What is love all about?

The million-dollar question. We often find ourselves feeling sad, angry, abused, and worst, suicidal just because we do not know what love is or we have mistaken love for something else. But does love destroy? Should it make us feel worried and stressed? Should it make us feel jealous?

Well if it is something that isn’t love then what is it? Let’s find out.

When we first started liking someone, what do we do? Well, we give that person our attention by giving that person our time. We are willing to give our time, money, and we see all the things positive about him/her. Just by letting that person know that we care is enough.

Then we start to date him/her, we set aside a schedule (and sometimes we even compromise our main priorities in life for this special event) sacrificing other things because we want to know more about him/her. We are highly interested in his personality or the things that she like.

At this point, we do not care much about what we can get but instead we want to give all we have because we want to let that person know that we value him/her. We do not care how much the effort is. We feel happy by doing every effort we can to give love – or “to love” in that sense. We act. And it brings happiness, a lot of happiness.

At this point we have established WHAT love is and HOW we feel about it. We have defined love as a verb – to give – and how we feel about it – being happy.

Now we get to the point where we enter a relationship. We still do what we do, we surprise our partners and do a lot of efforts on our end. But there’s one thing that has been added here. We now expect that we can at least have something in return, thus “give and TAKE”.

But if love is giving… what is “taking”?

Taking is simply what we do out of our desire to receive something in return. We give our time and efforts and we, somehow, at some point, want ourselves to be appreciated. As what William James said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated”. We get appreciation from our partner in various ways: sometimes we just want a simple “thank you”, a “bouquet of flowers”, a Facebook status about how much our partner loves us, or we go as extravagant as a desire to have a luxurious dinner date on a yacht, a trip to Paris, or a gift of something that we so wanted to have.

Because of this desire to be appreciated, we do not do things for free anymore. We won’t, by default, give our time, money, and efforts without those things being returned to us in ways we want them returned. And if we do not get what we feel we should receive. . .

This was taken from 9gag, credits to whoever made it.

We complain. Then we start to try and balance things out on our own. We stop giving simply because we don’t receive. We start to react and in most cases label our relationship as "falling out of love”. And when we do, we feel sad, we feel cheated, and we feel unfair. Why? Because we didn’t get what we think we deserve.

The focus is now more on what we should receive rather than what we should give. And the more we feel like these things are being denied to us, the more we want to get them.

We often complain about our partners for not “giving back” to us the love that we feel we deserve “in return”.  And we end up thinking that we “love them more” than they love us. But do we really?

Earlier we found out that love is giving and that we feel happy when we love – when we give. We also found out that our greatest desire is to be appreciated which is more likely focused on receiving than giving – to receive something that we want out of what we have given. But we also found out that when we don’t get what we felt we deserve, we start to take them. We ask for those things, sometimes to the extent that we DEMAND those things from our partners as if it is a requirement for love. And when we don’t get them, we feel sad, worried, cheated, unfair, and sometimes even feel suicidal. Why? Why does the act of taking have negative consequences?

Because it is an act of selfishness. Giving is an act directed towards the person we love; taking is an act directed towards us. Giving is selfless, taking is selfish. Giving is proactive, taking is reactive.

With this, I conclude, therefore, that love is all about giving. "Do unto others," Jesus said, "as you would have them do unto you".

 So when we feel sad and miserable because we do not get the love that we are expecting to receive let’s think back and ask ourselves…

“Do I really love him/her? Or Do I love myself more than how much I love him/her?”

“Am I concerned in making him/her happy? Or I’m concerned in my own happiness that I’m ready to DEMAND things from him/her, mistakenly thinking that if she doesn’t give what I want, she doesn’t love really love me?

When we’re thirsty for love, let us not react, let us not wait for our partners to fill our glasses up – for they may never do it and we will end up even thirstier. Let us fill up the glasses ourselves, and fill another one for our partners.

When we fall out of love, let us act, let us climb back up. Start giving more and taking less. Let’s remember the days when we are willing to give time and attention without expecting anything in return but for our partners to know that we care.

Let us remember that a fire doesn’t appear all by itself. We have to make the fire. Same thing with love. If it isn’t there, then we have to make it. Because love is a verb.