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Monday, 25 June 2012

How do you know when you love someone?


Good question – and good job on you for actually bothering to ask! It seems most people don’t care – in fact most people think love is the same as lust, and that it’s totally cool to be as possessive as possible.
Okay, so you think you might love this person, but you’re not sure. Here are a series of questions you can ask yourself to find out if you really love this person or not:
  • Picture this person 20-40 years in the future, with wrinkles and grey hair (or bald)… do you think you’ll love them then?
  • Imagine this person has some tragic accident in which they lose their… well… if it’s a woman, imagine they lose their boobs, if it’s a guy, imagine he loses his dangly bits… do you still love this person and want to be with them?
  • Imagine this person has a sex change… do you still love them?
  • What if this person becomes really fat, or is in an accident and has burn marks all over their face and body, so you think you’ll still love them, or find them repulsive?
How did you do? Were your answers mostly “Yes, I’ll totally still love him/her!”? … Or more like “Um… er.. maybe not…” … Most people would probably answer “Maybe not”… and if you did… well hey, I guess that means you don’t really love this person, but that’s okay, at least you know. 
And if you actually answered “Yes” to most (or even all) the questions – then it’s probably pretty safe to say you really love this person. Awesome. The world needs more people like you. 
But wait, there’s more… here’s a bonus question!
  • Imagine this person tells you they love you, but they also love someone else… how does that make you feel? Happy or upset?
This one is interesting, because the conventional “wisdom” generally seems to be that it’s good if you’re the only person he/she loves, and bad if there’s someone else… which is weird if you consider love to be a good thing. Love is a good thing, right? Love is never bad, right? So then how does it make any sense at all that it’d be a bad thing if this person loves MORE THAN ONE PERSON? Makes no sense to me… so then, if you’re happy for the person because they love more people, awesome – I’d say that’s a pretty good sign that you love this person and care about their well-being. If, on the other hand, the idea of them loving another human being besides you makes you upset or jealous or feel threatened in some way, I’d say you’re really more concerned about yourself and probably have some insecurity issues you might want to look into.

Best short meaningful love quotes

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” – Bertrand Russell



Looking for love in a bar is like looking for food in the gutter. You might find something that resembles what you’re looking for, but it’s probably bad for you.
“To come upon love without seeking it is the only way to find it.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.” – Benjamin Franklin
Just because someone doesn’t love you the way that you want, doesn’t mean that they don’t love you the best way they know how.
“Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, and enflames the great.” – Anonymous
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” – Maurice Maeterlinck
“Love isn’t blind, it just uses a completely different navigation system that isn’t compatible with anything else.”
“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” – H. L. Mencken
“To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.” – Anne-Sophie Swetchine
“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then there will be true peace.” – Sri Chin Moi Gosh
“True intimacy with another human being can only be experienced when you have found true peace within yourself.” – Angela L. Wozniak
“It is an irony that the more possessive you are, the more love you demand, the less you receive, while the more freedom you give, the less you demand, the more love you will receive.” – Dr. Harold Bloomfield
“Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them and you have found a lover for life.” – Leo Buscaglia
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” – James Baldwin
“Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.” – Rabbi J. Gordon
“It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.” – Anne Tyler
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” – W. H. Auden
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” – Marcus Aurelius
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” – Bertrand Russell
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get – only with what you are expecting to give – which is everything.” – Katharine Hepburn
“To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage, because we don’t want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt.”
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Trust lies at the core of love; there can be no true love without trust.” – M.K.Soni
“Love is giving and it has nothing to do with what you receive.” – Dr. Wayne Dyer
“It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.” – Lawrence Durrell
“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” – Gilbert Chesterton
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then there will be true peace.” – Sri Chin Moi Gosh
“There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.” – Mother Teresa
“What will survive of us is love.” – Phillip Larkin
“Life is like a phone call with a loved one. When it is cut short, we realize how much of it we have wasted.” – KLBseagull
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“That best portion of a good man’s life: His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” – William Wordsworth
“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
Power is never brought to an end by power. The eternal law is that power ends by love.

Longer meaningful love quotes

“To the extent that we are not living our lives exactly as we want – with the love and friendships we want, the abundance we want, and the happiness we are seeking – it’s to that extent we are resisting it.” – Brad Yates
“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” – Henry Van Dyke
“People were made to be loved and things were made to be used. That’s why there’s so much chaos in the world – people are being used and things are being loved.” – Anonymous
“There isn’t much better in this life than finding a way to spend a few hours in conversation with people you respect and love. You have to carve this time out of your life because you aren’t really living without it.” – RealLivePreacher.com
“Unconditional love is full appreciation for someone/something that has some things you don’t espouse yourself. Because if you love someone just like you, you love them for the parts that remind you of you, and that’s conditional.” – blank_mind
“Love cannot remain by itself – it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service. Whatever form we are, able or disabled, rich or poor, it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing; a lifelong sharing of love with others.” – Mother Teresa
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” – Tony the Tiger

Some Funny & Witty Love Quotes

“Sex is a dirty, filthy, vile disgusting thing. Save it for the one you love.”
How can you love God whom you have never seen, and hate your brother you see every day? Or is that why?
I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

What is the true meaning of love?

Most people who claim to love someone don’t really love them, because they don’t know what love actually is. 

What is love NOT?
  • Possessiveness is not love
  • Jealousy is not love
  • Lust is not love
  • Fear is not love
  • Keeping people all to yourself is not love
  • Expecting something from someone is not love
Real, true love is unconditional. All other “kinds” of love are not really love. Most parents and kids don’t love each other, most people in relationships don’t love each other, most people on the planet never experience unconditional love in their entire lives… or at least it sure looks that way.
To love someone unconditionally means that you love the person exactly as they are, exactly as they were before, and exactly as they will be in the future – because people change all the time, so if you love the person, you will love them even if they become something you disagree with. How many parents can say that about their kids? How many people can say that about their “lover”? Love is not about you or your pleasure or your amusement. It’s not about what you get out of it or what the other person can give to you. It’s not about having a trophy you can show off with and tell people “This is *MY* girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/son/daughter/whatever”. You do not “own” anyone. It’s not about you feeling ‘proud’ to be with someone who always agrees with everything you say and do and never does anything you disagree with. Unconditional love means that the person can just live their life exactly as they choose and you will always be there for them no matter what.
So, how does unconditional love fit in with relationships and marriage and sex and all that stuff the whole world keeps going crazy over? It doesn’t, really. It doesn’t “fit” in anywhere. Relationships are like trying to put love into a box and keep it there, except love is infinitely sized, and the box is… well, there is no box large enough. And a normal, conventional marriage is quite possibly the worst possible way to show someone how much you love them.
Unconditional love is more of a spiritual thing. It’s not bound by physical things, like blood relations and the desire to procreate. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sex. Most people are in relationships because they’re horny and/or lonely, even if they genuinely think they love the other person. But if the person they “love” suddenly lost their “equipment” for whatever reason, would they still want to be with that person? Would they get jealous if the person they “love” wanted to spend time with other people as well? Relationships based on needs are not unconditional.In order to truly understand love, you must first forget everything you have ever learned about it from society and anyone else (including what I just said). You are the only person who can tell you what love is. The only reason I’m writing all this stuff is because people always try to fit “love” in with things like dating, relationships and marriage and all that. You can’t make any sense of it if you keep doing that. You have to get rid of everything you think you know first.











































































































































About my writing
I write about this because I have always been deeply bothered by society’s definitions of love and how most people talk about love, and everything they associate with it. I have given this topic years of thought, and always found it extremely hard to explain my thoughts in actual words. How do you explain something as abstract and unexplainable as love? Sometimes the topic comes up on forums and I always respond to people as best I can. At first I was terrible at getting my point across, but after enough attempts I actually started to make some sense to myself. Then one day I realized I had typed quite a lot, and I never seem to run out of steam on this topic, so why not write some full articles about it?
If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that I moved from my old site to theguide2.com – I’m still the same person doing the writing though, so nothing has really changed except the address. 
Q&A:
Q: Do you think any human being can ever love someone 100% unconditionally?
A: Probably not. It’s (probably) impossible to be perfect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still worth it to try, just to see how close you can get.
Q: Do you love anyone perfectly unconditionally without ever making any of the mistakes you talk about here?
A: Hell no. But I’ve improved a lot and I’m always working on it.
Q: Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?
A: If you want it to. In a way, I want my posts to provoke people because so many people get it horribly wrong. And yes, I am actually this hard on myself as well. I’ve done my fair share of stupid things and have beaten myself up over it a million times. But I guess that’s how I had to learn… the hard way. At least now I know what I was doing wrong, and how it feels to be wrong, so I can understand better when other people do it.