We live in a world where humans have been separated from each other, but there is something that unites us despite our nationality, breed, gender, or age, and we call it love. We speak different languages but we all speak the language of love. We all have experienced love, and we all talk about love but: What is love? And what is its true meaning?

We never ask ourselves this question or at least the majority of us, and I wasn’t the exception. One day a friend of mine asked me, and when I tried to answer, I was not really sure about the correct answer, so I started researching to know exactly what love means. I started thinking about love and what it was for me, and then I looked for what other people said about love, I looked for the meaning in books, magazines, movies, and everywhere I could, and I found different meanings, what it made me think, that we are a little bit confused about the true meaning of love.

The truth is everyone has a different opinion about the meaning of love, and according to their point of life view those meanings are totally valid, I’m not an expert on love to say which answer is right and which one is wrong, and I think anyone is, but judging by how humans interact with each other, I can say we are confused about the true meaning of love, because love can have many meanings, but love should never be defined as painful, love is the synonym of happiness and not unhappiness.

“Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.” – Wayne Dyer

Humans over the years have always tried to define love in different ways, we find the word love in everything we see and hear, love has always been used as inspiration for movies, books, and songs, and the meanings of love have always been as different as people on this planet. People from around the world with different languages and cultures, religious people, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, writers, Actors, and musicians have always tried to find and express the real meaning of love.

But the truth is, love is something that cannot be defined, categorized, or described in any way, love is not a product we can buy in a store, it is not something we can find on a shelf, it is not something we can touch, love is something that can only be experienced, love goes beyond our understanding, and it is not something that can be easily explained in a few words in a dictionary, blog, book or anywhere, love can only be understood when we experience it.

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” – Thomas Merton

 So you may be wondering – Okay if I can only experience it, how can I know that what I am experiencing right now is actually this thing we call love if I don’t know what love really means?

And that is a very good question because there we find the problem of our existence. There is so much despair and sadness in this world due to our misconception of love. Our beliefs about love are mistaken and therefore our experience of what we call love is also mistaken. All this happened because we never really tried to understand what love really means, and when we try to do and experience something we don’t really understand there are very high chances to do it in the wrong way.

This is what is happening right now – Our wrong concept about love has confused us, and that has created so much hate, pain, and sadness in our lives. We don’t really understand what love means, so we have given it wrong meanings:

Love is about possession of a person or an object, love is wanting others to be who you want them to be, love is giving someone our heart allowing a person to break it into pieces whenever they want, love means being what we are not, in order to be accepted for others, Love means to satisfy your own needs at the expense of other, love is the feeling we have only when the other person act, think, feel as we want, love means accepting others to treat us as they please, love is material things, Love is about fame, power and money, Love is only about sex, Love is superficial, Love is painful, Love is bad, Love is a waste of time!

As I said before, I’m not an expert and I think in terms of love no human being is, at least not yet, we can all have different and valid meanings, but what we should understand is that love is happiness, not the opposite, our wrong beliefs about it make us think it is not, as we can see in the examples I gave, our concepts about love are mistaken, and that has created all the sadness and pain in our hearts.

So, what is love?

Definitely is not what I wrote before, but rather the opposite. The dictionary says love is: “A strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for someone”, but at least in my opinion, love is much more than that, it is much more than just a word, an emotion, or a feeling.

Love is caring for you and others, love is unconditional, love gives without expecting anything in return, love is wanting others to be the person they want to be, not the person you want them to be, love is about helping others be the best version of themselves they can be, love is a mutual agreement of giving the best they can for the benefit of both and others, love is when someone else’s happiness is your happiness, love is helping others, love is respect and understanding to each other, even if we think different. Love always constructs and never destroys, Love heals and never hurts, Love is not a finished product, love is something you work on each day, love is being happy for the success of others, love is being in the good and the bad moments, love is timeless, love has no boundaries, love doesn’t require anything, love is a connection between human beings, love is not attachment to something or someone because love is free, love is peaceful, love is loyal, love is not when our happiness depends on the thoughts and action of others, love is blind, it cannot see appearances, because it can only see what is invisible for the human eye, love is what makes us better human beings, because love is what we are made of, and love should be our guide!

♥