Advice, Dating Online Personals

Perceptions of Love

If you were asked what love is… what would you say? Your answer to this question would most likely depend on who you are and what experiences you have had with love. Love is one of those topics that either brings negative or positive responses from people and yet it is very often a central part of many people’s lives. Love can bring a lot of pleasure and pain, yet it is something we should try to embrace so that we can experience life more fully. In the context of a loving relationship, there are certain key elements that come to mind.

Often love makes a person think of so many things such as companionship, dating, romance, marriage, children etc. Overall though, the important thing seems to be that we have an opportunity in this lifetime to love and be loved. It may sound like a fairly basic need or want but very often it is hard to achieve. Children grow up and start dating and the search commences to experience and share the all encompassing feeling called love.

As children, a lot of our perceptions of love are first established in the relationships that we have with our parents, our siblings and our friends. We develop male and female role models in our lives, either consciously or unconsciously and our perceptions of love take shape in ways that we may not even understand ourselves. As we grow into adults, these perceptions of love start to surface and get expressed in all different contexts with all kinds of people, in particular, in the relationship that we have with our significant other. Very often, the love that we know is the love that we give.

A person’s perception of love is a delicate combination of how they were raised along with the personal experiences that they have had in their life with love. If a person were able to learn from their negative love experiences and focus on their positive ones, people would be much happier. Too often people carry emotional hurt resulting from past love issues with them and project this negativity into their present relationship and this results in a lot of unhappiness. Sometimes hurtful or painful experiences just need to be properly acknowledged and understood in order for a person to effectively move past them in a positive way.

So, after all is this is said, what is love? Well, love is in the eyes, heart and mind of the beholder. It is that mystical and powerful emotion that brings people together and also draws people apart. To love is to stop and reflect on the people and things that mean the most to us. We need to sometimes pause and take the time to discover and understand other people’s views on love so that we can better understand all that love encompasses.