Studying Love

Love

When I saw you, I was afraid of meeting you.
When I met you, I was afraid of kissing you.
When I kissed you, I was afraid to love you.
Now that I love you, I'm afraid of losing you. 

The above words from a famous soundtrack tells that being in a relationship and loving the partner is certainly not easy. There could be fears, daily stress getting piled up and the mental garbage does not getting cleaned up regularly, ups and downs in life.. so on and so forth.. The reasons could be minor or major, and few or several, but it makes living the love - not so simple. In this blog, I have discussed work of few great people in understanding the love.

I. Referring to Wikipedia, "Love" [in other languages -"agape", "amor", "प्यार", "lieben"] is a cognitive and social phenomenon. Love is an emotion of a strong affection and personal attachment. According to "Triangular theory of love", the three components of love are an intimacy (feelings of attachment), a passion (drives sexual attraction), and a commitment (decision on sharing and being remain with each other in long-term).

II.  John Gottman's work and his book "The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work" outlines seven principles that will reinforce the positive aspects of a relationship and help marriages endure during the rough moments:

1. Enhance Your Love Maps. Knowing the your partner, their dreams, hopes, interest
2. Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration
3. Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away
4. Let Your Partner Influence You
5. Solve Your Solvable Problems
6. Overcome Gridlock. Empathize with the partner's view, even if a compromise cannot be reached
7. Create Shared Meaning

 

III. In the words of Leo Buscaglia, "Life is our greatest possession and love its greatest affirmation". His work emphasized on following ideas:

• Study Love - One must learn what love is, what qualities make up a loving person and see how these are developed. (Perhaps, this article could be my attempt to study love :-) )
• Love Yourself - To love others you must love yourself. You can only give to others what you have yourself.
• Immerse Yourself - A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love.
• Change - A great deterrent to love is a "fear to change". Change is inevitable and so be open to changes in life. One grows in love.
• Be You - The hardest thing in the world is to be something you are not. So, be you!
• Don't Underestimate - Too often the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, are underestimated. All of these have the potential to turn a life to around and accelerate on the path of love.
• Live for Something - It’s not enough to have lived. One should be determined to live for something.

 

IV. As per the book "The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts", there are five languages of love, which are:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

Each individual understand one of the mentioned language in more dominant way and so it becomes important for the partner to recognize the language that his or her partner understands most. And then use that language to generate more love in life and needless to mention, to avoid conflicts in the relationship. Read more about this at following link.

V. Few more interesting references on "Love":

• http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Love
• http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/leo_buscaglia.html
• http://www.5lovelanguages.com/learn-the-languages/the-five-love-languages/

As Leo Buscaglia said "Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life". Let us make our individual lives lovely, loving and lovable...