LOVE SAYINGS & ROMANCE QUOTES

Paul Friedman asked:


Mankind is essentially spiritual. I don’t even understand how people can discredit the unseen when they are aware of its presence all around them. We walk through a sea of air which cannot be seen. Radio waves that we cannot see are passing through us constantly. We’re bombarded by atoms and neutrons and protons that are completely invisible. We scientifically understand the spaces that exist between the actual “matters” of even the densest materials on earth are big enough to drive a truck through. Yet we see, touch and feel them as if they are solid. Science has taught us the unseen is much vaster and varied than the material world we look at every day. There are colors we cannot see and sounds we cannot hear but we know they exist.

We can’t see the wind but we can feel the wind so we know it is there. Similarly we cannot see love but we can feel love so we know it is there. Where does love begin and end? From where does love originate? Are you, as an individual, able to manufacture love? The answer is no, you draw love from an unseen source. In fact, I will state it quite candidly. We are in a perpetual infinite sea of love itself. When we seek love it is like a fish in the ocean seeking water. The very substance of love is the substance of the universe. But because we have free will we are able to close off that part of us which receives love and imagine it doesn’t exist for us; but it does.

In the temporary confines of our human selves we lose sight of reality, the love that surrounds us. We imagine we have to find love and when we find the right person we give love. This world can be seen as a terrible place when we don’t feel loved. We get into all sorts of mischief desperately seeking someone to love and someone who will love us in return. But there is a trick. The trick is to recognize relationships as a very specific reality within this unreality, a safe environment where we can give our love without fear. When we have established the relationship of a marriage or our intention to be married we agree to open our hearts so love can flow through without restrictions. As a human being you are capable of loving every single human being in the world. Why don’t you? Somehow you have it in your head that if you love everyone and everything you become vulnerable, so you restrict yourself and feel the pain of the restriction. Now I’m not saying that you should become promiscuous or a flower child of the sixties. I am saying giving love is not the same as expressing love. When you are in a safe relationship, i.e. marriage, you can express love fully and that is in fact one of the purposes of marriage. The point is when you are in a marital relationship it is to your benefit to give love in as many great ways as you can imagine. When you do so you open up a channel within yourself and you are able to feel and receive the love you are giving.

We have all heard the expression that the more love you give the more you’ll receive. It is a true statement but completely misunderstood. It isn’t as people imagine that when you give love to others they will want to love you back. People love who they love, not those who love them. What the saying means is when you give love you are experiencing the love that is flowing through you. The fact of the matter is giving love allows you to feel love in more of an adulterated form. The love that you give is coming directly from the source of love, rather than the filtered version that comes from someone else. Does this make sense to you? So, interestingly, you receive far more love by giving it than by getting it.

We are essentially spiritual beings who thrive on love because love comes from the same source we come from: God. To deny God is to deny love and to deny love is to deny God. This is not a religious thought but rather a very practical thought that allows us to enjoy our existence. There is no greater enjoyment and feeling than love. So please remember to tell your spouse or your significant other, “I love you.”

Peter J Granger asked:


The sad truth is that most of us fall in love for the wrong reason. We bring a partner into our lives to fulfil our need for love, and it is this outward focus that creates all our problems. What we really do is ‘fall in need’, rather than ‘fall in love’. This creates a dependence on our partners - we rely on their presence in our lives, to make us happy. As I discovered in my marriage, this near total dependence on another person was a recipe for disaster. I suffered so much when my wife left me because I had to face the emptiness and lack of self-love within me. Although I was completely unaware of it at the time, that emptiness had been there long before I met my wife. If you have ever suffered the agony of losing somebody close to you, then you have experienced those feelings of dependency. I have seen many people repeatedly fall in love and lose it again until they become cynical about romantic relationships and give up on relationships all together. The problem is that when this happens they also give up on life as well.

There is another way of looking at love that takes us in a healing direction. Although our romantic relationships may begin for all the wrong reasons, we must not become cynical about them because they show us the true nature of love and can help us to reveal the real us. As we fall in love we see our potential for successful relationships and for a life full of love. In the honeymoon phases of a relationship we see only the best in our partners and feel really good about ourselves. The truth is that we don’t have to restrict these feelings to the start of a relationship - we could be this happy and fulfilled at any moment in our lives.

To see how this might be, let’s look at the process of falling in love in a more positive way. Can you remember what it felt like when you fell in love? Think back to those heady days when you couldn’t stop thinking about your partner. Do you remember how perfect he or she seemed, how totally in tune they were with you and how connected you felt? You probably spent hours looking into each others eyes, talking endlessly and making love with wild abandon. It was all so easy.

It was this way because you allowed yourself to fall in love - during that time you let go of all your fears and negative ideas about yourself and the world. You opened yourself up to all the love that was available. You poured love on your partner and they poured love on you. Crucially you also received each other’s love without question. These romantic experiences show you what it is like to be free of our fear and insecurity and experience your true capacity for love and joy in a committed relationship.

The key to understanding what happens when you fall in love is to recognize that nothing new comes to you. The love was waiting beneath your fear and negative self-beliefs and it showed up when you let them go. When you fell in love it seemed that your partner was making you feel happy but what really happened was that you gave yourself permission to be happy. In that moment you made a subconscious choice to feel good. It is critically important in your understanding of relationships to appreciate that, no matter how much love your partner gave you when you fell in love, the good feelings were already present in you, before you met. The romantic process simply allowed you to access your natural capacity for love. What’s really exciting about understanding love in this way, is that you can find it again at any point in your life, without depending on another person’s presence or behavior.

As you can see, when we understand love in this way it transforms our relationships and our lives. Suddenly we realize that love isn’t an emotion that comes and goes - it is a description of our very essence. Love is who we are.

This profoundly different understanding of love explains so much about our romantic experiences and about life itself. We realise that our positive experiences within relationships are not determined by the amount of love we are given by another person but by the amount of love we can embrace - the amount that we can reveal our loving essence. Of course it is wonderful to find somebody who loves us, but this is valueless if we are unable to receive it. When we or our partner has low self-esteem, we do not know ourselves as love, and it is in this situation that fear and anxiety fills the void. We just won’t let ourselves feel love or be loved.

If we are honest, few of us believe that we are 100% complete when it comes to love. Even if we find somebody to love us and temporally fulfill our need, this does nothing to heal the underlying low self-esteem. It makes us dependent and highly vulnerable to loss in the future. Our neediness for love becomes very unattractive and through all manner of negative behaviors, we drive our partners away. The irony is that we have gone out into the world to find something that we have had all along! Of course, the key question to ask is why we would ever deny our true, loving identity. It seems crazy that we would turn away from something that is so life-enhancing. The astonishing truth is that we turn away from love because we are afraid of it.

When it comes to love, we are our own worst enemies! It is time to recognize our fear of love and intimacy and to begin to embrace it more fully in our lives. To do this we must dismantle the self-imposed barriers to the love that is waiting for us beneath our fear. The rewards will be extraordinary.