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love isAs a marriage, family, and sexuality therapist, I have had the opportunity to interact with couples, families, and individuals from all walks of life who maintain various beliefs about relationships. Perhaps the most frequent and compelling conversation that emerges in my private practice and work in the community is how people define what love is and what it means to them. Oftentimes in couple's therapy, one of the individuals will pause and lookaround as if gathering his or her thoughts about how to define a concept previously taken for granted. Eventually, one of the two individuals will shout out a phrase and their partner will chime in with their thoughts about what they believe love REALLY is.Along the same lines, I recently conducted a workshop at a local university about the dynamics that exist in a loving relationship. The participants in the workshop came up with myriad ways to define "love" and the types of relationships that they wanted to have with their partners. Here are some of their responses about what love is:"A commitment to someone""Doing things for people that you don't do for everyone else""A strong feeling that you have for another person""Wanting to spend a lot of time with the person""The feeling you get before you reach orgasm during sex""The butterflies I get when I am around the person""The peace I feel when I think about spending time with my husband"Like the couples who I see in my practice, the participants in the workshop spent a great deal of time talking about how love is received and manifested and how it is a product of our families, cultures, and personalities. We discussed how the people around us (i.e. parents, friends, co-workers, etc.) help shape our beliefs and attitudes about what love is, how we love ourselves, and how we love others.From my professional experience in meeting with couples, families, and individuals, I have found that love involves intimacy, passion, commitment, and patience.Intimacy is how we relate, communicate, and express ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and sexually to our partners. Taking time to get to know our individual needs and desires and then sharing our concerns and issues with our partners gives the relationship an opportunity to grow in a healthy way. Intimacy refers to how a person demonstrates "closeness" when he/she is with his or her partner. For my couples, I will typically ask them to do an exercise where they are asked to clarify and articulate their own values about touching/affection, communication styles (i.e. talk/not talk; use of body language and gestures), assertiveness, initiation, and sexual expression. As the couples reveal their likes/dislikes, challenges/strengths, and values about the ways they are intimate with one another, they discover that many of their issues have gone unresolved because they (1) didn't take the time to find out their partner's beliefs/attitudes and/or (2) they didn't have the "tools" (i.e. use of reflective listening, empathy, acknowledgement of differences, etc.) to effectively express themselves to one another.Intimacy comes from holding a partner's hand, giving each other bubble baths, caressing each other's hair, watching television together, walking in the park together, eating together, reading a favorite book and sharing ideas, going shopping together, sitting quietly together in the living room, attending a church together, etc. Quality time (QT) is a term that many people use in order to signify the amount of time and intimacy that is present in a relationship. Using QT to get to know our partners on an intimate level is needed for a loving relationship.Passion is the driving force or motivation experienced by individuals to initiate, sustain, change, or sever a relationship. It's the excitement, enthusiasm, and zeal that we feel when we are with our partners. When passion has waned or no longer exists, the relationship becomes strained unless the passion is rediscovered or reshaped into a new and meaningful option. In many relationships, passion usually starts out very strong because we are very interested in learning about our partners and spending time with them. We often may feel the "butterflies" or do things that we may not normally do (i.e. drive across town to see each another, send flowers, write poetry, etc.) in order to feel closer to that special someone. I once counseled a man who indicated that he felt so passionate about a former lover that after spending several hours on the phone with her, he got into his car at 2 a.m. and drove 400 miles to bring her the morning paper and breakfast in bed.Commitment is the type of bond that we have with someone else. How close or distant we feel to a person is another way to identify this component of love. Commitment can be explicit (i.e. expressing to one another that you feel a strong connection that is physical, emotional, spiritual, and/or sexual) or implicit (i.e. you assume there is an agreement that you are attached physically, emotionally, spiritually and/or sexually). In my practice, I have found that couples with strong commitment or attachment bonds usually communicate with one another either verbally or non-verbally about their level of commitment. Those couples experiencing difficulty typically don't identify to their partners the level or the type of commitment that they have. Loving someone is identifying how you feel about the different forms of commitment and then articulating these feelings to your partner. A person can be physically committed (abstaining from kissing or having sex with anyone else), but feel emotionally unattached to his or her primary partner. On the other hand, one could feel emotionally attached to a primary partner but be sexually connected to someone else. If the relationship is important to you, take time out to figure out how you feel about YOU being in a relationship and then take time to find out how your partner feels.Patience is the final component of love. Loving ourselves requires us to be patient with learning about ourselves through life experiences. Similarly, loving our partners requires us to be patient with them as they learn life's lessons by experience. Being patient with our partners may be difficult if we are not patient with ourselves. For example, I have spent time with many couples who have been unwilling to give their partners time to figure out how they feel about the relationship, about living in their parents' house, having children, getting a new job, moving, etc. They pressure themselves and their partners to make uninformed or hasty decisions that typically end up straining their relationships. It is important to keep in mind that people process different ideas at different rates and we need to afford them and ourselves the latitude to make good decisions.Healthy, loving relationships involve intimacy, passion, commitment, and patience. "True" love begins when we take the time to figure out how we feel physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually about our individual selves and our partners. Love can encompass all those things mentioned before and it is important that we understand what love means to us as well as what it means to our partners. I think that is so very true! In order for love to work, all those parts have to be intact. Without, patience, passion, intimacy, and commitment, the love will eventually die! This was a very good article!love is base on respect, trust, and understanding that why most realationship don't work cause parnter forgat that! Report AbuseYou can't forget the spiritual component. No matter what your beliefs, LOVE in itself is much deeper than just an emotional fondness. There has to be a spiritual connection (in my opinion) for it to qualify as love. Report AbuseThis was an excellent article. Very well written. I agreed with the information & I think it was great how the author articulated the meaning of Love. I think it's important that individuals understand each concept and create a balance between them in a loving relationship. Report AbuseThis is a well written article...... so much so that i know that i have aleast loved once in my life...... i felt all those things about my lover and whom i thougt was my friend...... but i guess he didn't feel the same about me...... This article helped me to know that i am capable of love on all levels.... love aint always what it seemsfirst off if love was based on trust and respect why do people cheatif people love each other they wouldnt leave "the love of their life" behind with a kid!but nah i dont belive in love...not anymore anywayzfound this cars layout at HOT FreeLayouts.com :: MyHotComments