Self-Love Insight
What We Get Wrong About Love
5 insights that helped me to finally feel loved
What I loved most about ‘my’ man back in 2001 was that he told me at least once a day that he loved me.
Every time I heard the longed-for words, I felt a relief.
Without knowing I was loved, I’d feel like an empty well in desperate need of filling. Not feeling loved was my greatest pain since the beginning of my life, and I longed for someone to come along and fill it for me.
Every ‘I Love You’ was another drop into my starved heart. At least, that is what I thought.
But then I started wondering why I still didn’t feel loved. That’s when my investigations began.
How could I feel loved when I was constantly looking for it?
All the love I received didn’t fill my heart. It couldn’t.
In the same way, the street lights outside my house can’t light up my living room.
My need for love was so huge that I couldn’t access my own love. The need blocked it.
All I knew was lack, pain, and desperation.
I had to do something to help myself. So I looked outside to fill my empty well. It’s usually the first thing we do.
This feeling kept drawing people to me who also did not love themselves. This gave me the opportunity to work out my misguiding perceptions and let them go.
Our unhappy relationship was, in fact, a blessing in disguise.
Why it was hard to end my unhappy relationship
We both felt immense love for each other. It felt special, we hadn’t had anything like this before. But our external circumstances were not working for us.
We tried twice to part in the 6 years we were together. But we failed. We simply couldn’t end our love affair just like that.
Because the love we were feeling was happening on a soul level.
We had been in a close relationship before in a past life as priest and priestess. But because we couldn’t be physically intimate then, we built up a tangible tension that felt like electricity.
It was the first thing we both sensed when we met during a pompous fireworks display on Bonfire Night in 2001 at the local playing fields.
I never felt anything like that before or since. A palpable stream of intense energy pulled us together as we watched the sparkling lights ascend into the pitch-black night sky, casting a mesmerising glow around us.
When love doesn’t win
I stayed with him for so long because I couldn’t leave and because I wanted love to win. I was putting up with crappy behaviours, all for the pure Love I knew we once had.
But our Love did not win. Instead, I learned to love myself.
The setup for my learning was ‘perfect’. He was still married, so we couldn’t be together anyway. All the love we had for each other helped us to learn.
But the circumstances were not ideal for our human selves. He needed financial safety which he wouldn’t have with me. And I wanted a man who is emotionally strong, aware of his inner strength and worked on his self-development.
Because our human desires and preferences were not met, we had no chance to turn our love into a blooming relationship.
And I thought all we needed was love.
But all we need is to love ourselves and reconnect with our true Self, then Love always wins.
If you want to be with a partner who can stand on their own feet, you need to be the perfect mate to yourself first.
What happens when love does not last?
What we get wrong as human beings loving each other, is that we think we love our partners. We love them from a place of mental delight.
When we draw a heart onto a steamed-up window, our hearts are full of love for our sweetheart.
But where does this love come from? We never ask that question!
Does it come from thoughts like ‘I love him so much, I can't be without him’?
Or does it come from an inner stillness that is simply present, that doesn’t speak?
To be true to ourselves, it is essential to notice what we create with our desires or wants versus what is simply present in our beings.
We cherish our partners because they give us what we want.
We love something about them. We love them based on a condition.
Maybe it's his intellect, his ability to argue well or the multitalented brilliance in everything to do with building, repairing and engineering.
Maybe it's her beauty, her clear mind, her wisdom, or her love for dancing that you share.
Do the test: Put your hands over your heart and honestly ask yourself, ‘Do I love my partner?’ Why do I love him/her? What do you get?
It can take a few weeks to be clear about the answer because there is often a lot of ego wanting in the way. You feel it when you arrive at the truth.
You can not manufacture the truth. It simply is.
True unconditional Love feels different
I've felt true love flowing between me and others at a few rare and special times.
These meetings were brief encounters. A deep, meaningful conversion, a truly loving hug, or a 15-minute Tango where I could feel the essence of Love creating a truly magical experience that opened my heart.
There was nothing I had to do. That is true Love.
We might feel this magical Love is unattainable because we’ve tried to get it. That’s where we go ‘wrong’. We want it.
We have to stop wanting something from our beloved because that is not true Love. That is the ego’s need.
True Love opens its heart to someone on its own, we do not do that.
What we get wrong about Love is:
- We think we feel love when certain conditions we desire are fulfilled.
- True Love is not an emotion that comes and goes.
- True Love is always present as a deep inner stillness in our hearts.
- We don’t need to get love from anybody because we are Love with ‘L’.
- True Love is the essence of our being, the part of God in us, hence I spell it with a capital ‘L’.
This story was inspired by Brendan Charles who invited me to write something controversial like “What people get wrong about love”. Thanks for the prompt, Brendan.
