What Is Your Definition of Love? What's the meaning of love

As a race, human beings are experiencing a huge transition right now in their consciousness. They are going through a ‘hundredth monkey’ experience. The hundredth monkey is essentially a condition where one monkey discovers something new (like a new tool to use) and that monkey teaches it to another and that one teaches it to another until by the hundredth monkey, there is a shift in the entire species and they all are using the new tool. The transition that is taking place within the human consciousness is in the sector of relationships.

Up until today, relationships have been dysfunctional. So many relationship experts talk about insecure human attachment styles and relationship dynamics like the classic codependent and narcissistic relationship. But they talk about these things as if they are the rarity. They aren’t the rarity. Insecure attachments and narcissistic, codependent dynamics are in fact the past and current human condition. They are the way we do relationships. And all of that is about to change.

This old way of having relationships (and consequently our subconscious definition of love) has been passed down for thousands of years. To understand it, we need to look at how we adopt this style of relationships and definition of love. Because our parents did not receive true love, long before we were born, they entered a kind of self-centered bubble where they had to fight for their needs in all kinds of covert and overt ways. As a result of this, most parents have children in the first place for these self-centered reasons. We are born with the thought and expectation that we will serve a need they have. They do not really take us as a part of themselves and they cannot really embrace us as our unique selves as opposed to what they want us to be. Most of the things they give us are transactional in nature. Because of this dynamic, it is not a true partnership that we have with our parents. They can treat us any way they like without really being attuned to the impact they are having on us. They can treat us in any way they like, whether it is incoming abuse (like shaming) or outgoing abuse (like emotional neglect) and still we are expected to be the one that maintain our connection to them, stays committed to them and puts their needs and desires first. If we do not, we are made out to be the problem child. We are made out to be the self centered one that hurts them. What we learn is that true love is staying committed and connected and putting the other person first no matter what they do or don’t do to us. This is mankind’s current definition of love. It is our definition of unconditional love, so it is the love we are all looking for. Sit with this definition for a minute and see just how erroneous and dangerous this definition is. See just how wide it opens the door for abuse. See how it leads to the emotional experience that love is abuse.

This definition sets up a dynamic whereby we chase unavailable people and abusive people and if they commit to loving us and being connected to us, in order to feel loved, we have to turn the tables. We have to start abusing them and neglecting them and even abandoning them to see if they are going to stay with us and love us and put us first still. If they do, we know that we are loved. There is no safety in our relationships as a result. We are caught in an endless pattern of erratically hurting each other, withdrawing from each other, pushing each other away and desperately clinging to each other.

This definition of love is wrong. To love something is to take it as part of yourself. Love is inclusive. It is the energetic movement towards oneness. When you love something, you energetically pull it towards you and include it as you. If you have grown up with a self centered parent (and I’ll warn you, the parents who say they are selfless and consistently remind you about everything they are doing for you are the most self centered), because they aren’t really concerned with your needs, you inevitably have to fight for your own self-hood as well. You cannot conceptualize of a way to merge; you can only conceptualize of being swallowed by something else. In love, you take the other person’s best interests as part of your best interests and they take your best interests as part of their best interests and closeness is the primary priority in both of your life. This creates the only true safety in relationship. You cannot hurt something that you take as part of yourself without hurting yourself. But not being able to conceptualize of this true form of love, we avoid merging. We build relationships around power struggle. We can only see the potential of us taking the other person’s best interests as our own and prioritizing their needs and desires and them being happy about it, while our needs and desires are unimportant to them. We can only see one-way relationship. We can only see one-way relationship because that is all there was between us and our parents. Because of this, we actually prevent love. We fight to keep ourselves separate but in relationship. We cannot risk the trust of giving ourselves to the other person and them giving themselves to us, so we can never experience the feeling of symbiotic love. We are trapped in Ego and society supports it. It is not love to stay committed to and connected to someone regardless of what they do or don’t do to you. It isn’t love to expect someone to stay connected to you regardless of what you do or don’t do to them.

The actual definition of love is to take something as part of yourself. To do this out of your own free will is not to lose yourself. To do this is to take their best interests as part of your own best interests. It is to commit to the other person. It is to end the war between selves. When we do this, we can see the third option in a needs conflict. We can see the exact decision we need to make for our mutual best interests. This gives rise to trust and security in the relationship. This brings an end to both loneliness and abuse. We are in the process of learning how to love. And the first step is to let go of our faulty definition of love.