When people go on a quest to define love, what they are looking for is how to stay in love. A sustained form of love that would last.

Our version of love did not match with reality. It did not fix all our problems. It did not fulfill us permanently.

The love, that was once, wasn’t there anymore. That our love for our children did not last till the end of the night. That the perfect partner became boring.

Perhaps it is the Disney movies, the love songs, or the version of love we observe from our parents.

If we look at love carefully, we can learn the ingredients.

1. Do you love yourself? Can you enjoy your company in solitude? Can you care for yourself, your needs? And what you need to feel energise and able to offer emotional labour?
2. Do you know how to give love? Do you know how to make others feel understood, seen? Can you choose who you want to offer emotional labour?

This comes in self-awareness, effective communication, deep listening, having the time, energy, and resources to provide.

3. Do you possess the skill of partner well? Are you able to state your annoyance without negative residue? Are you able to be in relationship without repeated issues?

When my parent gave me advice, (to brush my teeth, sleep early, have better posture), I never followed.

Years after years, my back starts to hurt, painful visits to the dentist, and tired mornings, I suffered consequences of ignoring those advice.

But in between, it was unpleasant years of nagging.

The trouble is when we seek to help the people we love, we offer unsolicited advice. We rush, we didn’t get the full context. We forget that they don’t want what we want, they don’t see what we see, they don’t know what we do.

Good advice begins with enrolment. Where do you want to go? Are we on the same journey?

That’s the difference between unwanted and heartfelt advice.

A secret hidden from everyone is that our loved ones, friends and family have experienced trauma in the journey of their life.

We hide these experiences to ourselves because we think that we are the weird ones and our friend just wants to get through a pleasant dinner.

Although the latter might be true, not dealing with these traumatic experiences can result in a sub-optimal life.

We enter new relationships carrying the baggage of past experiences. At times, the past can be beneficial to gain self-awareness, helping us communicate better with a posture of generosity. But at other times, it is contained inside us in the form of a charged emotional field. Ready to leash out when we spot similar patterns from our past.

This disconnects us from the present reality and diverts our mind. We expand effort to repress and suppress these activated charges so as not to look crazy to others.

In our culture of immediacy, we run away from traumas through coping mechanisms. It works, for a certain time, to a certain point.

Solutions are out there. The healing begins with a choice.

Forcing, renouncing and avoiding, do not work. At least not in the long term.

The alternative? Truth.

By understanding, accepting, seeing the cost and the benefit, clearly.

Yes, we get hungry. But when we try the Broccoli test, we realize most of our hunger is emotional hunger. it is an excuse to eat. And then, you get to see that the cost of health is not worth the short-term pleasure. You allow desire to wash through you, get back to present, and make a decision.

This goes for sleeping early, smoking, gaming, or saving.

Of course, you can force your way to sleep early. You can expand effort. And more effort again, tomorrow. Until… it runs out. And you find yourself watching another episode of TV.

The other way is to know that you really want it in the short term. But in the long-term, it’s not worth it. Pause for 3 minutes. Then decide.

The desire comes back. But this time, you welcome it, accept it and it goes away, in a second.

You can self-improve your way through it, or you can understand it.

Your choice.

How long does the euphoria of winning last?

You don’t need to look very far to find some depressed founders, astronauts and Olympians. Even after achieving their goals of selling their company, winning an Olympics, or going to the moon.

Maybe, instead of suffering the journey for a very brief moment of euphoria, why don’t we choose games that we can actually enjoy every moment of.

Winning becomes a sideshow, the cherry on top of the cake.

What do you say, shall we get back to playing?

If you can get it done with less.

If that’s something you hate doing.

If you can do both things well.

Of course, why focus?

Checking your email while studying.

Watching a movie while surfing the internet.

Texting while dating.

Gaming while eating.

The trouble comes when we think that some things are better when we combine them.

It definitely possible to get them done. But I’m not so sure about, doing it well.

For the people, the activities, the work we love, not focusing is a disservice. More almost never makes it better.

Because you can’t be replaced easily.

Because you’ll enjoy it better.

Because they will miss you.

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.