The Deepness of Love

Love will never cease to befuddle or amaze me.

It's really riding a rollercoaster. One minute you're high up in the air, flying with the birds and dancing with sunshine, and the next minute, you hit rock bottom where you dwell with the worms of insecurity and unworthiness and the bugs of jealousy. You spend hours in that pit, trying hard to dig or claw your way out.

We all want to be the best for that someone we love and we are sometimes guilty of punishing ourselves harshly if we fail to meet expectations. We sometimes forget that love has no expectations and the expectations that we actually failed to meet our actually ours--not from the one who matters, and when we punish ourselves, we also punish the one we love.

Love is about sharing and reaching for each other. We had this early misconception that love is this wonderful feeling where we literally have hearts in our eyes and nothing can ever go wrong. It's the sharing part that makes it so difficult. People are inherently selfish. But there's nothing wrong with that. We have to learn to love ourselves first before we can learn to love others. Wnfortunately, we have this tendency to love ourselves more--putting our needs and wants above that of other people. It's definitely not what my 15 years of catholic education taught me. It's always a struggle to give and give until it hurts, or until the hurting stops. But it will stop, because that's when it blossoms to love.

Love is not all roses and rainbows, or sweetness and sunshine. Love is also despair and longing or disappointment and frustration. We all go through all of those things. That's how love grows. That's how love survives. We just have to remember, that when we feel ourselves despairing and longing, or being disappointed or frustrated, that there are still roses, rainbows, sweetness and lots of sunshine.