Love beliefs
Most of us hold unconscious beliefs, which our upbringing and environment have conditioned us to embrace. To have control over our lives we need to analyze what those beliefs are and then to examine, test, and question them. Our beliefs and standards need to be ours alone, not those borrowed from others. They need to be right for us. Although it is often uncomfortable to accept, much of what we have unconsciously absorbed from family, peers, school, the media, and society, can be wrong.
We need to work out what we believe about just about everything, but especially about love and relationships. Do we for example believe such things as without love life is empty, there is only one true love for each of us, and once we find that person we live happily ever after? Our beliefs drive our behaviour and dictate our reactions. But are those beliefs right and accurate? Believing something doesn’t make it fact.
Our beliefs about love are especially important. What does love mean? How does it feel? We need to have our own definition of love and ask ourselves what other people’s definitions might be and if what they feel for us and what we feel for them is actually love.
Love is not just a word—it is action and behaviour. Love is as love does. Love is not just candle lit dinners, flattery, or white wedding gowns. Love is about giving, support, attention, delight and pleasure. It is not about stress, confusion, and sorrow. Causing someone hurt, making them unhappy, are not acts of love. Love is not about suffering.
A man might tell everyone that he loves his wife and children for example, yet rarely spend time with them, squander his income on some addiction, cheat and lie. He calls that love. It’s crucial for us to recognize that the word love and behaviour that is unloving are incompatible and cancel each other out.
We also need to recognize that falling in love also involves deep, addictive infatuation that blinds us to the lover’s faults and failings and that it is no time to make major decisions or changes based on the relationship. We need to take things slowly, hold something back until we are sure, and realize that just because we find someone attractive doesn’t necessarily mean they are good and decent or right for us.
Men are sometimes accused of seeing women as sex objects but some women often see men as romantic objects who they hope will fulfill their fantasies of being adored. In the same way that a sex object is not seen as a unique, respected individual, neither is a romantic object. But whenever our view of another is so clouded, we not only do them a disservice, we leave ourselves open to disappointment and manipulation. We need to take off our rose-coloured glasses and realize that romance can be risky. We need to contain wishful thinking and expose any myths that make us vulnerable. We need to see what is, not what we believe or wish.
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