There’s a difference between loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel.  Let’s start with the easier one: loving how someone makes you feel.  Honestly it’s a difficult distinction to make at the beginning of any relationship (friendship or romantic or even a business) because we are flooded with excitement and feel good hormones that tell us the experience is good so we misinterpret that as feeling good because of that person.  It can be hard to separate what we are feeling from the person so realizing we like the feeling and not necessarily the person can take a while to clarify.  For example, if someone is constantly talking about a topic that excites us, it can be hard to distinguish liking that excitement from liking that person.  The trickier of the two is loving someone.  Loving someone is more than being happy around them or feeling good around them.  Loving someone encompasses accepting every facet of a person even if we don’t like it.  The irony of the simplicity of love is how complex it is.

What does it mean to love someone?  We’re often taught that love means never fighting or pushing and that it’s constant harmony and bliss.  The reality is that love does run on a spectrum, ranging from tolerate to adore to love to the ultimate culmination of power.  In the simplest terms, love is an acceptance of what is—but that doesn’t mean we are complacent and allow bad things to fester.  Love fosters growth in all parties involved because it points out better ways to do things and it enhances our strengths.  While it doesn’t seek to change people, it does encourage change toward the positive.  Love is a union beyond the physical—a physical union doesn’t really require any type of emotional connection so don’t allow physical involvement to cloud this issue either.  Love is an embracing and a protection—it’s a safe haven to incubate life and creativity together.  It’s an allowing of energies to exist as they are but combining to be something greater.

We feel good in other people’s energy, especially energy that is aligned with ours.  It can be easy to misconstrue what that really means.  But given time the rose colored glasses fall away and we need to get honest about what we really feel and distinguish between what we feel with someone versus for someone.  We are meant to manage our energy and guide it toward what feels good, that is true, but we also must maintain clarity about where that’s coming from.  Keep the source internal rather than internal.  Entering a relationship of any kind is an energy exchange and it’s important to be discerning on how we spend our energy.  It’s important to be clear on the purpose and the exchange of energy.  Love is very real, I don’t ever want to diminish or undermine that emotion because it is quite frankly one of the most important emotions we can experience.  As I said, love is on a spectrum, it’s just important to be clear on where we are on that continuum.  Don’t mistake a temporary feeling for such a powerful emotion.  Learn to harness that power and expand love to all.