What is love?
On pondering the above question, Haddaway’s hit song from 1993 came to mind, it goes like this: “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me, no more..”
Remember that song?
We all experience love differently based on what we experienced about it in our youth, from our parents, grandparents, friends, schooling, our local environment but also we learn about love in the big wide world from the media. And anything else that infiltrates our eyes, ears and subtle awareness.
Does love hurt? Well my truth at least, is that yes, love did hurt for most of my life, up until my turning point of transformation five years ago. I had a confusing taste of what love meant growing up and I think most of us do. We only realise this with hindsight, when we are forced into situations that confront our deeply embedded and unexamined childhoods and belief systems that got rooted and embedded there.
In our culture, love is often transactional, you do this or be this and I’ll be this. Fulfil my wishes, my desires, make up for what I lack, complete me, be my better half (so I don’t have to change or meet certain needs within myself) wear a nice shirt for me, put on this dress for me, be a certain way for me. Make ME happy, fulfil my expectations. ‘Love’ is often comfortable, profitable and when it isn’t anymore, it hurts and it’s over. Is that love?
I think to really love, we must be willing to surrender. The personality being too needy and self-serving in the midst,makes love conditional. And I don’t think there is love and conditional love.
There is just love and the other is a selfish ‘kind’ of love, as Michael Jackson sang in Man in the Mirror, “I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love, it’s time that I realised.”
Rabbi Abraham Twerski says that, “So much of what is love, is fish love.” He gives the following description, “Young man, why are you eating that fish?” The young man says, “Because I love fish.” “Oh, you love the fish? That’s why you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it.” He says, “Don’t tell me you love the fish, you love yourself. And because the fish tastes good to you–therefore you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it.”
So I learned about selfish love, I watched and copied as children do. But as a very young child of six years old, I also knew what unconditional love was and I didn’t learn this from adults.
The love I experienced as the most gentle, real, kind and patient was from my cat, Footsie. I didn’t have to be a certain way for her, she had no expectations of me. She came to me and put her paws around my neck every night when I was in my bunk bed, her head nestled between my shoulder and chin. This was where I felt really loved and knew pure, unconditional love.
The fact that as a society we love selfishly, points to our selfishness on an individual level. It is not our fault, we have copied our elders and inherited dysfunctional patterns from those who came before us but we can change, we must change. If we can’t unconditionally love others, it means we aren’t unconditionally loving ourselves, first. And that’s where it needs to start and where we can go to work. As ever, if we wish to change anything in the world, we need to start firstly, with ourselves.
Sarah is a Transformational Coach helping fellow humans to transform their suffering into living magical lives with inner freedom, inner power and inner joy.
