Mastering love

January 22, 2010 | Filed Under Challenge, Consider this, Moment of Truth 

I’ve spent the last few months contemplating love, dysfunction and the relationship between the two. Does the absence of love breed dysfunction? That question leads to several other questions, such as “what is love?” It’s an age-old question that I’m not equipped to answer with absolute certainty at this point (maybe another post), but I know that the two don’t comfortably co-exist, and yet so many operate in a constant state of dysfunction but try to invite love in and see no positive results. It’s both amazing and amazingly sad.

After a failed romantic endeavor, I spent months beating myself up about my ineptitudes, which–aha!–didn’t improve anything. Once I got over myself and was able to sift through all the many lessons, I found this:

• How you love yourself is how you’ll love others.
• Being able to love others only truly happens when you love yourself.
• You learn love from your parents.
• You also learn dysfunction from your parents.
• At some point, you’ll have to sort out your mess from your parents mess and make new agreements with yourself about what you believe to be true.

• Then, you’ll have to change the way you behave to support those new agreements.
• Change doesn’t always happen as fast as we’d like.
• People are constantly projecting their ideas of you/themselves/life/etc. See past the illusion.
• If you keep attracting crappy people into your life…the common denominator is you.
• There’s a chance that all our problems could be solved if we loved ourselves more.*
• Self-love is a neverending quest; even at the destination, there is more journey.

I learned quite a bit more, but I’ll save that for personal conversations.  One of my most recent ruminations is “is your love love?” Judging by the state of the world, I’m going to say that there’s so much brokeness that even mangled concepts of love are accepted and flourishing. I challenge you to ask yourself this question and be brutally honest with yourself. Denial will only serve the dysfuction, not the love.

Love’s in need of love today. And so are we.

* Results not guaranteed.

Image source: Paranoia–7

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