What is love?
“Baby, don’t hurt me…”.
But, really, what does it mean to love somebody? To be loved BY somebody. This is the question I’ve been struggling with pretty much my entire adult life, but especially so this past year as God has been prying my heart away from a past relationship that has been especially hard for me to let go of.
Up until recently, I thought I had experienced love three times in my adult life. Once in college, where, if I still believed in soul mates, I would be confident he is mine. Then, when I thought I fell in love with the man who is now my ex-husband. And lastly, in the only real relationship I have had in the 9 years of being divorced.
All three relationships ending really shook me in their own, unique way and left me questioning what love even means. But this last relationship I was in really did a number on me and left me more confused than ever. He loved me. At least, I believe he believes he did. And I believed I loved him. So, why then, were we not able to make it work? I know there is a plethora of reasons why we didn’t work, some my fault, some his, some nobody’s fault at all. But I felt so confused and hurt and angry that two people who professed to love each other could end up so broken and hurt by the other.
I ended up getting to a place where to hear a man say he loves me didn’t feel like love. All three relationships left me feeling rejected and abandoned even though they supposedly loved me at some point. I found myself questioning love, itself.
I was confused. How can love feel so awful?
So, for over a year I’ve been on a quest to really understand what love even is and why it seems to elude me. God has shown me a lot about myself…my character, my behaviors, my expectations…that contribute to things not working out in my relationships. But recently it hit me square in the face what the core problem is….
I was believing that their idea and definition of love WAS ACTUALLY LOVE. It didn’t even dawn on me that maybe THEY don’t really know what love is to begin with. They maybe felt warm, fuzzy feelings towards me and confused that with love. Now, don’t get me wrong, that feeling of being in love is important. I’m not negating that. However, that’s not actually love.
And honestly, I don’t think I knew what love was when I was telling them I loved them. My love towards them revolved around how they made me feel, which changed like the tide because, well, we’re fickle creatures and things like sleep and diet and hormones affect how we feel.
So, what is love? Well, let’s go to the ultimate source on the matter:
I Corinthians 13:4-8 (NIV)
So, here’s where I realized what my problem was…I was letting other people define what love is and then tell me that what I was experiencing was actually love. Which is absurd because us broken, fallen humans are not the author of love, therefore, we are not in a place to put our own definition on it.
What I have been realizing is that when I compare how I was “loved” in my past relationships, I was using their definition of love. “I’ve never felt this way about someone before.” or “You make me feel (insert whatever), and that’s how I know I love you” are examples of how the idea of love can be distorted. It is good and important to feel those things in a relationship, but they can’t the standard of what it means to actually love someone.
When I take God’s explanation of what love is and compare it to the men who have told me they loved me, I can see almost immediately that their way of “loving” me wasn’t lining up with how God says love looks.
If I could go back and tell my younger self what love looks like from a man, I feel like I would have saved myself a lot of heartache. I gave them the power to define love to me, and then when that “love” was not manifesting as godly, Biblical love I felt so hurt and confused.
Looking at what I Corinthians 13 says about love, we can see that the essence of love is selflessness. It is centered around our actions, thoughts, and behaviors towards other people.
A profession of love that starts with “I love you because you make me feel…” isn’t really love because the focus is on what the other person is doing for you. It is centered on self. That is a “love” based on how the other person makes you feel. Love based on feelings alone is fragile and unstable because our feelings change on a dime which implies our love can change just as easily.
Love is a verb.
Love is acting towards someone in a way that elevates their needs and wants above your own.
What’s important, though, is that we don’t look for love that encapsulates all of these things in order to meet the standard of love. No, that would require perfection, and the only perfect person to walk this earth was God in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ. Rather, we should be searching for someone who STRIVES to emulate these characteristics. Do they intentionally aim for loving in the way God calls us to love? Because someone who loves with that goal in mind is actually loving.
So, I think I’ve figured out what love is. Turns out the definition was staring me straight in the face the whole time. Now I know what to look for. Now I know what to strive for. I want to love like God calls me to love.
