Learning to love makes our expectations more realistic and our actions more committed. Loving is an art and as such requires commitment and dedication.
Last update: December 25, 2022
Knowing how to love is an art that requires work on oneself, experience and good will. Because sometimes, even if there is love, the quality of this feeling is not adequate. There are loves and loves. Some manage to transform our lives positively and forever. Others are a torment, temporary or lasting. Still others survive only out of habit and bring nothing good into our lives.
Mature love is healthy in the broad sense of the term. It significantly enriches the lives of those involved and contributes to their development and growth.
"There is only one remedy for love: to love more."
-Henry D. Thoreau-
Knowing how to love means recognizing the limits of one report and having achieved a certain individual balance. We must also learn to give up impossible desires and romantic fantasies. In this article, we present seven valuable lessons that teach us how to love.
7 lessons to know how to love
1. The same experience, different people
Knowing how to love means first of all understanding that each person is a universe unto itself. In love, especially that of a couple, sometimes there is an inordinate desire for mutual identification.
However, even if two people share the same experience, each sees and deals with it differently. This diversity teaches us that two people can never act as one, but continue to be two separate individuals. This is not bad: indeed, it is positive and normal.
2. People change
Everyone has a basic personality, which usually remains unchanged in its essence from childhood to old age. Nevertheless, we constantly change as a function of time, of experiences, events, etc.
Knowing how to love means understanding this; that is, to accept that we will probably have to learn to love the same person again. The father does this with his son who was first a child and then becomes a teenager. In the couple, the idealized person becomes real and you have to fall in love with him again. This is how it works.
3. Taking care of yourself is a way to think about others
The first love that needs to be strengthened is that of oneself. To know how to love others, you first need to be at peace and balance with yourself. This involves being aware of who we are, what we want and what we deserve.
Everything we do for ourselves we do for others as well. If we are at peace with ourselves, we can give peace. If we feel good, we can more easily accept others. If we take care of ourselves, we take care of the bonds with others.
4. Knowing how to love means protecting privacy
Today, with social networks, everyone wants to be seen, to show others their life and it is thought that it is normal to do so. There is also too much haste, especially in relationships, to get intimate with each other.
In reverse, we should protect the very private or vulnerable aspects of our life. Knowing how to love also means having patience and waiting for the bonds to intensify and for the field of intimacy to expand by itself.
5. Everyone fights their own battles
It is said that each person "carries his own cross". While it may be a bit of a dramatic way of looking at it, it's essentially true. We never fully understand the difficulties a person faces everyday.
What we can do, however, is to understand that everyone faces their own difficulties and that this generates tensions and conflicts. It is not necessary for the other to explain his discomfort and his emptiness to us to understand it, because it is not pleasant at all.
6. Knowing how to love means understanding that there is no equality in relationships
Human relations are not commercial contracts which imply total fairness in all circumstances. Quite the opposite. The predominant note is asymmetry, inequality.
There are times when one gives more than the other and then the opposite happens. For this reason, when we give something we cannot expect it to be returned to us in the same proportion. To love is to give the best of oneself and to accept what the other can and wants to give us.
7. Learn to say goodbye
Every love relationship ends at some point. The presence of other people in our life is always transitory. Sooner or later, and for various reasons, there will be a time when we will no longer be able to have them next to us.
Then, it is important to learn how to say goodbye to your loved one. The resulting pain is not resolved by avoiding other bonds of love or by trying to perpetuate them in an irrational way. Losing who we love is a reality from which no one escapes and it is important to learn to accept it.
Conclusions
Those presented in this article are simple guidelines to be taken as such and not as absolute and definitive rules. Just try to follow them, even if we don't succeed one hundred percent. Knowing how to love is also this: improve and make those around us better.
