Love is about giving and sharing—not about getting. Love is not needy. There is nothing controlling about real love. Love is that which supports your own and your partner’s highest good, which means that you would never try to control or possess the other person. When you love someone, you deeply value their essential qualities—the qualities that don’t go away with time. The challenge of real love is that you cannot desire to get love and to be loving at the same time. Your focus on getting love will always lead to a closed heart and controlling behavior, which shuts out love. Your focus on being loving, and on learning what is loving to yourself and your partner in any given moment, is what opens the heart. When you consistently choose to be loving with yourself and others, you will experience real love. When you love yourself, you will be far less vulnerable to becoming emotionally dependent on a partner because you won’t have a desperate need for attention and approval. When you give yourself the attention and approval you need, you’ll be able to have healthy relationships with others without depending on them for your sense of well-being. Learning to love yourself and feel whole, with or without other people in your life, is a lifelong journey. But it’s well worth the effort.
