How To Know If What You're Feeling Is Real, True Love
It's confusing.
misfire_studio / Shutterstock Most people would love to have true love in their life, yet often they have no idea what real love is.
Take a moment to think about how you would define love.
Defining love is like defining a particular color to a person who has never been able to see color: you have to feel it to know what it is.
The reason it's hard to define real love is that you cannot experience it with your mind, and definitions are of the mind.
Real love is of the heart, and it's a feeling that is the result of your intention to not only be loved but to be loving.
This is very different than the intention to be loved on its own.
The desire to be loved comes from the ego-wounded part of ourselves, the part that believes we need to get love from others in order to feel filled and worthy — that real love is something we get rather than something we are and something we share.
This is what creates so much confusion regarding love.
Real love is what you are, what your soul is, a spark of the Divine within.
Love is what God/Spirit is.
When your deepest desire is to be loving to yourself and others, this desire opens your heart and you become filled with the love that is as ubiquitous as the air you breathe.
This is real love — the experience of Spirit that fills the emptiness within and lets you know that you are never alone.
How do you know when you are experiencing real, true love with another person?
True love is what we experience when two or more people come together with open hearts already filled with love, and the love from their hearts overflows as it is openly and joyously shared.
If you come to a relationship with a feeling of emptiness and unworthiness, you are unlikely to experience real love. Real love is not the cake — it is the icing on the cake. The cake needs to be the love that comes through you from Spirit, and the icing is the love you share with another or others.
If you expect another's love to be the cake, then you will not experience real love, because you are coming from a closed heart and inner emptiness.
Real love does not need anything from another person.
It is like a waterfall flowing down inside from Spirit, filling the lake within and then flowing out in rivers and streams as it is shared with others. However, when the heart is closed, then the lake is empty and becomes like a bottomless sinkhole, desperately attempting to suck love, attention, and approval from others.
If you want to experience real love within a relationship, you need to open your heart up to allow unconditional love to flow through you.
You need to invite God-which-is-Love into your heart and become filled with it.
The challenge here is that you cannot desire to get love and be loving at the same time. The intent to get love will always lead to a closed heart and controlling behavior, which shuts out love.
The intent to be loving, and to learn what is loving to yourself and others in any given moment, is what opens the heart.
When you choose the intent to be loving with yourself and others, you will experience real, true love.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D., is a psychologist, noted public speaker, workshop leader, educator, chaplain, consultant, and artist who has appeared on many radio and TV shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show.