to turn me into my best self every day and encouraged her to pursue her dreams. This blog is a big shared dream of ours coming true. Sharing our journey with you. If we learned one thing together it is that real love means that hard work pays off. I would even go so far as to say that the single biggest reason that many people stop developing towards their dreams sooner or later is that they don’t truly embrace that big changes come with the pain of re-birth, the shedding of old skin, the death of a self-sustained perception of self. When we change, we overcome the magnetic forces of our past, our habits and those who know us and want us to stay — so we might remain in the drawers we were forcefully placed in. We human beings, we are conditioned to seek our identity and confirm it so we might have a quiet life without self-questioning. Yet, is it what we strive for? Our need for security guides us to holding on to material things — when really their worth has always been limited by the meaning we give to them. And so our search for meaning must return to the core of our lives, the spirit, for we have not come to take but to give the world all of us. And love is the best starting point. Love is giving someone our best self every single day.

“Our way back to intuition. The essential is invisible to the eye. “

I wonder when it was that we lost our intuition. Today we are trying to get our work-life balance in place when really the separation of work and life in the term alone is a clear indicator that something has gone so very wrong. It is when we are out of balance that we try to separate things and mechanically break them down with our rationale when some things in life can only be seen rightly with the heart as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it beautifully. The essential is invisible to the eye. Yet, we place our logic over anything and cause nothing but confusion. Take music for example. We do not logically derive what songs we like. It is a highly intuitive act. In fact, some 90% of all songs must either be about or inspired by love and I bet the same applies for your favourites. The day where a song about a company exit hits the charts is yet to come and it hopefully never will. Yet, we are starting to treat love like a garbage dump for the meaning we cannot extract from our jobs & careers when it really should be a holy blessing. We must not forget that love and work have always been complementary sources of energy for us — not substitutable ones. We want love to give us everything we want but at no cost, at no investment. But to put it with the words of an investment banker: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Love needs the right ingredients, a great cook and a timely preparation and tastes best with a dash of humility and gratefulness. And all of that better be learned.

“We believe love is best treated with the same seriousness we are treating work today.”

We want everyone to get and stay in love. Truly. Deeply. Eternally. And you better fall into it and get lost for a while, because chances are — you’re not really there if its all too comfortable. Why is it that we go to school for years, we study for years, get up at 6am each day, we spend days designing our CV and writing an application, travelling to interviews just to get our work life started and then we think all it needs to make a tick behind our love box is a tinder date with a rose and no chance to get to know one another without a pre-defined destination. We can all continue lying to ourselves in one form or another, but a shiny label social label à la “in a relationship” will neither bring us clarity nor fulfilment. We believe love is best treated with the same seriousness we are treating work today and it’s about time we get back there.

“There are huge opportunity costs to not getting married or settle when you are young.”

Yes, I hear the questions. How do I know she is the right one? How do I know he’s serious? Well, love is a candid undertaking that demands courage, vulnerability and the will to get disappointed. For those who haven’t settled yet and don’t know if they have the right partner. You can only know if you fully and wholeheartedly try. This is also for those who laugh about displays of love on facebook or don’t want to see them. This is not a competition and creating a loving relationship and showing affection is anything but a sign of weakness or softness. In fact this is a subject to complex and difficult, we better start helping each other do our homework. A healthy couple is always two individual worlds meeting on the inside and a unity to the outside. This is its identity. Isn’t it also calming to know there’s still love in a world whose news are reigned by the catastrophes. This is also for the ones who don’t want to decide because they want to keep believing that keeping all options open is the single best new way of life. You make up your own mind and use our blog to reflect. Be aware that there are huge opportunity costs to not getting married or settle when you are young and also to treating your body like a burger store. Variety nearly always comes at the cost of depth and our life is too big of a gift to live it at the surface. I want Imane to feel like she can pour all her love over me without fear, to show me my weakest spots and guide me out of them, to look at her when I am a hundred years old and know that she still sees in me the young naïve man I am today amongst so many other beautiful things. I have lived this transition and I have arrived — just to continue walking that path and know it is all I will ever do. I wish you the same, knowing that love is of the same sweet complexity as life itself. It will keep us wondering and discovering. This is why this blog is just as much for anyone who has found love and wants to live it fully, get inspired and enter into a dialogue with us. After all, this blog shall also get those talking who have already found and those who are still seeking — so they may share their experience.

“Love is the best new year resolution — any time.”

It’s a new year and before we make lists of priorities that we will all forget or we try to fix our life at the wrong spots, let me lay down why I believe love is the best starting point from which to pursue most goals. There are many things we are drifting away from in favour of a new world that creates itself from a lazy place of self-sustained comfort. We have lost touch with many things that have ever since given us roots in life. We are losing the feeling for where our food comes from and the appreciation of animals dying to nourish us. We are losing our connection to nature. We are losing our ability to recreate naturally. We are too stuck with ourselves so we lose our ability to shape society positively by interpreting tolerance as “anything goes” — in absence of respect and values that have been acquired over centuries. We are losing our spiritual selves through the demise and devaluation of religious practices in the western world. We are losing our sense of right and wrong and thereby our ability to equip our children well for the life that awaits them. We are losing our appreciation for mothers being the first school of their children so that genders start to compete in the work place. When Imane tells me she will show our little babies how to live — I get jealous. We are also losing the the meaning of life for elderly people as the first generations grow up away from their parents. And so all the generations have their challenges.

This is not a manifest of going back to the middle ages, but going back to the heart. Because if we get the core right — as opposed to just learning situation-specific behaviours — we are able to act flexibly upon any challenge that is placed in front of us. It is then that we can separate circumstance from substance. And it all starts at the heart. It starts when we dare to trust. When we dare to be vulnerable. When we stand up for ourselves. When we call it a working day to proudly go home without apologizing.When we overcome our egos. When we are forgiving and keep on giving. When we are all in and scared if it will work. When we dare to jump.

- To Imane and me love is the startup of our dreams. The one we found, spend sleepless nights with and never want to exit. Welcome to our journey! Let’s jump in. –

Wishing you all a year full of love,

Oliver

P.S. Anything I write here is thanks to the woman who turned me around in just a little more than year. Behind every strong man, there is a strong woman. Behind every strong woman, there is a strong man.

About The Author

Oliver