Love

How deep is your love? This song has been playing in my head for at least an hour now.

Love comes in many forms. It can be given or taken. Some people are just born with the life that everyone dreams of. They seem to be loved by people everywhere they go. Some are not so fortunate. They have been the ones giving but never getting anything in return.

Whether or not our family is perfect, it really does not matter. We should be grateful for having parents and siblings around us when we are growing up. We may have had fights between siblings for something as small as that beautiful pen or big as the estates of our parents. Everything that we have, we should be grateful for. There are some out there who have been abandoned or orphaned the day they were born.

Humans love to compare between each other. We love to look up to people who are more privileged than us. While this is good for aiming for a better life, we need to strike a balance between what is realistic and what is mere jealousy.

We may be having family members who are always fighting over everything under the sky. While we want to have a peaceful life, we should look at each family member as an individual and also collectively. There is no point comparing with our friends and neighbours. Everyone has their own way of communicating with each other. Having arguments all the time may be better than just keeping silent of all misery.

Just imagine we are a rubber band. It will last longer if it is stretched and let go every now and then. If it is continuously stretched and keep on being stretched, there will come a time when it can no longer withstand the stress. It will break. There need to be space for letting go of all the tension. That space may jolly well mean arguments between family members.

It is always better to let everyone know what we have in mind rather than making people guess. Women have a tendency to make their partners guess. No matter how well their partner may know them, sometimes the guessing game goes overboard. When that happens, we are often not satisfied and say to our partner that they do not love us anymore.

Men, on the other hand, are generally more straight-forward. But there is a problem with them too. They have a thing about being the bread winner of the household. Perhaps it is ego. Perhaps it is just the way they have been brought up, to be responsible over the family. Sometimes, we do feel that men are not such great lovers anymore after marriage. And so, problems arise.

We should understand that relationships move both ways and changes as time goes by. The fairy tale beginning during courtship will soon end when the relationship is brought to another level. After tying the knot, life begins in a different way. While keeping promises is important, we should also prepare for changes to happen. There could be that new home, living with in-laws, having children, and much more to take into consideration. If we are not prepared for these, some serious problems could arise.

If love is what brought a couple together, then love should bring them further. With love, all difficulties can be conquered. With love, we grow better.

But let us not forget the most important person we should love.

Life is as such that we are too busy to remember the most important person in our lives. Self-love is something that we should practice every minute. Whatever anybody says does not matter. All that matters is what we think of ourselves. The only person who will take the last breath with us is none other than ourselves. There is no doubt about that.

So why spend all the time loving somebody else but forgetting to love ourselves? Anybody can steal our heart and disappear forever from our lives. Why are we spending all the effort loving everyone else but not ourselves? Why do we always put ourselves last? We only live once. Make it meaningful.

It is only when we love ourselves, we are able to spread love to the world.

 

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.

Paulo Coelho de Souza (Paulo Coelho), Brazilian lyricist and novelist, 1947-present