LOVE
Five Parts:
Finding Romantic Love
Making Relationships Last
Avoiding Common Relationship Problems
Loving Your Friends and Family
Loving Yourself
Love is expressed as an action and experienced as a feeling. Yet, love has an essence that resists defining in any single way — it encompasses compassion, determination, tolerance, endurance, support, faith, and much more. If you're in the dark about how to love, this article should give you some food for thought, and perhaps teach you a little bit about how to love yourself, love the world, and love other people just a little bit more.
FINDIND ROMANTIC LOVE
1. Decide what you want from a loving relationship
What do you want out of a relationship, romantic or otherwise? What do you look for in a person that you love? What do you love in a person? While you don't want to narrow your focus too much, a properly-aligned list of priorities is helpful in knowing what to look for and how to find it.
- If it works for you, rather than making up a list of wants, make up a list of "deal-breakers." If you absolutely can't abide a drinker, a hyper-religious person, or a daredevil, put it on your deal breaker list and avoid getting tangled in their complicated web.
- Be judicious. If you’re putting a nice butt before a stable personality, you’re going to have a really tough time in relationships. Same goes for things like valuing friends who get you into the best clubs over friends who’ll hold your hair back while you puke. Put substance above superficials, every time.
- Real people don’t fit in boxes. Keep in mind qualities that you want a prospective lover to have, but don’t require someone to meet all of them and make sure you’ve got your priorities in order.[1]
2. Have something to offer others.
When you go to start a relationship, be it romantic or platonic, you’ll want to be sure that you bring something to that relationship. Having nothing to offer will give you and probably the other person the sense that you are a leech. Work on giving as much as you take, in all your relationships, and you’ll be set for success.
- A life partner or a lover can help you cope with the problems in your life and will work with you to solve them, but no one is going to make those problems just go away but you. You have to rescue yourself. Be your own knight-in-shining-armor. Expecting someone else to do that for you will only result in putting way too much pressure on them and disappointing yourself in the long run.[2]
- If you're experimenting with online dating, or other digital forms of communication, you've got to put some work into it. Messaging a hottie with "Hey" isn't bringing anything to the table. Ask questions, put your dazzling sense of humor on display, be naturally curious. Be yourself.
3.Meet lots of people.
Unlike in the serendipitous plots of most romantic comedies, we usually don't run into long-term lovers and friends by accident. With the noise and bustle of 21st century life, meeting people takes work. Treat every night out, or every new class, or every new encounter as a possibility and bring your A-game.
- Be friendly when you meet people, and try to see the best in them. Even if you're at a party you'd rather not be at, make a little goal that you'll make one new friend by the end of the night. Turn your dull party into a fresh opportunity.
- Make plans with people you're interested in. Rather than exchanging numbers and putting someone in your phone as "Red Shirt Blonde," try to make specific plans before the end of the night. Find common ground with someone and decide that you'll meet up for coffee, or an event sometime later in the week. Make it concrete, rather than vague.
4.Let yourself be vulnerable with others.
Unfortunately, loving someone means that they can hurt you. This is normal and okay (and almost inevitable). But if you want to have real love, you need to allow yourself to open up with that person. Don’t keep secrets from them, don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t, but instead give them the opportunity to know the real you.
- Don't put on an act with people you're interested in, or with friends that you're building a relationship with. If you're pretending to be one way, it's not fair to the person who meets you halfway. Be yourself all the time, and you'll be confident that the people you meet are worthy of loving you, because it'll be the real you.
5. Give it time.
Don’t force love and don’t try to speed it up. This will only create false feelings which drain you emotionally and leave you feeling empty and unsatisfied. You can’t rush love. But believe that it will come because it most certainly will. You just have to find the right person.
Making Relationships Last
1. Commit.
If you're in love, prove it by putting effort into the relationship and working hard to make it work. Communicate openly with your partner about your goals for the relationship and where you see it going. If you're only interested in a short-term fling, be honest. If you've got an eye toward serious long-term love, be honest. There's nothing wrong with either kind of love, but you need to make sure that your partner is equally committed to the same version of love that you are.
Commit to the person and to the relationship. It’s easy when two people have been together for awhile and you’ve become very trusting to just get very comfortable with each other. Maybe you don’t go out on dates anymore or maybe you don’t dress up nice for each other sometimes. But you should at least do these things occasionally, or eventually someone will feel like they’re no longer worth the effor
2. Learn lessons and apply them to your relationships.
Yes, bad things will happen in your relationships. You’ll say the wrong thing, or they’ll hurt your feelings. It happens. The important part, when anything goes wrong (even if it’s just problems in your life), is to learn your lessons and just keep moving forward. Try to make the most of any negative situation, turning it into something positive by gaining and growing from the experience. Honestly try to adopt your significant other's POV in any argument that gets fairly serious -- do try to be compassionate and understand where they're coming from.[3]
If you're in the wrong, apologize and own up to your mistake. Good relationships air out the grievances and clear the air. Bad relationships hide the negativity and let it fester into serious problems. If you're in love, talk about your problems.
3.Work constantly to make yourself and those you love better.
A good, loving relationship is one where you constantly challenge each other to be better people. Help the other person to achieve their dreams and goals because you believe they deserve it. Improve yourself and work for your dreams so that you can be the person you feel they deserve. We should be better people because of the relationships that we have, and this is the way to do it.
4.Eliminate jealousy.
This is one of the unhealthiest things to have in a relationship, as it can break down trust and respect, and create barriers. For some people, this can be the most challenging part of relationships. Jealousy is a tough thing to break, but you can do it. The most important thing to understand is that jealousy issues almost always come from within, from the jealous person’s own issues, so those need to be worked through first. This is a place where those communication skills come in handy.
This is, of course, assuming one person in the relationship is running around blatantly cheating on the other. In which case, they don’t really love the person they’re hurting, now do they?
Avoiding Common Relationship Problems
1.Never, ever manipulate someone.
Popular culture often tells us, subtly, that we should manipulate our significant other. You’ll find magazine upon magazine about how to get your girlfriend to do this or how to make your husband more that. But the thing is that expecting someone to change, and emotionally or mentally manipulating them into doing it, is one of the worst things you can do for your relationship. By manipulating them, you are creating distrust and resentment, a terrible thing to do to someone you love.
2.Don’t expect perfection.
Don’t expect perfection in the person you love or in yourself. This sets incredibly unrealistic expectations. Neither of you will be able to live up to these standards and you both will end up hurt and disappointed. Even if you feel that you only expect perfection for yourself, this will give you the mindset that people can be perfect and you will subconsciously expect the same from the person you’re with.
3.Don’t bring outside problems into your relationships.
Life gets stressful sometimes. We have problems and they make us upset, hurt, or angry. There are many, many people who take out these negative emotions on the people they love, often because they feel like they have no other outlet. But you should never do this. Find good ways to deal with your stress, like exercising or doing art. This will keep you from unreasonable outbursts directed at the person you love.
Loving Your Friends and Family
1.Be a good friend.
Whether you’re trying to create and grow love in a platonic or romantic relationship, you need to be a good friend to the person you love. Love is about more than kissing and hugging: it’s about being there when someone needs you and helping them unselfishly. Work to be as good a friend to them as you can be, and let them do the same.
Work hard at your relationships. Show up for your friends. If your buddy's having an art opening, or playing a concert, buy a ticket and show up in the front row, even if you're not crazy about the music. Listen when your friend has a problem, and make yourself available emotionally.
Try and learn to recognize when it's ok to be friends, and not possible to be more. Many people complain about being stuck in the "friend zone," which is really just a way of saying that you're attracted to someone who isn't attracted to you. Every healthy person needs a variety of healthy relationships, not all of them romantic. Embrace each interpersonal relationship for the unique brand of love it provides.
2. Respect everyone and earn the respect of others.
Respect your friends, your family, and your lovers by validating their actual accomplishments, opinions and experiences. Try to understand them deeply, on a personal level. Ask them questions, have long discussions, and open your heart. Understand that the other person has their own wishes and desires, and rights to privacy and dignity. If you can’t allow this for another person, then you can’t love them.
3.Love people for who they are.
Everyone is different. This doesn’t make anyone better or worse than anyone else. If you want to love someone, you need to take them for everything that they are, good and bad. Realize that none of those traits may be permanent and that if you want them to change, you have to help them want that change for themselves. Give them the tools they need to make the change. They aren’t yours to mold into your personal statue of perfection.Loving Yourself
1.Love yourself.
Before loving anyone else, you have to love yourself. This will help you show that you can experience love, sending a message that you are secure, confident, and worth loving in return. Loving yourself will make you a better lover because you will not be hindered by self-doubt and crises of confidence.
If you have problems loving yourself, then work hard to build yourself up. Work on your self confidence by accepting your past and moving forward. You may feel that things you did in the past will make you unlovable, or that you have too many problems to be lovable. Untrue. Accept the things that happened to you, forgive yourself, and move on.2.Count your blessings.
When things get tough, money runs out or someone loses a job, the way to get through these tough times is to focus on the things in your life that are good. Don’t worry about all the things you don’t have, because you will always not have a lot of things. That’s out of your control. But you can enjoy and find love in the things that you do have right now, while you have them. Appreciate this moment.
3.Be selfish sometimes.
If you constantly give in your relationships and don’t focus on your own needs every now and again, you will find that you become burnt out. In order to make yourself a better lover, be selfish on occasion and make sure you’re getting what you need to be happy too.
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