But you can also find community in your neighbourhood , attend something regularly to build relationships, or recognise how your friends, family and colleagues all contribute to a kind of scattered village of people that understand varied parts of who you are. Throughout my life I've certainly experienced friendships that have followed a similar trajectory to some love stories — a frenzied meeting, a devising of future plans together, spending any free moment together, revealing secrets and fears, and gaining a deep understanding of each other that has grown over the years and decades.
But such connection doesn't have to come in the form of a life-long partner, or having a crowd of friends around you at all times — after all, we have all experienced a feeling of loneliness even while in company.
Rather, it's the quality of your close relationships that has an impact on your overall life satisfaction. A year study that tracked the work, home lives and health of individuals overwhelming found that people who are more socially connected to family, friends, and community are happier, physically healthier, and live longer than people who are less well connected.
You can be single and still have deep relationships and someone to share moments of your life with. Our relationships with other people shape our daily lives, as does our relationship with ourselves.
The things we love are an expression of that relationship with ourselves, and should be nurtured like any other. When we look for love only in the form of another person, in many ways love becomes out of our control — we can't make another person love us.
As Donald Kaufman says to his twin brother Charlie in the film Adaptation, "You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago. While Donald is referencing an unrequited romantic love, it can equally be applied to the things we love in our lives.
Being single has perhaps afforded me more time to dive into the things I love and build my own recipe for love. Personally, the moments I have felt the greatest sense of fulfilment — akin to feelings of lust and limerence — have been the moments of flow in my creative projects.
These moments of challenge and reward have felt like an expanding of the heart and mind. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, "The best moments in our lives usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile … For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves. For this type of love, I don't have to wait for someone else to come along or do metaphorical somersaults to attract it, I just have to love what I love and dive into it.
Like any type of love, though, there can also be heartbreak in this form of love. Just as we might look for another person to complete us, we can seek validation from our work in the form of external recognition, whether it's acclaim, prizes or accolades. Loving yourself means being less needy in a relationship and less demanding, leading to a much healthier relationship all around which is filled with even more — you guessed it — love.
So know why love is important, love yourself, and the rest, we promise, will fall in place. You will receive newsletter emails from time to time with what we believe is a valuable and interesting content. You will also receive exclusive offers, freebies, promotions and other fun and exciting news on all the ways how we can be here for you during YOUR very unique and special journey through life.
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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. Necessary Necessary. Hopefully, we begin our journey conceived in love. We are nurtured through parental love before growing up and finding our own romantic love and life partner or maybe multiple partners.
We may then create our own family so experiencing parental love as the caregiver and nurturer and thus the cycle endlessly perpetuates itself. We still have the enduring love of our parents whilst they remain alive and other family members such as siblings and grandparents. Love is at every turn. The proliferation of online dating sites indicates that those who are minus love in a romantic context feel hard done by and lonely. It seems that parental and sibling love and even the love of friends is not enough.
Immortalised in poetry, prose, songs and other media such as television and film, the journey to that one true love is as important now as it has ever been. True love, romantic love, real love, call it what you will is definitely the ultimate prize. And it is from this premier love, this optimal emotion, this love to end all loves, that everything else cascades down as it is this love which begets human life and propagates the human race giving rise to sibling love, parental love and more distant family love.
It is the spring of life and therein lies its inherent power and importance. The innate insecurity of love, rather perversely, is what makes it so desirable and the subject of such focus and this is one of the reasons why it is so powerful.
Not every fairytale encounter leads to a happy ending sadly. Taking something for granted can devalue its importance in our life, we all do it and it is only when it is denied us or taken away that we really appreciate the true value of what we had. Take our health as one example, unappreciated probably until it is challenged or something as simple as a good job or a lovely home and especially, a relationship.
In the early days of a new relationship, passionate love is insecure, not certain, not guaranteed. There is always that wonder, that question, does he or she feel the same way about me and, to the same degree? We are out of control to some degree and want a guarantee that we can have our next fix. But those initial romantic feelings are vulnerable and delicate, intense and compelling but never guaranteed. Something that is an ultimate to us as human beings but is not guaranteed is attributed a worth beyond all worths.
And there is something to be said for the scarcity value of real true love. Same sex love is hugely powerful because it has been fought for and hard-won in different societies where acceptance and tolerance have been a long slow battle. Some might say same sex love is even more powerful and important because it has had to undergo resistance, intolerance and even physical and verbal abuse throughout its passage to a more visible presence in society.
Being persecuted in one form or another seems to have made the prize even more worthy and coveted. It is a perversity of human nature that if something is illicit or illegal or even just frowned upon, it is somehow more attractive and sought after than if it were transparent and accepted. Same sex love has enjoyed something of this cachet which has imbued it with a power and significance which ironically might wane a little now that there are more openness and tolerance.
The fight for acceptance will transition into a more solid and open family love rather like that enjoyed by other members of society. Many people spend their entire lives on a quest for it. Anything that is rare and beautiful will always have mysticism and lure, like the visible lustre of an imperial Faberge Easter egg.
It is human instinct to want to reach out for the unattainable but it is important to be careful not to muddle up wanting a particular person with wanting the actual status and condition of love itself. The more desirable that person as well, the more people say how amazing he or she is, the more the kudos increases. It is well known in business and retail studies that scarcity functions like an obstacle which makes the pursuit of that particular goal or end product even more desirable.
Think Chanel or other designer brands. Does the fact that real, true love is not as common as would like to think it is mean that we crave it more just for this very fact?
It is a well-known selling device by retailers to create a perception of scarcity in order to drive up sales. Equally, offering eye-watering discounts is something many people feel they cannot miss out on even though they may not really want or need that item.
Real love is a scarce commodity and so its value and power and importance is seriously highlighted by this fact. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who died in Safety is next followed by love and belonging.
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