To Love and to Be In Love

By Victoria Leal

When you love someone, you primarily love them because of what they bring to your life. You love them because they make you happy, because you are grateful to them for what they bring to YOUR life. You love them for what they say and do to make your life a little more pleasant. You love them for the joy and happiness they bring to your life and how they make you feel about you.

When you love someone, it’s all about YOU!
When you are In Love with someone, it’s about what you can bring to their life. Being in love with someone causes you to do and say the things that will bring about joy and happiness in their lives. When you are in love with someone, you will do and say things that will make their lives more pleasant. You look for ways to make them feel good about themselves.
When you are in love with someone, it’s all about THEM!

The most wonderful experience that you can have is to love someone and also be in love with them because your needs are being fulfilled by loving them and you in turn fulfill their needs by being in love with them. When you both love each other and are both in love with each other, the cycle is complete.

When you love someone and are in love with them and they love you but they are not in love with you, eventually the relationship will become one-sided. When this happens, the person that is in love will begin to feel the effects of not having their needs fulfilled. In other words, they are doing all of the “giving” of support to their partner, but they are not “receiving” the support they need from their partner.

Once this point is reached and their need for emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual support are not being met, they tend to feel as though they are being taken for granted, or that their partner does not care as much about their happiness as they do their own, and the feelings of wanting to make your partner’s life easier, more pleasant begin to dissipate…hence we have the term “falling out of love” with them.

In the beginning of love, it has become more acceptable to say that you are “falling in love” with someone rather than to just come right out and say “I love you”! When you do that, the other person may doubt your love for them. Because they don’t yet love you, they can’t understand how you can love them. However, if they love you also, then when you first tell them that you love them, it brightens up their world and the two of you now have a starting place for something beautiful.

The beginning of love is just love. When you first realize that you love someone, you love them and then you begin to fall in love with them. And the two can happen instantaneously. Think about it, in the beginning of every relationship, we are looking at how this relationship will benefit us; how happy it will make us; how attracted to them WE are; how being in this relationship makes us feel and more importantly, how the other person makes us feel. To be honest, it’s really all about US.

As we begin to fall in love with someone, we begin to think more about them and what will make them happy. We begin to do things that will please them and make their lives happy, peaceful, and more at ease. But first, we will have taken into consideration our own happiness factor before we allow ourselves to fall in love. And it’s important to note here that time is not a factor. You feel what you feel, at the moment you feel it. But because we have been conditioned to live in fear, we believe and others are quick to advise us to “Take Your Time.”

Others are quick to say that what you feel is just infatuation or worse yet, they attempt to take what you feel and hold it up against the Bible’s definition of love, which most find impossible to live up to, so you begin to doubt yourself, to doubt what it is that you feel, for someone else, in your heart. Learn to trust your heart and to trust your instincts about what you feel. What you feel in your heart is real and it is no one else’s place to define how you feel.

In case you’re wondering, Yes, I definitely believe in love at first sight and if you saw that person through the eyes of love instead of through the eyes of fear, you would too. In order to experience the most beautiful, profound love, you must not be afraid. Do not be afraid to open your heart and give your all, for this is truly the only way that you will know a love so complete, that it will blow your mind! And if you do open your heart and give all that you have to give and it doesn’t work out, you just have to keep going, realizing that you are that much closer to finding the man or woman of your dreams…trust me on this!

If you can realize the beauty that is you, the essence of all that is good, then you will eliminate heartache from your life. After all, why would you want someone who doesn’t want you? You are God’s most spectacular creation and you deserve to be loved in the grandest way. And yes, if it does not work, it may hurt for a while but you move on. This does not mean that you did not really love; it just means that you were not in love with the right person and the more time you spend with the “wrong” one, you are taking precious moments away from the “right” one.

So, do not be afraid to love; do not hold the “New” person in your life responsible for what the “Old” person has done. Do not shield your heart for fear of it being broken…Open up, Forgive, Let go of past hurts and pain, Live, and Love to the fullest extent and you will draw unto you that which you so richly deserve, which is someone who will love you and be in love with you…totally and completely!

Victoria Leal is the Owner of Reality Check.bravehost.com. To find helpful information on how to live the kind of life you deserve, please visit: http://realitycheck.bravehost.com This article is copyright 2007 by Victoria Leal and may be reprinted in it's entirety as long as this byline and copyright statement are included.