Love is something everybody is talking about, but the essence of it is really hard to grasp. Love can be defined and expressed in many different ways, but here, for my purposes, I will take a merely practical, down-to-earth approach to the meaning of love.

Love is the perception or feeling that you are a worthy and lovable being. Worthy of life, worthy of happiness, worthy of respect, worthy of treated well, worthy of care, worthy of being heard, worthy of expressing yourself.

This special feeling is the fuel of life, the fundament of everything in your life, the basis of self-esteem, self-respect, care, freedom, happiness, creativity, motivation, meaning, connection, and life purpose. And it is the basis of your ability to treat others the same way, with love, care, and respect.

The Nature of Love

Love, unlike other things in life, has a strange nature, with important implications.

Zero or Infinite

First, the “level of love” in a person can be pretty much only two extremes: zero or infinite. Either you have it, or you don’t. Either you feel it, or you don’t. Either you believe in it or don’t. Either you feel like being worthy or not. There is not much in between. There is one very dominant feeling for each and every one of us in most of our time: feeling worthy or feeling unworthy. Of course, a person with love can have “bad days” and occasional feelings of unworthiness, but these are usually short, temporary, fleeting feelings. And a person without love can have “good days” and occasional feelings of worthiness and love, but these are also usually short and temporary. But the usual, dominant feeling is either love or lovelessness.

You Can’t Lose Love

Another strange quality of love is that it can’t be lost. If you grew up in a loving environment, or if you ever reached the deep experience or state of love, and worthiness, that experience, that state, and feeling will stay with you essentially for all your life. You can pretty much do anything, the feeling will stay with you. Of course, you will need love and care in your life after that too, but you will find it very easy to get it, and very little will be enough. Because you already have and infinite source of love in you, that can’t be taken away, no matter how cruel your current circumstances are.

Very Hard to Get

On the other hand, unfortunately, if you grew up without love, you can live in the most loving and caring environment as an adult, you will find it very difficult to truly receive and embrace the love your environment is giving you. You will very easily get back to the all-too-familiar state of lovelessness and unworthiness. This can be very sad for you, and also very difficult for your otherwise very loving environment (if it exists). If you didn’t experience the state of love and worthiness as a child, it is very hard to reach it as an adult (although very much possible).

Infiniteness

If you live with love, you experience that there is infinite, endless amount of love in you. Therefore, you find it very easy to give it away. It comes very naturally to be loving, caring, and respectful towards others. It not only doesn’t decrease the infinite love in yourself but paradoxically, even strengthens your feeling of love.

On the other hand, if you are living without love, any time you give love to someone, you feel like there is even less left for you to have. You’ll find it very difficult and painful to share it with others.

The Consequences of Love

Whether you feel the love in yourself or not, whether you believe deep down that you are a worthy being or not, it makes all the difference in your thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions in your life. You’ll perceive the world and life altogether very differently if you feel being loved or not.

If you don’t feel like worthy of love, you might find it difficult to relate and connect with others. You might suffer from feelings of shame, anxiety, depression, or rage. You might feel inferior to others, or superior to others. You might struggle with confidence issues. You might struggle with human relationships. You might treat yourself poorly, you might suffer from different kinds of addictions. You might be extremely shy, or extremely arrogant and offensive. You might be jealous, others’ successes might be painful for you. And the list goes on.

On the other hand, if you feel yourself a being worthy of love, it is very likely that you treat yourself and others well, you can relate and connect to others well, you have a healthy self-esteem, you have a healthy level of shame, you are confident, you can respect yourself and others. You can enjoy life, your success, and others’ successes.

The Need and Source of Love

Each and every human being has a deep and essential need for love and care. Period. There is no exception. However, lots people had to adapt to their situation of lovelessness, therefore learned how to live without love, and how to believe that they don’t need love at all. But this is never true.

And this brings us to the very problem of love. Although every person has a “built-in” need for love and care, there are also many built-in mechanisms in our body, brain, and psyche, that makes us incredibly resistant to different conditions and extremely successful to adapting to them. These mechanisms can shape our perceptions, views, and beliefs according to our actual circumstances.

This adaptation is a life-long process, but the fundamental and most powerful part of it happens in our early childhood. The younger we are, the more significance and importance our circumstances and life events have on us. Our perceptions from our first few years are very deeply ingrained in us, and they are very difficult to even notice later on, let alone change them.

Our Understanding of Love

If you grew up in a loving and caring family, with parents being healthy and happy enough to give you the love, care, and respect you needed as a child, it is very likely that self-esteem, love, and care are a natural way of life for you. Therefore, it might be hard for you to understand the distinction that I am trying to paint here about love and lovelessness, because love is so naturally and deeply ingrained in you, that you can’t really imagine, how it might be to grow up and live without it. And you probably don’t know much about shame, anxiety, isolation, depression, and alike. And that’s great, you should be grateful for this.

On the other hand, if you grew up without the essential love, care, and respect that you needed as a child, it is very likely that you have issues with self-esteem, self-respect, loving yourself, and others. It is also very likely that you have experienced periods of intense shame, anxiety, isolation, depression, addiction, and these kinds of awful things in your life. Also, it might be very hard for you to grasp the true essence of love because you rarely experienced it (if ever), and you might find it very difficult to even believe such a thing existing. (I did.) You might find love to be just some made-up stupid fantasy of people, like the Santa Claus. (I did.)

This is the tricky problem of love in my experience. The one who has it doesn’t really know what it is because he or she has never been outside of love. The one who doesn’t have it doesn’t really know what it is because he or she has never been inside of love.

If I want to exaggerate it a bit (and I want), imagine someone who was born blind, and you want to explain him or her how it is and how it feels to see. Quite a challenge, isn’t it? Unlike with vision (a person with a vision can imagine how it is to be blind by closing his or her eyes), with love, it goes both ways. It is very difficult to explain love to someone living without it, but it is just as difficult to explain lovelessness to someone who is living in love. It might be easier to understand and grasp the consequences of love and lovelessness first because the difference between the two can be subtle, unfathomable, and invisible, but the effects can be very significant and far-reaching.

The Transition to Love

I believe the ones who know the most about love are the ones who experienced states of both love and lovelessness. And this is a very rare thing, unfortunately, because getting to the state of love from lovelessness is very difficult. It is a long and hard journey. It takes lots of time, conscious effort, support, and help. But it is very much possible. That’s why I started this blog in the first place because I believe in it.

The people who have walked this path are the ones who really know the difference. They are the ones who can really appreciate love. They are the ones who you should listen to when you want to understand love, life, and happiness better.