HOW TO LOVE GENUINELY

steemnaira (55)in #life • 7 years ago (edited)

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Good day guys. I want to share a knowledge I grabbed from watching an old monk on the television give words of advice to young couples and singles about love. Watching him speak, changed my perspective about love and has been able to change my life for the better.

I got to learn from him that the problem is always that we mistake the idea of love for attachment. We imagine that the grasping and clinging that we encounter in our relationships show that we love whereas actually it is just mere attachment which causes pain. It causes pain because the more we grasp, the more we are afraid to lose, and then if we do lose, then of course, we are going to suffer pain.

Attachment says; I love you and therefore I want you to make me happy. This is common with our attachment to physical things. You know when you get too attached to a thing, you wouldn’t want to let go because that thing gives you some kind of pleasure. A pleasure you don’t wana stop having. Basically, what we get attached to are things which serve to make us happy.

But genuine love says; I love you, therefore I want you to be happy. If that includes me, great. And if it doesn’t, then I don’t mind. I just want your happiness. That is what true and genuine love is all about. Genuine loves can be seen shown to even people we don’t know. It doesn’t ask for anything in return. It just gives.

Genuine love is an entirely different feeling. Attachment is like holding tight but genuine love is like holding very gently, nurturing and allowing things to flow and not to be held tightly. The more tightly we hold on to others, the more we will suffer pain because people are not reliable.

This concept is very difficult for people to understand because they think that the more they hold on to someone, the more it shows that they care about them. But it really doesn’t. it shows that they are only trying to grasp on to something because so they don’t lose it, otherwise, they themselves will be hurt.

Any kind of relationship which imagines that we can fulfil ourselves through another is bound to be very tricky. Ideally, people should come together already feeling fulfilled within themselves and just therefore appreciating that in the other person rather than expecting the other to supply that sense of well-being which they don’t feel on their own.

Another problem is that which deals with the projection that comes with romance, where we project all our ideas, ideals and desires and romantic fantasies unto the other which the other cannot possibly fulfil once you get to know them and then you recognize that it’s not prince charming or Cinderella, it’s just a very ordinary person who is also struggling to become a better person. And unless one is able to see, like and come to the understanding that we need to accept people just the way they are because that’s what genuine love does, then it’s going to be a very difficult relationship.

I hope you have learnt a thing or two from the words of this monk. Wonder what the world would look like if we all practiced genuine love?