what is genuine love

Susie Wilson- Etiquette Expert 'Love is free yet binds us' 5 September 2015

WHAT IS LOVE What is Love? Genuine love is not dependency There are many kinds of love, like a mother’s, a brother or sister’s, or a friend’s. But here we will be talking about Genuine love is not dependency.

Genuine love is not dependency, two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other. Whilst we all have dependency needs or feelings, dependency - the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being cared for by another in physically healthy adults is pathological, an illness, one of the most common of all psychiatric disorders - 'passive dependent personality disorder'.

What is Love? Genuine love is not dependency

�1

Attributes of a genuine love are ones that reflect our human nature. We are relationship beings, hardwired with inborn strivings for empathic connection.


People with this disorder are so busy seeking to be loved, that they have no energy left to love and always have an inner emptiness, never being fulfilled or having a sense of completeness. They tolerate loneliness poorly and define themselves in terms of their relationships. The relationship is more important than the persons within the relationship. When a relationship breaks down, they will often say "I am nothing now", and will rapidly seek a new relationship to replace the old.

This condition arises from a childhood where there is parental failure to fulfil the needs for affection, attention and care and thus the child fails to develop a sense of inner security and lovability. They then feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having it, cling to it with desperation that leads to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behaviour that destroys the very relationships they are trying to preserve. They lack the basics of self discipline, are impulsive, dishonest, cling to outworn relationships when they should give them up, and lack a sense of responsibility for themselves. They passively look to others, even their children as the source of their happiness and fulfilment, and thus when they are not happy or fulfilled, they feel that others are responsible, consequently they are endlessly angry as expecting another person to make you happy will result in being endlessly disappointed.

Dependency is not concerned with the other person's growth but only their own nourishment. They desire to be happy but don't desire growth, nor are they willing to tolerate the unhappiness, the loneliness and suffering involved in growth.

Dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love, but a form of anti-love. It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure. It works to trap and constrict rather than liberate and grow. It ultimately destroys relationships and people.

Genuine love is not simply giving: it is judicious giving and judicious with-holding as well. It is judicious praising and criticising, arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling as well as comforting. It is leadership.


�2

'Love is free yet binds us' The paradox of love is that it is supremely free yet attaches us with bonds stronger than death. It cannot be bought or sold; there is nothing it cannot face; love is life's greatest blessing.


It thus requires judgment & judgment requires more than instinct, it requires thoughtful & often painful decision-making.

Genuine love certainly is not mothers pushing food onto their overweight children, parents who buy roomfuls of toys or clothes for their children or parents who do not set limits and deny no desires and fail to teach responsibility and self-discipline. Such behaviour is destructive nurturing that ignores the personal growth needs of the other person, usually to meet certain needs of the self.

Genuine love is not a feeling but an action:

The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies cathexis or the experience of cathecting - the process by which an object becomes important to us.

We may cathect with any object, animal, person or even a hobby and often multiple simultaneously, but the fact that we have cathected does not mean we care for that person's development.

Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. In a successful marriage, partners must regularly, routinely & predictably, attend to each other and their relationship no matter how they feel.

This misconception of the "feeling" being love results in all manner of self-deception such as the alcoholic, whose wife and children desperately need his attention at that very moment, sitting in a bar with tears in his eyes, telling the bartender "I really love my family".


�3

what is genuine love

Lifestyle