#23 - love, revisited

A brilliant man once shared with a room full of people that I was lucky to be a part of, the following on love:

"Love is loving all that a person is and all that a person isn't.  You don't get to choose the parts of a person you like and discard the parts that you don't.  And if you do, thats not really loving them, thats making them into the person that you'd like them to me and denying the rest of them."

Those 3 sentences altered my outlook on loving another person.  How often do we adore all the things we do like about a person initially and shudder inside by turning away from the things we don't like about the person to the point where all the things about them, including the things we did like initially start driving us crazy... A little too often, I think.

The man went on to say, "Do you know why you fall out of love?" to which we all shook our heads back and forth.  He answered, "It's because you stopped sharing yourself with them.  We are so good at  making it seem like they aren't the person that used to make us happy anymore and that they are the ones that have changed.  But its actually us that have stopped sharing ourselves with them." He then went on to say, "Go home and try it out.  Open up a conversation with your partner that you initiate. Share yourself with them.  Do you remember what it was like when you first fell in love?  You would talk on the phone for hours into the middle of the night, but the next day could you even recall what you had talked about all night?  Not likely, but you just remember that feeling of talking to them for hours on end.  You were sharing yourself with them then?"

This man was brilliant and he had a point.  He pointed to something.  That its so easy to cross our arms and with our body language say, "Hey, your not making me happy anymore." But when do we ever stop to consider that we might just have something to do with that?

This point he was onto, is the end of being at the cause of other people for your happiness.

(I found this on the sidewalk one day in 2012.  I often wondered 

how 2 years later this might have made its way onto the street and 

where the people in love might be)