ADRIAN: Does true love really exist? If it does then tell me, what is love? My partner and I used to love each other at the beginning, but now we just feel so dry toward each other and I ask myself – where has our love gone? How can I bring it back?
Hi Adrian: Asking what is “Love” is like asking what is “Jump,” – Love is a verb, an action word rather than a noun – therefore like “Jump” we can’t describe how it looks like but we can discuss what it does.
Love is NOT how you feel, love is how you act. When my partner provokes me in some way, I can be angry but still act kindly towards her. When I’m angry I’m not feeling in love, but my kind actions show that I still love her.
So what is love? Love is a choice to act in a caring way towards my partner – even on the days I wake up feeling uncaring.
When your partner says you don’t love her anymore, she doesn’t mean the feelings. She is referring to how you act towards her. The true meaning of love is reflected in how we act and not how we feel.
The greatest lie Hollywood ever told us was that Love is a strong feeling of attraction towards someone. Sadly, you are going to feel for many many people in your life, and it will never mean that you love them.
It doesn’t matter how much you feel for someone, you still haven’t loved them if you haven’t chosen to make their life and happiness as important as yours. You know you love someone when they become the reason why you choose to wake up and go to work every day of your life.
Love doesn’t mean you won’t hurt your partner sometimes, but love means you will come back and say you are sorry because you care for how they feel and you don’t want to be the reason for their sadness. To love is to choose to care.
Love is how much you have chosen to care for me and not how much you feel when you look at me.
If you marry someone simply for how you feel, then the truth is you don’t really care for that person, instead what you really care for is how you feel when you are with that person. That person becomes merely an instrument to caress your feelings.
Feelings in love are like the icing on the cake. A cake has icing but icing is not cake. Love has feelings but feelings are not love. Sometimes the feelings will disappear, but that doesn’t mean the love is gone. That is because love is a decision, it goes nowhere until you decide otherwise.
Your love feelings are not yours because they come and go as they please. But the Love itself is totally yours because it is a decision that will always be where you placed it until you decide to place it somewhere else.
So Adrian if you ask me what love is, I will tell you love is a commitment, a decision. It takes time to make a commitment that lasts for a lifetime. And not everyone deserves your commitment; that is why you should take your time and not be afraid to turn some people down.
However, only when you have made that commitment can you safely say you have loved. Otherwise most people have spent their lives feeling for almost everyone yet loving absolutely no one. You can’t blame them, they thought that feeling was love.
Many love birds think they are having an intimate relationship when all they have is just an intimate experience. It’s just a fling. It’s driven by passions. Yet, as I write in my book Life Capsules for Success
“Passion may make you go fast, but it’s commitment that makes you go far.”
̶ MOFFAT MACHINGURA | Life Capsules for Success
Feelings are the spice of love but commitment is the spine of love.
To answer your question, where has our love gone?…
Since love is a choice, then you can never wake up with your love gone. As long as you haven’t decided to stop loving your partner your love is still with you. The feeling of love can go away, especially when you stop acting kindly towards your partner.
And the best way to bring back that love feeling is to start acting in kind and caring ways toward each other again.
So partners who say, “Our love is gone” don’t really get that they still do love each other, and the loss of feelings that is happening between them can still happen with anyone else that they choose to start another relationship with.
At the beginning of the relationship it is the feeling of love that makes us act caringly towards our partners, but later on in the relationship it is acting caringly that makes us feel in love.
At first we will have to feel in love in order to act lovingly but later we will have to act lovingly in order to feel in love.
So if you are asking, “Where has our love gone?”
The truth is, right now, you still have all the love that you need. You have to stop trying to feel it and just start to act it. It is the actions of love that will bring back the feelings of love.
Let’s go to the next question…
