What is the definition of love? Complete that sentence in one word. Love is ____? Canāt think of anything can you? It's not that easy to define because love is invisible, timeless, and means different things to so many people. In fact, the thesaurus offered no words that could replace the word love fully in a sentence (i.e., affection was the closest word I found and that still doesnāt even come close to defining love, especially true love, the feel it in your soul kind of love).
The online dictionary's definition of love is: A strong feeling of affection and concern toward another person, as that arising from kinship or close friendship.
So even the online dictionary doesnāt limit love to being just a verb or an adjective because they canāt and that is because it is something we feel and that we do (or choose to do or not do). We are born from the act of making love, and of course most of us grow up looking for it from another person and some of us are lucky to find it once or even multiple times.
Most of us also take love for granted. The love we got daily as children from our mothers, fathers, grandparents and other elders who were our initial role models in this world most likely loved us so much that, because of that unconditional love, they were forced to teach us about hate and what we needed to fear. They taught us discipline and rules, thus making us resent them at times when things came up that made the rules breakable. Yes, of course they loved us but they taught us to self-protect and in the process, may have forgotten to teach us to self-love because they didnāt know how to self-love themselves. That is unfortunately a newer term but something everyone struggles with. Self-love isnāt selfish, it is very healthy and something we all need to be better at.
Maybe that is why as humans we are consistently in search of āthe oneā but have such a hard time finding him or her. If we canāt define love and we were never taught to love ourselves, how do we find āthe oneā to give love to? If we compare our lives to the love stories we see in the movies we are sure to be disappointed. Is it so unreal to think you canāt just meet āthe oneā and just know it? It happened to me. I knew I was meant to marry my ex-husband and even though it didnāt work out, I have no regrets and it surely wasnāt because we didnāt love each other. We always will in fact, but we also loved ourselves more, and enough to know that our differences just couldnāt be worked out. Sometimes that happens and thatās ok. Again, most likely not what most of us were taught. We were most likely taught the opposite.
You might say how can I love myself if I canāt even define love? Well that is a good question and I will give you the answer I give my kids when they ask me how they will know if the person they meet is āthe oneā. I always say make sure they are your best friend. Same with loving yourself. You really canāt love your best friend if you donāt love yourself. You decide to be good to yourself or not, you decide to make good choices for your body, your mind and your soul, so treat yourself the way you wanted to be treated. I know the adage is treat others the way you want to be treated, well that should be done too, but never at the sacrifice of the love for yourself.
Love is within. That is my definition of love in one word. Women especially must learn that self-love is truly within them and about them. Once you become all you need, you have so much more love to offer āthe oneā worthy of having it.