What is true love?

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Love. Maybe the majority of people's conversations are about love and relationships. Everybody is looking for love. Love from theirs relatives, friends, co-workers, love from another person who would be willing to stay with us even when he/she sees our true self.

Maybe you have noticed the huge number of love/relationship coaches nowadays. They all give us advice on how and where to meet the right partner, how to sustain a healthy long-term relationship, how to make this guy you are dating commit to you, how to show that you are a high quality woman/man and all that jazz. As you can see, love is a business. And it has always been one. Yes, maybe 20 years ago, love coaches were not so popular as they are today, but romantic comedies has always been ever greens. We all love these fairytale bubble sugary stories of a man who meets a woman, they have nothing in common but they fall madly in love, have many challenges, but at the end, they are together and they live happily ever after.

When I was younger, I used to believe that this is what love is – roses, chocolates, champagne and Celine Dion on repeat. It didn't take a long time and I understood that this was not love. This is not true love. This is just a feeling of infatuation that comes fast and goes away also pretty fast. And we all love it. Infatuation is a part of the process of falling in love. We love feeling the butterflies, being nervous before meeting the other person, show them our best self... but this is not what will make a relationship last for 20 or even more years. There must be something else that makes two people have a strong bond between each other. I don't talk only about romantic relationships, but all kind of relationships. Many people, when they hear the words “relationship” or “love” always think of romantic relationships. The truth is that we feel love and have “love” relationships with many more people than our partners in life.

So why do we try to learn something that we already know? Why do we think that we need to have a coach to teach us how to love, how to be a good partner and how to make a relationship last when we probably already know it?

We think that romantic love and love in general are two different things. They are not the same, but they are not so different either. The only difference is that in romantic love, you have passion, sexual desire, lust that you don't have in other “love” relationships. And if you think of it, these are actually the things that make us blind to what truly matters in a relationship. This is why once these “ingredients” are gone, we wake up from the fairytale and we realize that we have next to us a person that we can not stand, that we don't really like... and we want to run away as fast as we can.

Last week my sister and my parents were in France to see me. As I have been living abroad for so many years now, these family moments are priceless to me. My family stayed for 7 days. We traveled in France and in Belgium. We laughed, we yelled at each other, we argued, we danced, we sang, we saw things we hadn't seen before and met new people, had to deal with some issues with one of our Airbnbs and ate a lot! A typical family holiday. However, this holiday made me think of love. Of true love. It made me think of what true love was and how it makes us feel. I realized that we all know deep inside what true love is. And when we feel it, we know it. I also realized that all the relationships we have with all the people we meet in our life, are “love relationships” or they must be love relationships. Yes, even with the grumpy cashier at the grocery store. We always have to come from a place of love, compassion and understanding for the others.

During this holiday with my family I caught myself thinking how lucky I was to have these people in my life. How even when we argue and we yell, I still love them so much that I can not even explain it and I know that they love me back. Sometimes we get angry with each other, but we talk it out, apologize, try to make things right. I know that these are the people I can trust the most in my life. I know that they want the best for me. Really. Genuinely. And I want the best for them. Really. Genuinely. They are ready to do anything for me and I am ready to do anything for them. I am even ready to sacrifice my life only to save theirs. And I know that they would do the same for me. These are the people who were with me in my best and in my worst. And it was not only because they were “my family” and they had to. We know that in many families people are not very close to each other. If I have to be completely honest, I don't think I am so close to my parents and my sister either. They don't know many things about me, but they know the most important ones. We have never had a parent/friend relationship in which I know that I can tell them anything and they will be fine with it. I can not. Sometimes I even think - “it would have been so much better if they were like that or if they weren't like that... because of them, now I am this way” and then, I realize that they are who they are and I am who I am. We all have personal wounds to heal. I can not blame them for my own struggles and issues. I have to deal with them by myself. I accept my family as they are, knowing that they are the best family I could ask for. If they could give me the world, they would do it. If I could do it for them, I would.

I remember how a couple of days ago we were in a bus traveling to a new destination. I looked at my sister who was watching by the window and my parents who were falling asleep. I caught up myself smiling because of this so ordinary, so normal, so simple moment. I felt peace, happiness, acceptance, gratitude. I felt like I was back home. I felt blessed to have the possibility to share this ordinary moment with them.

Maybe the fact that I work with people who have theirs children often in foster families, makes me see my own family in a whole different way. I realize how important they are to me and how lucky I am to have them. Not everybody has the chance to have a loving and supporting family. However, I believe that we all have at least one person or even an animal in our life for whom we feel unconditional pure love.

In my job, we often try to create places of free speech and exchange of thoughts and ideas which allow people from different social classes and personal backgrounds to share what they think without being judged. Once we had to talk about human rights and what a human right was. A little girl told us that a human right is to have a family and to be able to live with them and to love them. This is maybe one of the most powerful things I had heard from a child. It is a human right to be loved and to love, to take care of someone and to be taken care of, to care.

While I was on the bus looking at my sister and my parents falling asleep, I thought that love is not actually a feeling. Love is an action. True love is an action. True love is measured by our actions, not by the butterflies in our stomach. I am not a love expert at all. I have had many romantic partners, I was trying to understand what love was, trying to feel this pure unconditional love that people talk/sing/cry about. I was also the girl trying to follow all Cosmopolitan's advice on how to make a guy want to be in a relationship with you. I was trying to understand romantic love when LOVE IS LOVE. The love that I feel towards my best friend is pure unconditional love as well. Sometimes, I get angry with him, I don't understand why he does certain things, but I still love him, because through the years he showed me that he deserves my love, my trust and my respect.

So, when we leave behind the looks, the titles, the lust and all these extras, love is gratitude. We feel grateful to have some people in our life because they make us become better, happier, kinder, bolder, braver. They teach us how to step out of our boundaries, how to expand our love for the world and for ourselves.

Love is acceptance. We truly love the people in our life only when we accept them as they are. We don't want to change them. Yeah, sometimes they are annoying but it is ok, they have other qualities that we appreciate more and they are much more important to us.

Love is giving. People always want to take, but true love is when you want to give. You give and you don't want anything in return. This is the purest and selfless act of love. You want to see the other person happy and you are ready to give them as much as you can and even more.

Love is when you forget about your ego. Yes, sometimes you will make things that your ego won't like. You will accept that you made a mistake. You will apologize. You will agree that the other knows better than you. Love is not a competition. We don't try to win anything. You will celebrate the other person's victories. And this is not so easy as it looks like. People often say that those who love you will be next to you in difficult moments, but I think that those who love you will be next to you and celebrate with you the good moments. People who love us will be truly happy for us when we are happy, when we succeed. Love is not a game of who is better and who is worse.

Love is when you take care... because you care. You want to take care of the other. You want to help them. You want to support them. You want to make sure that they are fine, that they are safe. You want to see them happy.

Love is respect. This is so important. We respect the people we love. We think they are great. We respect everything they have been through, everything they have done, everything they know, everything they learned... and also, we respect theirs choices, theirs decisions even if we don't like them. We respect theirs thoughts, theirs beliefs, theirs fears and insecurities.

Love is an action. Not words, not promises, not fairy tales. Action. And I think that it takes time to truly start loving someone. We need to see them in their worst, to go through challenges together, through arguments, sometimes they will even make the worst of us go out, they will make us see ourselves in whole new way and sometimes we will not like it. They are our teachers in life, but what a great way to learn... through love. Elena