For months after my own divorce I questioned whether my husband ever loved me, digging into the depths of my soul about what love really was, how it could be there one minute and gone the next. It seemed so destructive, so violent a break. I found a fascinating article online that helped to put this question in perspective - I reprint it here with permission. It's a collection...
"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love." Saul Bellow indicates that the difficulty stems from our lack of training at the real thing when he says, "In expressing love, we belong among the undeveloped countries."
Katherine Anne Porter agrees that love must be learned, noting, "Hate needs no instruction, but only wants to be provoked. Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it."
Columnist Ann Landers, who’s spent a lifetime dealing with people’s notions of love, explains, "Infatuation might lead you to do things you’ll regret later, but love never does. Love is an upper. It makes you look up. It makes you think up. It makes you a better person than you were before."
The bottom line is that love is not about what comes back to us, but what comes out from us.
If we are beginning to grasp what love is not, how can we recognize what love is? Fyodor Dostoevsky explains, "In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love." Perhaps our emphasis on love as a feeling, rather than an activity, is where we’ve gone wrong.
Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, wrote, "Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary is to find the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it."
In the current best-seller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey explains, "Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do; the sacrifices you make, the giving of self. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions."
