The perfect love that people seek – and the imperfect love they live with

We all strive to love and be loved, but in our intimate relationships, there is often a lot of pain and conflicts.  

Although most of us are familiar with moments when we loved freely and openly, it is often difficult for us to maintain such love where it is most important – in our relations with partners. This creates a strange gap between absolute love – that ideal love that we know in our hearts – and relative love, which is so imperfectly manifested in our daily lives.

If love is so beautiful and powerful, then why are human relationships so difficult and require a lot of tension from us? If love is a source of happiness and joy, why is it so difficult for us to reveal it to it in its entirety? When you fall in love, the beauty of this person’s presence in your life is so amazing and joyful that it literally breaks into your heart. 

Similarly, when a friend or loved one dies, all your complaints against him come to zero. You simply feel grateful to him or her for having, as he is, spent some time with you in this world. Pure, unconditional love shines when people put aside their demands and plans and completely open to another person.

Absolute love is not something that we should – or that we could – imitate or fake. It manifests itself naturally when we are completely open – to another person, ourselves, life. In relation to others, this is manifested as a selfless concern. In relation to ourselves, this is recognized as inner confidence and self-acceptance, which warm us from the inside.

Although the human heart is the channel through which our love pours out into the world, this channel is usually full of various rubbish – fearsome protective models of reactions that develop because we do not feel truly loved. When we are fully open to each other, we may get some difficulties: our deepest and darkest wounds, our despair and distrust, our most vulnerable emotional triggers. 

Just as the sun’s heat causes the evaporating water to form clouds, just as the pure openness of love activates the dense clouds of our emotional traumas and reveals the bottlenecks where we are squeezed, where we live in fear and oppose love.

© Fortune, 2020