How to Love: Lesson Learned or Instilled at Birth?

Love is one of the most, in my opinion, powerful emotions we possess. As singer Al Green says “love, something that can make you do wrong, do right…” Love can bring out a wide range of other emotions and psychosis. Lately, I’ve been thinking about love (and for the record I am NOT, I repeat I AM NOT in love, hell I’m barely dating) and if knowing how to give and receive love is something we really know how to do. Many claim to know how to love, yet is their way of “loving” someone correct? Does having two parents’ around make you more of a “lover” than not? Is love something we learn from failed relationships?

The more I think about love, the more I realize that – like many others – my vision or version of love probably is not the best in the world. I always knew I never wanted to be unhappy like my parent’s – one is openly unhappy, while the other has been suffering in silence for as long as I’ve been old enough to understand the ins and outs of that marriage. So my solution was to do everything not to be like them. Simple enough, right? Not so much. In trying not to be like my parent’s, I realized that I didn’t have any positive representations of love (or marriage) to mirror. Life’s easy when you know what not to do, but what about when you don’t know what to do?

Some say that a failed relationship is a good way to learn about love, others say it’s a good way to learn about the pains of love. I guess the argument is that with a failed relationship you can evaluate yourself and the people you are attracted to so you can make necessary changes in order to avoid making the same mistakes. But what if you could avoid the failed relationship and the wrong people; can you still learn how to love? Can you still learn how to avoid falling for their type?

For me, learning how and who to love is going to be a lifelong, ongoing process. It’s something I have to free my heart from its trust insecurity restraints long enough to allow me to figure out how to truly love and be in love with the right person. An elder once told me that “love is not about finding the person you want to sleep with for the rest of your life, rather finding the person who you want to fight with for the rest of your lives…”