How To Love Someone Happily Ever After
True love can be selfish but for people to evolve, love must too.
Remember the feeling when you first fell in love?
That moment when you looked into each others eyes and felt it’s where you belong. That moment when the world stood still as you stole your first kiss. That moment when everything was just so perfect that you wish you could hold on to it forever?
What wouldn’t we do to bottle those emotions?
That’s love for you.
Surreal and intoxicating, it’s also selfish and addictive. Often when we find the perfect love and the perfect relationship, we want to hold on and do all we can to preserve it as it stands.
But life by nature is about evolution and if we hold too tight to the love, we might just stifle the very person we love.
How then, do we keep this love alive? How do we carry on with life, allow it to evolve and yet, hold on to this flutter.
How do we continue to see people change and yet, love them even more with every passing day?
We Love To Capture The Moment
Going back to the beginning, when we’re truly deeply in love with someone, we begin to love every thing about them.
Whether this be their style, their confidence or even their little quirks and subtle vulnerabilities, we just can’t seem to get enough of them. In fact, even their most annoying habits can seem endearing because in our heart, it’s them we love.
Not what they do, what they say, what they eat, or what they wear, but who they are — just as they are.
And for our partner who shares the same feeling as us, it’s a beautiful feeling for them to know that they’re accepted just as wholly, passionately and graciously as they’ve accepted you.
And somewhere in our hearts, we both want to hold on tight.
And why would we not?
This feeling of undying and unconditional love has to be one of the most surreal moments in life, if not the most.
What’s life worth if not for magical moments such as these?
Yet Life Evolves
Yet no matter how hard we try, life catches up.
Often over time, we sense that the people we love have changed and in desperate efforts to hold on to that love, we try to reign them back.
Sometimes, we feel cheated because they’re no longer the people we first fell for. At other times, we try and and inject moments of happiness by doing things we always loved to do, only to find that maybe they aren’t so much as they used to be. In extreme situations, we also blame our partners for changing so much and perhaps even part ways because our love no longer recognises them.
‘You’ve changed.’
‘You’re not the same anymore.’
‘You’re just not the same person I fell in love with.’
Yes, life evolves.
But isn’t that the whole point of life anyway?
Much as we’d like to hold on to that feeling of lasting love, if we truly love a person, we must want the best for them — for them to experience life freely and wholeheartedly and by virtue of that, feel free to evolve.
For them to know that your love is as conditional now as it was then and that no matter who they go on to become, you’ll be rooting for them.
Or is our love so selfish that to preserve this love, we’d rather cage them and stifle their growth so that throughout their lives, they feel pressured to remain the person they were when we first met. Do we want evolution to fee for them like walking on eggshells lest they choose a path that’s less deserving of your love.
For example, over time, the shy and vulnerable girl you fell for in college might evolve into a confident young women who can make her own decisions. Or the really funny guy who couldn’t stop pulling pranks might have now matured into a rather serious executive.
Do they know that you love them no matter what? Have you told them?
Let’s Preserve The Love
I’m all for preserving love and to me there’s nothing more magical than seeing an old couple walk hand-in-hand knowing that they’ve stood with each other through thick and thin.
Yet for that to happen, our love must be selfless enough to truly understand their journey, their experiences, their changes, their feeling, their emotions and continue to love them no matter what.
When we fall in love with people for who they are, we must seek to love and understand them for who they choose to become. That, in my view is what determines how many miles we walk together.
