The reality is that life’s not like Crazy, Stupid, Love, or Fifty Shades of Grey. Finding the right partner can be quite perplexing- especially in your early and late 20s.
Over the years, I’ve taken a closer look at my past relationships and listened a lot about the relationships of close friends, family members, and random people.
People either go above and beyond or do the absolute bare minimum for their relationship, usually, there’s no balance between the two partners. Why is that? I’ve concluded that it’s the way people understand and communicate love.
What is love?
No, don’t say baby don’t hurt me.
Love is an abstract term. There are countless ways for people to explain love and that’s the beauty of it, everyone has their own definition because everyone comprehends love differently.
Today’s media doesn’t describe love properly.
I prefer the connotations of two ancient Greek words that describe love as agape and eros. Many philosophers have tried to explain these two complex words but I’m not here to interpret their meaning and their sayings.
I would say that eros is the initial feeling of attraction after meeting someone and agape is the complete surrender of one’s self to another being.
Since love is used more daily, I would identify it as agape. Whereas the process of falling in love would be the combination of eros and agape.
The dinner that changed my life.
About a year ago, I had the chance to eat dinner with a few doctors, which some of them happened to be psychiatrists.
After we finished our dinner and we were waiting for dessert, we started discussing personal relationships. Discussing with psychiatrists is a very interesting experience, because, most of the time, they’ve mastered the art of phrasing questions properly, and reading between the lines.
We ended up discussing about love and how people express and identify it. After a while, they asked me to describe what I think love is.
Oh boy…that was embarrassing.
I ended up talking about attraction, different love languages, and affection but my immature mind couldn’t properly define the word.
After I finished talking there was silence.
They kindly disagreed with me and it turned out that they had a different understanding of love. I asked them to identify what they think love is. They paused, thought about it for a few seconds, and came to the same conclusion.
Love is blind.
Do you really want to know if you love someone? If so, you need to ask yourself the following question.
You’re with your significant other at your house. They go to sleep and a fire starts, it begins to grow fast to the point where you can’t breathe. Next to you is the door, you can get out or you can risk your life to try and save your significant other.
What do you do?
If you choose the latter- then you can safely say that you truly love your partner.
If you find this scenario very extreme you can also ask yourself the following question.
What is your biggest pet peeve of all time? Got it? Cool.
If your significant other does said pet peeve, do you get mad or do you stop caring? If you’ve answered the latter once again.
DING DING DING!
You’re in love.
After putting myself into this theoretical scenario I started valuing my friendships and romantic relationships differently.
So… are you blindly in love or do you have a 20/20 vision?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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