Love is deeply rooted in a person's perception of another's value. That view, while aware to advantages, comforts enjoyed, or profits inherent to the relationship, is not what constitutes love. The value of an individual viewed through the lens of love is priceless. Love views a person's value specific to the intrinsic character relative to the person's uniqueness, and a clear view of the person's ultimate potential. Real love does not derive its value for an individual from accomodating attributes, it sees the best, the divine, the ultimate in the individual. Often, this perspective also fuels the flames for self improvement in the one who loves. This unique perspective translates into feelings. These feelings then motivate outward behavior.
Love can also work in the opposite direction. Behave in ways that demonstrate love, and practiced long enough, those experiences will cultivate a paradigm shift past ego and selfishness. It will unearth, to our view, the true composition and value of other people. We will find the good in people. Once gratitude starts bolstersing an individual's view of another's value it will inspire the bonding and motivating feelings of love within the honest heart. People can grow to love others.
Love, contrary to popular belief, is not irrational. It is the epitome of reason and rationality, even though, like most all things, it too can be corrupted. When perception gives way to feeling, love as a feeling becomes a most compelling and motivating force. However, make no mistake, love is not unbridled passion or desire. Many allow their feelings to boil over rational restraint and reasonable boundaries. Many romanticise the heart's dominion over the head. Make no mistake, feelings don't think, they don't take anything into consideration relative to consequence, agency, or futurity. Your feeler feels and your thinker thinks. For love to flourish, both must be active. Feelings when run-a-muck, soon develop into heartaches and tragedies. Something which starts off as good and wholesome can soon become twisted and destructive if left without moorings.
True love has a specific objective, design, and purpose. True love carries a discernable, guiding motive which shapes our behavior to a specific end. When we love someone we seek to protect them from evil. We seek to serve and/or provide for their best interests and outcomes. It means we desire, and work, for the best, for them. We encourage the best in that individual, for their happiness sake, which also brings us happiness. As a result, someone who is truly loving, in no way intentionally seeks to override, enslave, or control the other individual. Furthermore, social behavior, employed to demonstrate love and promote greater happiness, is never manipulative, deceptive, or coercive. Social behaviors once built upon these tenets naturally derive edifying and uplifting practices. When our feelings or behaviors become irrational to these manifest foundational points, it is no longer love what we feel or express. It is something else altogether, it is lust.
Lust is a term often confused, and in certain instances purposely counterfeit to love. Lust is strongly wanting a thing for selfish and/or improper purposes, and usually in improper, unjust, and inequitable means.
Love on the other hand is a virtue. It is a moral code of thought, feeling, and action. Where lust is unjust, as it seeks to take what isn't theirs, or in unfair ways, love is just because it does not take at all, it instead gives freely and without strings attached. Love, of it's own free will and choice, chooses to freely give of themself for the benefit of the other. In the economics of relationships, in most cases, love is immediately unfair as it is not an equal exchange, and many times remains that way indefinitely, but love doesn't care about reciprocity. Love cares for the individual.
Reciprocity, though often a wonderful by-product of loving interaction, is not the aim nor the foundational tenet for giving love. Such a motive for loving someone is manipulation. It is manipulation because inherent to the behavior is a lie. Manipulation feigns appreciation, acceptance, and affection. Manipulation lies because it shows itself to put others over self, when in reality it ultimately seeks self over others. Manipulation is a control tactic. It means passively seeking to control a relationship and an individual. These efforts almost always fall short of the intended prize and typically end in very hard feelings as expectations go unfulfilled. Deadlines to retract love, and replace it with hard feelings, are drawn specific to the manipulator's stamina in giving without getting. Instead of looking to bless the inidividual, they seek to bless themselves with the type of individual they desire. In this type of mindset it is impossible to appreciate the person for who and what they are. Contractual love relationships are also counterfeits to loving relationships. They breed manipulation techniques. What makes love, love, is that it is a free gift, ultimately undeserved. Love is not selfish! Love acts out of a benevolent character. It is expressed gladly for the benefit of the person being loved, all the while respecting moral agency. For love, the means are just as important as the ends.
I believe that many people equate love with trust and therefore incorrectly establish expectations and scenarios in their minds which ultimately ruin relationships and bring very hard feelings. Trust is not love. Love is a realist. It sees the potential as well as the actual good in a person but it also sees the less than good and recognizes up to where it is reasonable to trust that individual. A parent may love their two year old, but would you trust an unsupervised two year old to not make themself sick if left alone in a candy store? Would you trust that individual differently if it were your 65 year old grandparent? You may love both, however, the level of trust is dependent upon the level of maturity. Whether it is love between friends, girlfriend-boyfriend, spouses, brothers and sisters, parent to child, romantic love, what have you, equate trust and love and you set yourself up for ruining your perception of those you love.
Many people would argue this point. They would say no, love has to have trust. I understand them, but the definition of trust they refer to is not really trust. Implicit to love is faith. You hope in something which you do not see (a person's ultimate potential - their ideal self) yet when you are in love, you see so much evidence in the person to that end that it is easy to set up expectations. In truth, it is true that anyone can progress to their ultimate potential. However, the path to that ideal is something very different to all people. This is where people often confuse and turn from love to lust. Love is patient. Recognizing the person's failings and accepting them as they are, the loving person helps to edify and assist in the process of progressing towards greater happiness according to the chosen rate of the one being loved, the focus is on the individual being loved.
Lust throws away patience. It tries to force the person into change. The manipulator may mentally and verbally feign to do so out of love but in reality they serve themselves. They seek the beneficial circumstances of having a changed loved one and what that translates for them. The focus is on the one doing the lusting.
Here's a hypothetical example. Two parents, believing themselves to love their children, receive a poor report from the child's teacher on the child's school work. One parent takes the time to work with the child in improving their grades. Relating with the child, the parent finds out that the child has unaddressed concerns that are distracting the child's efforts. Tending to the child's needs first, the parent assists the child by helping to resolve their concerns, which in turn give the child greater reason and capacity to do better and realize their potential. The patience exerted in this scenario is personal, edifying, and specific directed for the child. It is love. The parent's sacrifice demonstrates appreciation for the child, acceptance of the child, and affection for the child.
The second parent, upon receiving the news from school, takes out a belt and after scolding the child and telling them that they are lazy threatens the child with a couple of lashings unless they get their grades up. This treatment is based on controlling the child's behavior but doesn't take the child's perspective, understanding, and capacity into account. It has nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the parent actualizing a change in the situation. This is not a demonstration of love. This is a demonstration of lust. A certain end result is being sought out by improper means. These means discount the person at the heart of the matter - the child. These actions do not show appreciation for the child, they actually discount the child's actual internal state. These actions do not show affection for the child, they actually demonstrate aversion for who they are and instead of affection threaten violence. These actions do not show acceptance. Opposite to acceptance it demonstrates clear rejection. There is no distinction between the value of the child and the value of the grades they produce.
The same concepts of love and lust are played out in every important distinction of human relationships. Yes, even, and I would say especially, in romantic relationships.
In appreciating the good in individuals it does not mean that we polarize our vision to their habits, choices, and present character. Love in truth is not blind. Love recognizes and sees them clearly for who they are. We accept them for all that they are, in the present, a conglomerate of all their good and bad choices. It is important to not misunderstand that condoning or accepting anything bad so as to in that way show someone acceptance is never a loving behavior. It is something quite different altogether. To help fortify a behavior that perpetuates baseness in an individual is to help develop the worst in an individual and ultimately works towards the eventual unhappiness of the individual. That is definitely not love.
Love means that we recognize the great good a person holds and desire greater happiness for them. How much you are willing to invest in an individual demonstrates how much you value them, and it shows how you see them. If you are not willing to offer all that you are, in truth and goodness, then you do not love them fully, you love yourself, something, or someone else, more.Love grows over time because relationships provide greater insight into a person's true value also providing for more reasons to be grateful for knowing the other individual. Relationships are strained and break over time when they are built on obtaining inwardly self interested expectations instead of giving outwardly personalized and needed sincere attention and effort.
Love germinates from the seeds of gratitude. Appreciation is the natural fruit of that plant. Appreciation without expression is impotent, therefore affections which consequently demonstrate acceptance are needed if love is to be communicated and understood. And yes, it does need to be communicated, verbally as well as through mutually recognizable mediums of actions. The truth is that the person imbued with love wants to demonstrate it because it is not for self but for the happiness of the other. Also, mind reading is not an ability human beings poses, demonstating love means that we share how we feel using the language of affection, tailored of necessity, not to the way we would like it to be shared with us, but tailored to the fit and the form most understood by the person to whom we would show love. After all, we show love not for our benefit, but for theirs. That's worth repeating, love is expressed for the sake of others. It makes no sense to say I love you in english to someone who only speaks Japanese, just because you speak english. If love is difficult to express it shows that we love ourselves, our pride, or something else more than the individual.
Ultimately, love does not take, it gives. Love is unselfish. Love does not keep score. The expense in sacrifice and effort for the loved one is swallowed up in the desire to do all that one can to help that individual grow to the full measure of their capacity for true happiness. Love has to be all consuming as a result of the imperfect nature of humankind. Love necessitates longsuffering. It requires patience. It is kind. It inspires. Love is quick to forgive and forget. Love does not behave itself unseemingly. Love has no need for competition. Love has no need for pride. Love does not make itself out to be more than it is. Love carries no contention. Love is a choice. A choice that permeates the feelings. Feelings that make it easy to behave charitably towards someone who may or may not at face value deserve it.
Love as a choice therefore does not die, it can only be smothered by individuals who choose to murder it off by behaving in unloving ways and refusing to see the value of the individuals they once loved. Kill gratitude for another person and you kill the sustenance for any and all feelings of love. Recycle the mistakes, faults, and errors of an individual long enough in your head and you leave no room for any thoughts of gratitude, for the good they have or do. Cultivate criticizm and its cancerous properties will shrivel up any feelings of love until they are all dead. In essence, what a person does, when they do these things, is convince themself that the person they use to love is really of insufficient value for them. Inherent to that statement is the fact that the only way to kill the feelings of love is to become self centered, selfish, and self serving.
People often lie to themselves. They often make excuses for incorrect behavior so to justify themselves. What we don't instinctively realize is that if we play the audio and visual enough times in out head, our feelings will start to conform, regardless of the truth. Once our feelings conform, whenever relevant stimuli are present our feelings almost instinctively motivate us to action. People don't fall out of love. When love dies its because it was premeditated murder. They were pressing rewind far before they started showing signs.
It is a natural feeling to be hurt by expectations that go unfulfilled. However, it is insanity and unatural for us to expect things that are untrue. Unfortunately, people often lie to themselves rather than face uncomfortable realizations. When expectations of reciprocity are drawn as a basis for love, we set ourselves up for a lot of hurt feelings. Following that same train of thought, we have no basis for loving, we have plenty of reasons why not to love, we have plenty of reasons as to why that person is worthless to us, and upon that premise we shape our feelings by replaying all the things that we do good for that individual, and pitting them against all the things the other does which are hurtful. Feeling justified, eventually we do something uncouth, or we cut ties and run to seemingly better prospects. This scenario is not love, it is contractual consumerism, where objects are bought and sold at a price, consumed and/or disposed of depending on gratification and pleasure. Inherent to this mindset is the objectification of human beings. Relegated to objects we don't care about them, their feelings, their past, their present, their futures. Just as love is a choice, so too is ending love. Unfortunately, people often would rather lie to themselves and defer ability so that they need not accept responsibility.
This perspective is a means to keep real motives hidden. Lusts unfulfilled, contractually minded individuals when they do not receive what they originally believed they could acquire alway cut bait, bail, and move on to finding what they want, where they think they can find it. Love is not contractual. Reciprocity is contractual. Love might have a tendency to lead to feelings and behavior of reciprocity but love is not reciprocity. Love is charitable. Charity is not contractual, that's what makes it charity.
Finally, the principle of love is the same in all the varying modes of human relations. Romantic love is no different in principle, than the love between a father and son. While expressions of affection, acceptance, and appreciation may in truth vary, love is the same in all instances, what differs are the appropriately practiced behaviors. Behaviorally, love is always demonstrating appreciation and acceptance, through some act of affection. However, affections must be designed and demonstrated according to the requirements of the individual respectful to the relationship. That is why certain behaviors are inappropriate without the correct standing as to the association between two individuals. That is why we show love to our siblings differently than we do our spouse, or children, or individually from person to person.
One last note, married couples express affection at a level of physical intimacy that outside of matrimony would be detrimental to a person's physical and emotional stability. This is due to the fact that such a relationship is formed with the determined and publically expressed commitment to always remain together and love the other individual. That physical expression of intimacy within marriage when demonstrating appreciation, affection, and acceptance for the spouse inspires a unity unparalleled in human relationships and develops motivation to persist at progressing to become the best of oneself for each other. If those intimacies ever become selfish and self serving they have an opposite effect, consequently driving emotional wedges which destroy individuals and relationships. Physical intimacies without the marriage commitment are grossly damaging. They perpetuate a selfish carnal appetite which ever increases yet can never remain satiated, and it cheapens the feelings of worth a person carries for oneself. Without the longstanding commitment of marriage, such acts objectify people as means to a physically pleasurable end. Physical intimacy biologically carry a chemical mechanism meant to form bonding feelings. When people move on from physically intimate relationships, individuals lose a sense of affection, appreciation, and acceptance. Such results often lead many to believe that they are consequently of less worth. These consequences bring struggle and unhappiness over the longterm, that is why physical intimacies outside of the appropriate bonds of matrimony are the antithesis of showing love. Often in these instances, what is cloaked in the word love, is really the ugliness of lust. It is also another reason for integrity in oaths, vows, and commitments. These things should be seen as important promises reflecting how we esteem others and not something to be taken lightly or easily disolved once made. Inherent to the responsibilities tied to these terms are individuals with real lives and real thoughts and feelings. Too often our mypoic selfishness objectify individuals which deny love and increase self centeredness.
Pornography is a specific venue which amplifies lust and is a tool for destroying love. There is nothing good about it. It is designed to titillate and play on the individual's senses so to overpower restraint and give way to natural passions. It steals the ability for people to put themselves aside for the betterment of others. It heightens appetite which neglects the unique needs of relationships. It detracts from the ability to appreciate, accept, and show genuine affection to all relationships but most especially those of husband and wife.
Lust ultimately depraves the beautiful for the fulfillment of the sensual and selfish. It narrows vision of the worth and beauty of individuals. Lust destroys, isolates, and diminishes. Its culminating end brings unhappiness and misery as passions go unbridled.
Let us not confuse love and lust. Put away lust. Let us bridle our passions that we may be full of love. Cultivate love. It is the greatest rewarder. Love changes people for the better, both the giver and the receiver!
Jeffrey R. Holland How Do I Love Thee? February 15, 2000 BYU Broadcasting
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