Today we are going to step into one of the most beautiful & talked about area of life which is ‘Love’. Although there have been written books about love, movies have been made, poems have been penned; still, love seems to remain a mystery for many of us. We are still struggling with million different questions which revolve around ‘Love’. Questions like what is love, Why do we love somebody, Why there is a longing to be in love, Is love & relationship the same thing, so on and so forth. My idea behind writing this article is to bring a certain level of clarity to this aspect of life so that we can consciously make it happen for ourselves.

What is Love? : There have been many definitions put forth by various poets, writers & philosophers of the modern and ancient times, so there is no point coining a new definition. Let me use a scientific methodology for it. One thing which we are sure about is that ‘Love’ is an experience which happens within our selves and I am sure most of us have experienced it at a certain point in our lives. I assume that most of the people who have gone to schools must have studied the subject called ‘Chemistry’. Now I am gonna take the help of chemistry to explain about love. Inherently all kinds of experience which happen within our body, be it love, hatred, anxiety, angst, blissfulness, ecstasy etc. have a certain chemical basis to it. Which means if I am in love and a doctor takes a blood sample from my body, you will find out that the blood chemistry is in a particular way. Now if the same blood sample is taken when I am angry, the blood chemistry will be in a different way. So basically its a play of different chemical reactions which are happening within our body.

Love is one kind of chemistry, agony is another kind, happiness is another kind and so on. Depending on what kind of chemistry we are producing in our body we will have a particular kind of experience. When we say we are in love, this simply means that ‘at the level of our emotions’ we are feeling utterly pleasant or in another way, when our ‘Emotions turn sweet’, we label it as love.

Why does everyone have a deep longing for love? : I don’t know whether you like Indian food or Italian food, I also don’t know whether you would like to become a doctor, an engineer, a pilot or whatever. But one thing which I am sure of is that you certainly have an urge of belonging to someone, you want to accomplish a certain feeling of ‘oneness’ within and around you. If you haven’t had such feeling, then you are yet to get there, but you will have it for sure at a certain phase of your life. Let’s understand this aspect of ‘Union’ which we want to have in our lives.

The very nature of life is such that it is all ‘Inclusive’. Which means we can not know life by cutting it down into small pieces. We can know life by weaving all different threads together. Let’s talk about love particularly in this context. When we say two people are in love, that means at the level of ‘Emotions’ they have become one and they are willing to even die for each other, which itself signifies the intensity of their bonding. Therefore when you live a life which has certain intensity and reverberation, naturally you will live with the highest level of pleasantness within yourself, and Love is one of the easiest ways to get to that pleasant state. That is the genesis of the seed of love in every human being i.e we want to get to a certain level of life intensity where we are completely blissed out and pleasant within ourselves.

Meaning of love in Modern Perspective? :  Words which I am gonna write here will be harsh, but unfortunately, it’s very applicable in today’s context. The love affair which people have with each other in the modern times is nothing more than a transaction. Let’s understand the word transaction in the present context. This means if you will do this, this & this for me, then I will love you and be with you, otherwise, you may go to hell. Now, this is not said verbally, but both the person expect this from each other. The moment you go a little offside to their expectations, things go haywire and the love affair crumbles.

The very simple reason for such situation is that it was never about love, it was just a transaction which two people were doing with each other, and when you transact there is going to be a friction for sure. It’s like a zero-sum game if I win you lose or vice versa. With the advent of technology, such cases are becoming more and more evident because you can have parallel love affairs running in your Facebook account with those people whom you have never met in your life. So if you don’t like one, you can dump that and switch to another looking for another transaction, and its an endless race with no destination.

Do we necessarily need someone to have a love affair? : The very idea that we need someone to be loving is a big myth. As I described earlier that love is a certain sweetness of your own emotions. If that is so, it has nothing to do with somebody. Love is the way you are, not something which you do. Hence love is your quality, not an act. Now I am not saying that you should be in love with someone. Of course, you should and that very love should be the multiplication of your inherent existing quality of love. If you are not happy & loving within yourself and you expect that by being associated with a person you are gonna get love, then for sure your association will fall apart very soon. This is the reason for the failure of the love affair in many people’s lives. Instead of being an expression of love, they want to squeeze love out of somebody. This is a horrible thing to do.

Just pay little attention & see that when you are loving by your own nature, then people want to get associated with you. But when you want to extract it out of somebody, no one wants to be with you. If you truly become loving within yourself, you won’t even feel the need of loving someone else. You can just fall into a love affair with air and the surroundings.

Is Love a Relationship? : There is a trend which today’s generation particularly the young lot follows. When they fall in love with someone, the first thing they will do is to log into their Facebook account and change their status from ‘Single’ to ‘In Relationship’. In my opinion, that’s a total misunderstanding of the meaning of ‘Love’. When you say you are in a relationship (we will explore relationships in detail in a different article), what you are saying is that you are going to fulfill a certain amount of needs. If you look at the history of time, you will find out that relationships were formed to fulfill a wide variety of needs to survive in the world.

But when it comes to ‘Love’, this is a life affair which is beyond any kind of relationship and needs. Hence calling ‘Love’ as ‘Relationship’ is not appropriate. Love is that quality wherein you are ready to embrace everything which comes your way.

Be in a Self-start mode, not on Push Start: When you say that I can only love a particular person, you are failing the very nature of love. As I mentioned earlier that the nature of love is ‘Inclusiveness’. So if you can love only a single person and exclude the rest, that doesn’t make sense. Having said that the clear distinction which we need to make here is that love is not an action, its a quality. Therefore if you develop this quality of being loving, then with whomsoever you come in touch with, you can do things lovingly.

Secondly be an expression of love rather than extracting love from somebody else. When you are not happy and want to be with somebody to get that happiness and love, then chances of you being loving and happy are very remote. You will always remain in a push start mode, which means until the time you don’t get a third person to transact with, you can’t be loving. So the better & wise choice is to be on a self-start mode, which means it doesn’t matter whether you have someone with you or not, you have consciously chosen to be an expression of love & joy. If this is the state of your being, then you already have unlocked the potential of being eternally loving & peaceful.

Hope you might have enjoyed reading this article. Please reach out in the comment section for more clarity on the subject.

Happy Reading 🙂