Love Is Many Shades Of Grey
Are you in love? Is love something you feel every day for a special someone or do you experience love more infrequently? If it is the latter, then you are not in love. If you are in love you know what love feels like, you experience it all the time, it’s part of your everyday life. You feel it when you are loved, or you don’t feel it when you aren’t.
Love is a group of emotions and behaviors marked by emotional intimacy, passion, commitment, and exclusiveness. It often involves close caring, intimacy, trust, passion, attraction, support, and attraction. Love can range from being very light and fleeting to extremely intense, passionate, lasting, and devoted. It is frequently associated with a variety of positive emotional states, such as happiness, excitement, vitality, peace, and joy, but it can also cause negative feelings such as sadness, disappointments, fear, envy, resentment, anxiety, guilt, and even hate. Most of us experience some combination of these four states at different times or in varying degrees on a regular basis. For most of us, love is a more frequent and intense occurrence rather than a light and fleeting experience.
Being in love is healthy, if it produces positive emotions such as joy, happiness, contentment, trust, security, creativity, vitality, balance, safety, security, and pleasure. Loving another person is the same as being loved in return. In a healthy relationship both partners contribute to the emotional well-being of each other and each partner enjoys reciprocating the other person’s positive feelings. These are all the ingredients that make up love.
When love is present and thriving in a relationship, it is not uncommon for one partner to be highly desirable, while the other feels unloved and rejected. In a healthy relationship the lack of love may be perceived as an expression of the partners’ inability to satisfy the other person’s emotional needs. This is because the primary function of love is to contribute to and intensify the other person’s emotional experience. It is the lack of love that can create distance, whereas the primary function of affection is to embrace and connect with another person. Lack of affection creates discomfort within the relationship, whereas the presence of love creates intense feelings of connectedness, security, belongingness and intimacy.
Another way of thinking about love is the way that it relates to our lives at a basic level. At a basic level we desire love and security, which is typically defined as companionship and safety. We want to be loved and have our needs met and we want our companionship to be secure and constant. The desire for love, security, companionship, and regular needs met are then the desires and motivation for pursuing a relationship and commitment with someone else. That is, our basic instincts and motivation are to have love and be loved.
To truly engage in love you must cultivate and nurture the feelings of intimacy, security and connectedness within you and with your partner. When you do this, you will then begin to experience and manifest the positive emotions of love. Intimacy is the most powerful force in the world. It can change your life and the lives of everyone you encounter in your journey.