We all have to find out what love means to us

Have you been measuring your relationships against a version of love that isn’t even yours? One of the most important — and most overlooked — pieces of spiritual growth is learning to understand love from your own experience, not from movies, books, or inherited ideals.

The Danger of Borrowed Versions of Love

We all have to find out what love means to us in our lives — as it is to us from the lives that we’ve actually had. Not from the lives we think we should have had. Not from some segment of a romantic movie, or some chapter in a self-help book, or a fairy tale version of how love is supposed to look.

When we look at our relationships through someone else’s framework of what love should be, we set ourselves up for constant disappointment. We keep measuring something real against something imaginary. Imagine how dangerous that is — to look at love for what we think it should be, rather than what love actually is in our life today. Because the only knowledge of love you’re ever going to have is the knowledge you carry in this moment. That’s what love is to you.

Returning to What You Actually Know

We’ve got to get rid of those borrowed ideas. Remove the ideal of somebody else’s love. Remove the romantic notion from a story that has nothing to do with your real life. Those are beautiful things — they give us inspiration — but then we have to come back to the reality of: what is love to me, as I sit in this moment?

Because you do have knowledge of what love is. You’ve experienced it — in friendships, in family, in moments of genuine care. Is there a love here in my current relationship that can blossom into more love? But measured according to what I’ve known of love, not what I think love should have looked like in some ideal version of my life.

Applying It to Your Relationships

You realize in your personal relationships that yes — there is love here. There are people in your life you care about deeply. So why not apply that same principle — the way you care about the people you trust and respect — to the way you look at your intimate relationships or your significant other?

That’s the kind of way to look at love: from your heart, not from somebody else’s mind. Not from Hollywood, not from Snow White, not from a chapter someone wrote about what romance is supposed to be. From your heart, and what your heart actually knows about love in this moment.

Does that make sense? It’s simple — but it changes everything. Love from your own knowing is real. Love from someone else’s script is a ghost you’ll never catch.

Have fun,
Much love,
KC