Alex Shalman . comPractical Personal Development

This article is part of The Virtuous Human Series.

Love (noun) – A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

Love (verb) – To give of oneself, and ones time, energy, and resources fully to another person in the mental, physical, and spiritual sense.

“The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.”
~William Somerset Maugham

What love isn’t.

When I close my eyes I can picture our first date, as vividly as if I was still there with her. The world looked like a tunnel, and the only things in it were her, me, and the awesome peanut butter shake in between us.

Outside of us all I heard was white noise, which was the buzzing of the other patrons in the restaurant. She looked so beautiful in her white dress and her platinum blond hair. Her eyes sparkled like Swarovski crystals.

When she talked each word penetrated me deeply. When I talked, she hung onto every syllable. The communication was full of proactive listening, coupled with a perfect understanding, and a deep desire for one another.

As beautiful and memorable as this moment is, it isn’t love. This moment is the realization of a perfect evening as a beautiful work of art, created by two resonating entities. The evening was perfect, but love isn’t about pink colored glasses, champagne toasts, and cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles.

What love is.

In the opening of this article I defined love as both a noun and a verb. In order for one to achieve love the noun, one must perform love the action. As with any action, love is also a conscious choice that we are all capable of.

Rabbi Burger of Aish HaTorah made a good point when I was in Israel. He said that we pick people with whom we will be together with for purely selfish reasons. Whether we are attracted to them, they have money, are kind and compassionate, or share our goals — we pick for selfish reasons.

However, after the choice is made, and the marriage is finalized, the only way to continue workability is to love. Love being an unselfish giving of oneself to the person we’re married to.

A tangent on marriages.

Up until very recently in human history marriages operated as a prearranged union. People were introduced and married in a short span of time, at which point they began their life and learned to love each other. This method was much more effective in keeping couples together as compared to the modern day methods and rampant divorce rates. Even in relationships that we would deem less than ideal the couples put in the time to make it work and ultimately stayed together.

I know this is a gross generalization and there were likely many couples without workability that stayed together because divorce was not an easy option. It’s the easiness of the option to divorce that prevents people from putting in the work, and putting in the love, in order to co-create a relationship that transcend moments of anger, doubt, and frustration.

I would imagine that there are more couples that currently divorce on a whim as compared to couples that used to be together without workability. That discipline, and stead fastness, that requires a person to make things work out is the stuff that love is made of.

Remember: Love is a conscious choice, so if you’re missing the love in any of your relationships, you have the option to love consciously. We don’t just fall in love, unable to get up again. Rather we are able to control it, and channel it towards the people that we deem worthy of it.

This post is part of The Virtuous Human Series. There will be many articles in this series — make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!