Discovery of Love: discovery of ourselves in others

 Discovery of Love is a secret yet to be explored

"Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition." - Alexander Smith

The Discovery of love remains a forever secret as long as we are blind in the fog of self-deception. It is the main reason that causes a broken heart due to the gap between our understanding of love and understanding of self.

When we are deeply loved by someone, we attract attention from that special one by the beautiful side of ourselves. Many times, we do not know what attributes we possess until someone approaches us and tells us how much we are loved for those attributes. We could also be wondering and never get to know how we cope with certain situations until we have experienced some life-changing love affairs because it is only our actual responses to love that define who we really are.

Without love that stimulates various profound interactions in our life, we might never discover our real sense of self that helps us recognize that love, life, and the world associate all types of life hurdles with various human weaknesses. Love is a magic drive to generate problems, challenges, happiness, sadness, and forgiveness. It can create a live test for all. Our faith is tested in love, our character is measured in love, our virtue is tempered in love and our experience is enriched in love. The object of love is only a temporary stop-by where we knock the door and turn the very key to our true inner self.

Not every romantic encounter starts with our good virtue. Many times, it is a bad trait in our personality that attracts love. In this scenario, the bad influence will revengefully attract someone who will be sent to us to teach us a lesson down the road. We will be fatally attracted to that person, due to our lack of certain positive traits or weaknesses in some respect. Sometimes, the teacher is tender and kind, who possesses good virtue and teaches us in patience.   But more often than not, the teacher coming into our life is fierce and lets us see our own defective image in his/her reaction to us.  They will first win our hearts, then take our love away to urge us to face what we need to address in life, like throwing light onto the dark corner of our souls, where our weaknesses lie. We have to move on with hands back handcuffed with a broken heart.

How long it takes to learn the lesson decides how long we need to suffer from love. For example, we could repeatedly be sinking into self-denial, the malicious circle that keeps us from growing into a complete person, that is no matter how we do our best, we keep rejecting ourselves in love. One-sided love is a good example of this. We keep blaming ourselves for not getting love returned and we keep finding excuses for the loved one and think there must be something wrong with ourselves. Without realizing the problem, we continue the one-sided love, and let it destroy our self-respect, precious time, and vital energy in life. But there is an end to the problem. The price is just too high and the lesson is just too costly. Why do not wake up earlier?

We could also take ourselves too seriously in love and blamed loved one for everything when a relationship goes wrong. The very self-centeredness  fosters aggressiveness and manipulations in love. We lose sleep and orchestrate a whole range of things thinking we are madly in love only to find out that we are just playing a self-directed love movie.

Why do not wake up earlier?

By keeping a reasonable distance with a loved one, we learn to stabilize the independence of self. By our willingness to compromise in love relationships, we learn to keep our sense of self-balanced against our commitment in love. By giving our sweet kisses and cozy hugs to loved ones, we learn to take care of our need to express love instead of hiding passions.