8 Things You Should Know About True Love
To love means to truly know, recognize and assume that people have as many flaws as they have virtues, that some customs may make us uncomfortable, that not everything is a bed of roses and we don’t live in fairy-tale.
No, true love is something that goes beyond loving coincidences. Sincere and true loving is intensely falling in love with the differences. It means to be tolerant of what makes the other person uncomfortable and opening the doors to trust.
You can’t say you truly care for someone until you know their demons, rage, anger and contradictions. When you truly love, you understand that a relationship isn’t all beauty. There’s also chaos and, with it, dynamite.
To sum up, loving means to coexist with each other while taking care of various details, building puzzles and castles of hopes and disappointments in the air. If we understand this, we’ll know the true value of permanence, that some feelings do last, that you don’t just use and discard them.
Keys to nourish a healthy relationship
To truly love is a great challenge. A first step is getting rid of all of those assumptions that keep us from seeing the realities of love. Therefore, we should have certain premises very clear. These will help us know what true love is.
1. Fall in love with yourself and life itself, then fall for whoever you want
To care for someone without dependence or necessity you need to value yourself first. That means that in order to say “I love you,” you must first say “I love myself.” Self-love and self-knowledge are the keys to generating healthy relationships.
To summarize, to find the right person we should prepare ourselves for a relationship. This implies inner work that can be costly but that will have great benefits.
“If love were a tree, the roots would be your self-love. The more you love yourself, the more fruits your love will give to others and the more it’ll last.”
-Walter Riso-
2. Love without conditions or exceptions
It’s natural and normal that you won’t like everything about your partner. However, the differences make love beautiful and complete. If we only care for that which we like or the way we idealize things, the love won’t be able to last since we’re all beings filled with lights and shadows.
3. Loving is not needing, it’s preferring
Dependence and caring are so at odds that if we force them to coexist, they destroy each other. Nobody has the responsibility to fill in what we’re missing. When our love is based on preference instead of need, we value our partner them for who they are and not what they provide for us.
This point is closely linked to the first one; that is to say, we need to work on and take care of ourselves to not fall into having the “need” of someone covering our wounds and eliminating our faults. That’s why, the key to true love lies within ourselves.
4. Being the perfect couple doesn’t mean not having problems, but rather knowing how to solve them
Sometimes we make the mistake of believing that for love to work the relationship needs to not have any problems, no arguing. That we need to understand each other 100%. However, caring means facing the good and the bad without any type of anesthesia. You need to face reality just how it is and resolve your problems through respect, compromise and stability.
5. Love doesn’t grow out of nowhere, it’s built
In order to build love, you need to form a team and establish the rules of the game. In order to get in the game you should know that communication, sincere listening, empathy and open dialogues are necessary.
6. To love fully, you should establish you emotional limits
A healthy relationship isn’t founded on power games or conditions. It’s founded on joint, balanced and healthy purposes. So, we should rid ourselves of the idea that caring implies sacrifice.
There are certain things that we shouldn’t tolerate such as abuse, betrayal, emotional manipulation, or abuse of our values. All of them are based on lack of respect and caring, so rejecting it means not pushing our emotional limits.
7. True love doesn’t demand, it offers
Caring isn’t control or demands, it’s liberty and trust. Despite this, emotional slavery is much more common than we like to recognize.
That’s why we need to eliminate victimism and reproaches that try to justify bad actions or words. This type of behavior keeps us trapped in a negative spiral that nourishes our relationship with darkness, distrust and false expectations.
Likewise, if you have to sacrifice part of yourself and your life to be with someone, then that love is diminished. Loving is based on the respect and individual growth of each of the members of the relationship.
If love hurts, that means it’s not true. We’re confusing feelings and destroying ourselves. So, if you’re drowning, it’s time to come up for some air. We shouldn’t have to change in other fit with our partner. Instead, maybe we just haven’t found a shoe our size. If the relationship brings you sorrow, the best thing to do is let go.