Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

– Bell Hooks, All About Love

For the longest time, I have tried to understand what love is. I’ve always had a deep desire to experience unconditional, accepting, and transformative love. I remember being 18 and writing in my diary that I just want to experience real healthy love despite not knowing what this looked like.

Our life basically revolves around the quality of our relationships, whatever they are. Intimate, platonic, working, friendship, family relationships. Including the relationship that we have with ourselves. The quality of those relationships determines the quality of our lives. Many people have their own idea and experience of love, sometimes our idea of love is based on what we have experienced and bore witness to when we were growing up. When we are younger, we form ideas about the world, ourselves, and other people. Love is transformative, love is accepting, forgiving, and understanding. Love should bring peace. Unfortunately, for many of us, this was not our experience of love especially in the core moments of our lives or within our developmental stage as children.

We also live in a society where many people pretend that love is not important, people are not loving in healthy ways or promote this notion that you should cut someone off at the first issue or miscommunication. If this was really the case, why are relationships still so romanticised? Why are people also saying “God when?” when they see a cute couple online? And why are intimate relationships such a focal point? Because love is important, we all need it, and we are deserving of love. Humans need compatibility and connections with other humans, it is in our nature. When we reject this, avoid this, and choose not to connect with others in healthy and loving ways. We deprive ourselves of what we need, of an experience that may bring us peace, understanding and transformation.

Although, I believe that you should give people grace, and you should learn to be forgiving in certain instances. It is unreasonable to sever every bond as soon as someone makes a mistake or there’s an issue in your relationship. But what you should not do is stay where you are being abused, or where your boundaries are consistently being crossed. This shows that this individual has little care or respect for you so of course you should use your discernment and break away. However, love is forgiving and accepting, if someone you love hurts you, if they have shown understanding, accepted responsibility for this and are proactive in changing their behaviour whilst being consistent. Then it is ok to hold onto this type of connection, you want a healthy relationship, not a perfect one.

Keep this quote in mind:

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly, we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

– Bell Hooks, All About Love

I remember for a long time being confused about love. This is because I didn’t experience it in healthy ways when I was a child. I can accept that people have their own ideas of love. People may think that they’re being loving when in fact they are being abusive, harsh, or critical. I understand that when it comes to our parents who have not experienced healthy love, they cannot be loving towards their children, many times people act in ways that are familiar to them. Whilst I’m still learning, loving, and understanding. Throughout the years I have a greater understanding of love, which came from the experience of love within friendships and deep connections on a spiritual and emotional level. Also learning to love and accept myself more. I have been on a journey of reprogramming my belief system about love, my experience of what I thought was love, in the past, came with abuse. I know that love and abuse cannot co-exist, however, I was used to this and when the person(s) that I loved caused my pain, this bred a lot of confusion within me. Loving myself is also rejecting and creating boundaries with those I know cannot give me the love that I deserve.

Additionally, you must be accepting and open to love, to receiving the kind of love you desire. Not only should you give it to yourself, but you must be open to receiving and giving this love to others. I believe love is not just a feeling but an act, when we desire love we should act in loving ways and be proactive with it. Our actions begin to come from a place of understanding and acceptance. Pouring love into others can bring out the best in us, we become more forgiving and accepting of ourselves when we can still love and see the beauty in others despite their flaws or difficulties.

With that said, although you have had negative experiences in this department, doesn’t mean this is all you will continue to receive or what you deserve. Once you begin to reprogramme your idea about love, understand what you experienced and act in loving ways towards yourself and others. You will notice positive changes in the type of connections you will attract in your life. Healthy love will find you if you allow it to and most importantly, treat yourself in the ways you would want others to treat you.

Love on yourself and others x

Thank you for reading!