True Love

And today I became hopeful. There is something better than ‘falling in love’. There is a love deeper and more passionate than that of two people helplessly engrossed in each other. I think of that song, ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’. I love it and I can relate. Sometimes, you feel like there is nothing you can do and you are a victim of your own feelings. But imagine if ‘being in love’ was not about being enslaved to ones own emotions. Imagine if being in love was a choice.

You’ve got to treasure those father-daughter moments. They don’t happen all that often but when they do, I get heaps out of it. Last night I was cocooned in my hammock on the front verandah and Dad came out listened to me complain and question love and everything, particularly my feelings for a certain guy. This morning Dad brought out a book for me to read called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. He told me to read the chapter entitled, ‘Falling in Love’.

Chapman described typical, familiar scenarios where people fell in love but then turned it all around saying, ‘falling in love is not real love’. Some of the reasons he explained include:

• Falling is love is not an act of the will or a conscious choice. This means we have no control over who we fall in love with or when it happens.
• Falling in love is not real love because it is effortless. The extents we go to for the other person (long phone calls, travelling etc) are nothing because we are compelled my our feelings. We cannot take credit for doing the things that an instinctive obsession led us to do.
• The ‘in-love experience’  does not focus on fostering the personal growth of you or the other person, because when you’re in love, everything seems perfect.

That’s not to say that falling in love does not happen. It does. It is just that there is so much hype placed on falling in love with someone. Of being in infatuated surrender. What happens when you awaken from your slumber and see each others flaws? When you’re committed to each other for life? When the ‘tingling’ feeling passes? If the things of fairy-tales don’t work out? If meeting your ‘true love’ does not quite equate to an immediate ‘happily ever after’? Is there any hope? Yes!  Chapman writes,

‘Our most basic need is not to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows our of reason and choice, not instinct. 

Love that is of choice. Imagine living with someone who you loved by choice. Imagine loving someone in a way that seeks to enrich them. Imagine a selfless love.

Because I honestly think selfishness is at the root of ‘falling in love’. We become captive to our own emotions. Our own desires. The other person becomes a mere means of extinguishing our own feelings of loneliness, and desires for love and affection.

Be honest with yourself. if you’ve ever been in love, how much did your desire to enrich the other person’s life? To see them challenged and grow? And how much of it was about how the other person made you feel?

Apparently falling is love happens. They say it’s effects last about two years and then you move on. After understanding it this way, it makes me want to bi-pass falling in love all together and move on to the real deal.

But alas, we must let nature take its course. It seems the butterfly must struggle from its cocoon in order to build its strength to fly. And I want to fly. So I say cocoon me up in ‘helpless love’ so I can move on to the next level. Real love. True love. Selfless love. Don’t listen to Disney. That’s where it’s at!

Enter: The famous love passage  from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (In NLT to give it a bit of a twist). Every time I read this I am reminded that love is not what everyone thinks. It is so much more!

^” Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud  or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.  It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.Love will last forever!”