One of the biggest fallouts of romance is the lack of love.

It could be that maybe you are not ready to be loved. But more often, it is our expectation of love that gets us in trouble.

Two contrasting ideas of love.

The first view of love is that it is an emotion that is generated by perfection, by something that’s amazing, by a very beautiful, exciting and intelligent person. A sense of awe, wonder or joy.

The other view is that love is an emotion you bring to bear on what is imperfect. That is, love is most necessary when we are weak and incomplete. Emotional labour.

If we look around at how our culture uses the word “love”, we might find more contradicting definitions. And so, we get muddled.

We believe that love should be a continual feeling of perfection. Or that we should receive the same quality of love as we offer. Our expectations, unmet, can quickly become a recipe for unjust, anger and unhappiness.

Maybe instead, the first step to a long-term happy relationship begins with making conscious our definition of love, announcing our idiosyncratic meaning and seeing if it’s, after all, a sustainable way to get the love we want.