Yesterday, we established the fact that the quality of your love engine depends on the quality of fuel you put into it. There is no use in expecting that your love will turn out right if you don’t take responsibility for introducing excellent love fuels into it. Love is not a mystery. The following are some excellent fuels or virtues that will ensure wonderful love outcomes. It is also important to note that these love fuels work best when an individual has made them personal habits, not just occasional actions.
You must also realize that it is better to bring these habits into your love life, rather than trying to develop them while already in love. Your best chance at accomplishing this is by developing these loving dispositions in your day to day platonic friendships. Once these habits have been perfected in a friendship context, they can now be introduced into an intimate relationship context. However, if you are already in an emotional relationship, it isn’t too late to develop them. It will just take greater determination and effort to live them out in practice.
KINDNESS
It is almost impossible not to love a person that is consistently kind to us. The challenge in love, however, is that the more familiar we are with our lover and their proclivities, the less likely we are to be kind toward them. In practice, we have the tendency to treat strangers more kindly than our intimate partners. This pattern must be deliberately reversed if our love lives will succeed. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be kind to outsiders, I am simply saying that we should prioritize insiders over outsiders in the display of kindness. In fact for many of you, if you treat your insiders half as well as you treat outsiders, you are bound to experience a relationship breakthrough.
MEEKNESS
There seems to be a love philosopher in every one of us. Something in all of us wants to feel like we know all there is to know about love. If that were true, the results would have been obvious in our hitch-free love lives. Unfortunately, this isn’t so. The truth is that we all, I inclusive have a lot to learn about love. The second challenge relates to the source of our learning. Some of us know we need to be taught but we aren’t ready to learn from what I believe to be the principal sources of love instruction. The first source is the creator himself, the second source is our lover. Think about it. Who can better teach you about loving a person, like that person themselves? The third source of instruction is those whose love lives are working. Except you are meek and humble enough to learn from these three sources your love life won’t work.
GENTLENESS
I sincerely cannot believe that you can love a person and be rough and shabby in your treatment of them. Most X rated movies promote a violent distortion and perversion of what lovemaking is meant to be. Not too long ago a lady was murdered by her lover during sexual asphyxiation. Could all of these extremes be love? I sincerely doubt it. I take my inspiration from how we treat the material things we love. Don’t we take the utmost care of them? Don’t we handle them delicately? Don’t preserve them specially? How dare we treat the things we love better than the ones we love? It is a cosmic aberration to value the material over the spiritual. No lover in their right minds should tolerate abuse for a second. The gentleness of approach, of speech, and of touch, is a crucial sign of love.
That said, we all must refuse to subscribe to a mystical definition of love. Rather we should subscribe to a practical definition of it. This practical definition of it should be lived out in our lives by being selective of the kind of fuels(attitudes, actions and habits) that we use in the day to day running of our love lives. Those who internalize this lesson will enjoy their love lives to the fullest extent in our love deficient age.
THE GREATEST IS LOVE
