Seven Lessons on How to Love
Here are some lessons on how to love. We decided to share them because love is an art that requires self-introspection and self-improvement, along with experience and goodwill. This is because the quality of love varies from person to person. Some people love to love. Some types of love can transform lives positively and forever. Other types of love torment people and might be fleeting and enduring. Then, there are the types of love people feed mainly due to habit but don’t really make a difference in their lives one way or another.
An evolved mature love is healthy in the broad sense of the word. It significantly enriches the lives of those involved and contributes to their development and expansion.
Knowing how to love implies recognizing the limits of a relationship and loving after reaching a certain level of individual balance. Also, it’s about learning to give up impossible desires and romantic fantasies.
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
-Henry D. Thoreau-
Seven lessons on how to love
1. The same experience can lead to different perspectives
The first of the lessons on knowing how to love is to understand that everyone is unique. Love, especially the romantic type, often arrives with a strong desire for mutual identification.
However, every person sees and assimilates love differently even when they share the same experience. That diversity makes it clear that two people aren’t one, but separate individuals. This isn’t bad, only positive and normal.
2. Knowing that people change is one of the lessons on how to love
People have a basic personality structure and its essence usually stays the same throughout their transition from childhood to old age. Despite this, humans are constantly changing depending on their era, experiences, and learning opportunities, among other things.
To know how to love is to understand and accept that you’ll have to relearn how to love the same person. A father does it with his son who was formerly a child and later an adolescent. In couples, the idealized being becomes a real person and it’s necessary to fall in love with them all over again. This is how love works.
3. Taking care of yourself is a way of caring about others
The first love that must be strengthened is the one you have for yourself. In order to know how to love others, you must be in relative peace and balance with yourself. This is how you become aware of who you are, what you want, and what you deserve.
Everything you do for yourself, you also do for others. If you’re at peace, you can give peace. If you feel good about who you are, you can easily accept others. Finally, if you take care of yourself, you can take care of your connection with others.
4. Protecting one another’s privacy, one of the lessons on how to love
Currently, there’s a collective desire for exposure. Many people want to show their personal lives to a large audience and feel it’s valid to do so. Also, there’s too much haste to become intimate with one other, especially in romantic relationships.
Those private or vulnerable aspects of your life should be protected a little more. Knowing how to love is also having patience. Only time can strengthen the ties and expand the field of intimacy.
5. Everyone must fight their own battles
Everyone has their own burden to carry. And even though it may be a bit of a dramatic way of looking at it, it’s true in essence. One can never fully understand the struggles another person goes through on a daily basis.
What you can do is take this into account to understand everyone has their own difficulties. Also, it generates tensions and conflicts. It isn’t necessary for others to explain their discomforts and gaps for you to understand it when it’s not as pleasant as it could be.
6. There’s no equality in relationships,
Human relationships aren’t commercial contracts that imply full equity in every circumstance. On the contrary, the predominant note is asymmetry and inequity. One can never attain full reciprocity.
There are times when a person gives more than the other and then the opposite occurs. Therefore, you can’t keep tabs on them and demand they correspond to you in the same proportion whenever you give them something. Knowing how to love is giving your best and accepting what the other can and wants to give you.
7. Knowing when to let go
All love relationships end at some point. The presence of other people in your life is always transitory. Sooner or later, and for various reasons, there comes a time when you no longer have their company.
Hence, it’s important to learn to say goodbye to those you love. The pain this implies isn’t resolved by avoiding the bonds of love, nor by trying to perpetuate them beyond reason. Losing what you love is a reality no one escapes from and everyone must learn to accept it.
These lessons for knowing how to love are mere guidelines. They should be taken as guides and not as standards. It’s enough to try to follow them, even if you don’t succeed one hundred percent. This is because loving is also the quest to become a better person and, also, improve the lives of those around you.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Fromm, E., & Rosenblatt, N. (2000). El arte de amar. São Paulo^ eSP SP: Martins Fontes.