Learn to recognize what is love and what is something else

Learn to recognize what is love and what is something else. Some people confuse love with feelings of lust (e.g., purely sexual interest), ownership or control (e.g., co-dependency or manipulative motivators), worry (e.g., over-involved parenting or a spouse always checking up), neediness (e.g., insecurity or low self-esteem) and so forth. Yet, love is only possible when you don't need others to define who you are or need others to conform to your view of the world. Love isn't a tool for using people or binding them to your side; if you find yourself calling such actions "love", then it isn't love.

Acknowledge the breadth of love. Love isn't simply about romance––to define it so narrowly is to deprive yourself of the beauty and full extent of love. Love is a feeling, drive or emotion that we experience in association with people, pursuits and nature, and love can be found in many places, situations and relationships.

Begin by loving yourself. You can only truly love another being when you love yourself properly. Otherwise, you risk spending a lot of your life projecting inner hurts, pain and other negative emotions onto other people, seeing the worst in them so as to avoid facing it inside yourself. Loving yourself is not about putting yourself before others––that's another form of confusion. Loving yourself is about having self-respect, discovering what really makes you tick and spending your life being true to your real talents. It's about not putting yourself down and not comparing yourself to others. Once you learn to love yourself, you will be free of any sense of feeling threatened by others' success (real or apparent) and you will be able to share freely of your love with them.
 
To love truly is not only having a capacity to give love, but also to gracefully open your heart to receive love. Know that you deserve love. You are worthy of love The more you feel the love in your heart, the greater you are able to give more love to others.

• Love is shared between people––our parents and children, siblings, spouses and partners, dates, friends, neighbors, community members and humanity.
• It's found in the passion for the things you do in your life, including work, hobbies, volunteering and the like; it can be found when you're at your most creative, or "in the flow".
• Love happens when you embrace the wonderful awesomeness of life, as you acknowledge how incredible this world really is, how intricate and complex life is.
• Love is found in observing nature, in spending time with our companion animals and in learning about other living beings in the world, beings who often show their own expression of love to those they care for.
• Love is at its most giving when it is altruistic, shown to a stranger we may never meet again.
• Love cannot be pigeonholed––it happens whenever your heart is open to receiving the beauty, wonder and awe of people, beings and happenings around you.

Love those who don't love you. Love teaches you that hateful people are often driven by a lack of self-respect and that they're churned up about all the things they don't like about themselves, causing them to project this hate onto others. Of all people, haters need your compassion most. And it is love that leads to compassionate responses. Where hate is directed toward you, repel it with love and use their hatred as motivation to show that tolerance, kindness and acceptance are better ways to get along in our communities.

Accept risk. You cannot love without accepting that there is always a chance of loss of the love or of being hurt. That is what makes love so powerful though––we risk much because the reward of love is so great. And in losing love at times in life, you learn to appreciate the love you do have even more and you also learn that at times in life, it is better to let go than to force someone to love you. Most importantly, you have a choice. You have a choice to let a loss of love ruin you for all times, perhaps becoming like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, embittered all her life, emotionally stuck at the time of the loss. Or, you can make the choice to learn from hurtful experiences, however difficult the lesson, and move on to discover the many other people who won't reject your love and who will give freely of theirs.

• Think how lucky you are to have people in your life to love.
• Never seek to make an idol out of any person you love. This is likely to lose the person in the long run, as they'll feel pressured to live up to something you've imposed upon them. Let them be who they really are around you––that's a true expression of love.

Make love your eternal thing. Never stop loving other people who are in your life and who come and go. By sharing love around, you create a loving environment and you inspire others to do the same thing. You also show the best reflection of your worth to others when you love. More people showing love in our world means endless forgiveness, a willingness to give people second chances and a commitment to moving humanity forward, ever striving for greater harmony. Jean Anouilh once observed that "love is, above all, the gift of oneself." In giving of the best of who you really are to others in the name of love, you transcend selfish motives and introspection, and truly seek to appreciate others.

• Love is a means by which you start to see things more clearly together, to reach compromises or to collaborate, and to make room for finding a way forward that includes others, not just your ego.
• People become beautiful to you because you love them. In a society obsessed with appearance, it can often seem the other way around but the reality is that love makes a person beautiful and the imperfect perfect.

There are many types of relationships that involve love, but love itself is a common thread to all those relationships. For example: a mother-son relationship is different from the relationship with a best friend, and both these relationships are different from a romantic relationship. But in each of these relationships, each person loves the other (wants the best for the other). Love is the base of the pyramid. On top of the base, we can add other items such as other common interests (in the case of friends) or sex (in the case of romantic relationships). Therefore, relationships can grow and evolve but the love itself is solid and constant. It does not change.

Warnings

• You must love yourself before you can love another. But before you can love yourself, you must know and understand yourself profoundly. This deep understanding of yourself will automatically lead you to love yourself (since you will become aware of your divine essence) and you will also love every other person at that same moment (because you will recognize that same divine essence in every other person).
• Loving others isn't always easy. It's not supposed to be.
• There is always the risk of getting hurt. And if love switches to fear, remember to fully love and trust in your constant decision to choose love over fear.
• Jealousy is a clear sign of fear. Therefore the most appropriate response is to begin loving again (since we cannot love and fear at the same time).
• Realize what you have while you have it, and care for the person you love and trust.
• The idea of romantic love is often fueled by fantasies and much of the romantic love shown in movies and romance novels is unrealistic and causes real mortals to feel inadequate. Be aware that creatively written or filmed romantic love is a thing of art in its own––mere mortals are recommended to see that romantic love has warts. The more expansively you view romantic love, the more accepting you are that romantic love isn't always ideal and the more certain you are about who you are and what matters to you in life, the more likely you'll be to find happiness in romance. Leave those rose colored glasses slightly lifted at all times!
• Never seek to force love. You can try but you'll find fear, neediness and insecurity, not love. Love will come if you're willing to share love, to give of it freely and to expect nothing in return.