What is love? When you love someone what does it feel like? Love is when someone makes you feel good. When you love yourself it is because you make yourself feel good. And when you love someone else it is because they make you feel good. Loving yourself or someone else really has nothing to do with who or what they are. But it has everything to do with how they make you feel.
Someone who hates themself, really just hates how they make themselves feel. It has really nothing to do with who they are as a person. And it has everything to do with how they make themselves feel. If they wanted to start loving themselves, all they would have to do is start making themselves feel good.
How does someone make you feel loved? What do they actually have to do? Love means making someone feel accepted, heard, good enough, important, useful, understood, worthy, deserving, etc. Love is a flood of different good feelings. And we all have certain needs that lead us to feeling loved. Some of us need more acceptance. Some of us need more affection. Some of us need more acts of service. We all recieve love differently. And there is nothing wrong with these different needs.
Are you fulfilling your own needs to make yourself feel loved? You have to love yourself and accept yourself first. Because you can’t give from an empty cup. When you give acceptance to someone else, it has to be from your overflow. Otherwise it is at a detriment. When you are on an airplane, they teach you to put your air mask on first before you help your child. You have to be able to breath before you can help others. You have to take care of yourself and your own needs before you can take care of another.
Have you ever done something you don’t like doing with someone you love and it been not so bad? I hate fancy restaurants. But some of my boyfriends have really liked food and fancy restaurants. Occassionally, I would give in and go to a fancy restaurant with them just to make them happy. I thought this was what you do for the people you love. Because when I would go to a fancy restaurant with them it wouldn’t be so bad because they loved it. And I thought my enjoyment of these occasions had to do with love.
But really this was just my mirror neurons and empathy. When I did these things, I would be partaking in a shared state of being. I hate fancy food and restaurants. But some of my boyfriends loved them. It wasn’t that I loved the fancy food or the restaurants. And it wasn’t even that I loved them as people. It was the love of partaking in a shared state of being.
When you are in relationships you make compromises. We are taught to call this love. But love is when someone makes you feel good. If you are doing something you dislike, you are not being made to feel good. You are partaking in a shared state of being with your mirror neurons and empathy. You are enjoying the state of another person’s being. It’s not that I loved fancy food all of a sudden. It’s that I loved the way that person made me feel. But it wasn’t love. It was a shared state of being taking part in my brain via my mirror neurons. It was my empathy, not love.
Often we confuse love with partaking in shared states of being. Love is when someone makes you feel good. But the key is they have to make you feel good without taking part in an activity. So just someone sitting there with you making you feel good. No talking, no watching television, all your clothes on, no touching. Basically love is when someone is with you doing nothing and it makes you feel good. If you love someone because you like doing things with them, that’s not love. That is partaking in a shared state of being. This is enjoying someone. Enjoying someone is very different than love. How many people have you known who you could do absolutely nothing with and they make you feel good? Because that is love. Having an activities partner is not love.
Even having someone that you come together with to create a shared experience and state of being with around a certain goal is not love. Aka marriage, creating a family, and business partnerships are not necessarily love. These are coming together to create a shared experience and state of being around a certain goal. This is partnership. Arranged marriages are partnership. But they are not always love. Business partners are a partnership, but they are rarely love. Doing things with another person is not love. It’s just a shared state of being. It’s just your mirror neurons and empathy at work. It’s not always love. It’s actually rarely love.
We are not meant to call shared states of being love. We can utilize our mirror neurons with anyone. It has nothing to do with love. However, we are supposed to love ourselves. We should be able to sit and do nothing with ourselves and feel good. That is love. If you can’t sit with yourself doing nothing and make yourself feel good, you will not be able to do it with someone else. We are taught that we love always. But love is the exception to the rule. It is rare. Maybe if you are lucky you will find one or two people in a lifetime that you can do nothing with and feel good.
Humans are not meant to love each other. We are meant to love ourselves. And we are meant to enjoy each other.
A culture is just a group of people who come together with shared beliefs. Those shared beliefs create patterns in behavior. However, when these shared beliefs are lies the people start livng lies.
Love is a lie. We are supposed to enjoy each other. But love is rare and often a lie. We are taught to live lies when we have beliefs that are lies. Love is a fairytale. And I have never seen a fairytale where the two main characters did nothing together and made each other feel good. How about you?