WHAT IS LOVE?

To really love, have to know what love is. As long as we discover its depth, we will grow more in the ability to love. We start from the importance of the family as a vital cell of society. And the family is a community of love, for this is the vital engine of it. Love, not in a poetic sense, but in a unitive and dynamic function between human beings.

If there is anything that can explain man's actions, his union with other people, and therefore the whole family cycle that begins from marriage, that something is love. Love is the creative principle and source, because man was created by love and for love. All manifestations of the human being make this tendency clear: love is what identifies the person, the ability to love is unique to the human being.

The bond between people must be love, the inner principle, permanent strength and the ultimate goal to live, grow and perfect. This might seem like an ideal or very utopian posture in the convulsed times in which we live; however, it  is also very important to remember that although love is the driving force behind the union of man and woman in marriage, and thus the birth of a family, is the will, the mutual consent of the male and a woman, on which marriage is founded, establishing a bond. To really love, have to know what love is. As long as we discover its depth, we will grow more in the capacity to love.

LOVE IS THE ESSENTIAL DYNAMIC OF THE HUMAN BEING.
It is dynamic, because it encompasses different stages, it is expressed in all areas of human personality and throughout our life. It is essential, for it is the beginning, the idea by which man was created and the end for which it exists. This will be the activity of man for all eternity ("Faith and hope are now present, but in the end, there will only be love"). Love is the only reason that justifies the existence of each and every one. The whole universe was created out of love. Love is the supreme act of freedom, the reluctantly human activity by which one person chooses and performs the good of the other.

REQUIREMENTS FOR AUTHENTIC LOVE:

Wanting to love, like an act of human will. Not for convenience or because I like it, I feel like it or I'm interested. 

Seek the good of the other person, which makes her happy and perfects it. Seek the good of the other precisely in terms of the other, not for me, but from me to the other, as it is.

ELEMENTS THAT ARE GIVEN IN LOVE:

a)        Corror in being.

It is the beginning of every love of friendship, of true love. Love has the virtue of "making real" the person we love, is not indifferent to us, we care above all things; what's more, its reality becomes our own reality. ("I wish with all the strength of my soul that you may exist." "How wonderful that you were created!").

  b)   Desire for fullness.
Love not only aspires to the loved one to live, but to live well, to reach its fullness, to attain its perfection, which corresponds exactly to one of the ends of conjugal love. What a big commitment, as a couple, to achieve it!
Only love makes us able to penetrate a person, admire the greatness and nuances it encloses, and empower them by love. Isn't this what we do with that baby we're given in the hospital, even since we know he's on his way? How good it would be to think the same for our partner, anticipating a project to perfect ourselves for all the splendid we can become. ("You won't know everything I'm worth until I can be, next to you, everything I am," that is, "I love you for who you are and what you will become.")
This includes loving him with his flaws, putting the means for imperfections to be overcome. Love means admiration, growth so as not to disappoint the hopes that someone else put in me, from his love. How? Coming out of my own attachment, without absorbing the other, avoiding domination.

c) Delivery.

It is the culmination of love; the one who truly loves is given in the total donation of himself with and from our own being. This involves overcoming our own instincts and thus conquering our own fullness as a person. Man is the only creature that God has loved for himself and cannot find his own fullness but in the surrender of himself to others.

The selfish is incapable of love. Affective maturity expands the ability to love, to get out of "living for me" and to achieve a "living for you". In other ways, "the primacy of you, not for me, but as to you." ("When I met you, an intellectual process was done from outside, into me. Today I love you and that love comes out of the way.")

RECIPROCITY IN LOVE

The first thing who loves is self-approval feels. He knows that he is someone who has an irreplaceable mission and the same goes for the one who knows himself, since he proves that he exists, that his existence is not vain. ("YouTube make me be, I need you to be me").
We require people to endorse our existence. Feeling loved, I am able to bring my abilities to life. Pushed by the love of the one who loves me, I will become who I am. ("This is why I love you and need to be loved"). At this moment comes the freedom to correspond or not to love, and to accept the demands of feeling loved.

NEED FOR CORRESPONDENCE

He is not, in the condition of the human being, to love without wanting to be loved. Love is a matter of two, only in this way you establish a balance. He who loves deserves the correspondence of the other, because generously he donates and because at the same time, he becomes needed from the other.
How to combine selfless love with the idea of being reciprocated?
When we seek the other to love us, we seek their fullness, to develop their capacity to love and, therefore, their good and perfection. It only reaches fullness, when it is given and received in both directions. ("Where there is no love, put love and you will receive love").")

STRENGTH UNITED TO LOVE
Genuine love leads to unity with the loved one, in all fields, affective and spiritual physicist. Even though  we are completely different, we are complementary. "We are one and I seek your good as mine; What happens to you affects me, as if it had happened to me."
Two merges into one, retaining their own identity. “This is the supreme symptom of love: to be side by side, in deep contact and proximity." (Ortega and Gasset)

THE COUPLE'S EMOTIONAL AND EMOTIONAL STABILITY
Love affects all our physical, psychic and spiritual dynamics. It is dec  go, it compromises all our being, body and soul.
Let's look at two points, then:

1.How love is constituted in the couple.
2.What fundamentals we have to work on.

1.How love is constituted in the couple.

Paul E. Charbonneau says in his book "Marriage Preparation Course" that initially one couple attracts, there is some interest and that of course an initial feeling for the other, part of the love to the other. But that there are many factors that will be part of the foundation on which this couple is built, of its interior structure, factors inherent in our own existence such as:

A) Two Psychology’s. Marriage is the union of these two psychologies. Men and women we have two different ways of feeling, acting, of reacting, but each has its own temperament, its own character. Harmonizing the psychologys of both requires all our effort, our attention to understand the other, of our empathy, but in addition to constant communication.

B) Two Personalities. My character is reinforced over time, with the education I received and with the circumstances it goes through. Normally there is no conscious project of education in the mastery of feelings, use of intelligence or exercise of our will.

C) Two Egoisms. I'm getting married to be happy or to make you happy. Let us look back a little, the last five years before our marriage in which there is a progressive independence. Men start working, unless they are financially dependent, to set their own schedules, routines, friendships and priorities, and the same goes for women, their time is less restricted, their schedules, their friendships, no longer asks permission, and at best, warns where they will be; has some economic independence, tastes, chooses their personal look, without anyone's influence. In short, it starts to become independent.
And what happens when we get married: there is a restriction of schedules, activities, even friendships or family relationships. It's like a trailer that goes downhill at full speed and tries to brake, inertia resists.

D) Two different educations that coexist.
If our relationship is based solely on that initial feeling, of two matching structures, it will not resist. Why?
You can start a process of confrontation that leads us to take a distance (Charbonneau, calls it "the abyss in disguise"); this distance leads us to a total divergence, each has its life, its tastes, its own activities. It hurts us at first, but we get used to everything, we even like it.

The shared loneliness. If the circumstances of life are divergent, if from 24 hours. Of the day, we spend 12 to 15 hours alone, it will be difficult for us to establish a real human relationship with our partner. Man on the one hand is accustomed to dealing with commercial, transactional relationships, projecting a more "function" relationship with the couple, without reaching the essence of the person. The woman, on her part, lives in a world of children, her dialogues are in this sense, with children and at best, with friends about children and some other subject that is not transcendent. His mental development in the ageing stage is in a dormant state, undernered by his own circumstances. How many times do we need to talk to adults about what is going on in the world without often providing opportunities for true personal development. It becomes a relationship marked by superficiality. There is no real dialogue, or television supplements this being and chatting with you.

2.What fundamentals we have to work on.

We saw that the personal and vital structure is complicated. How to get out of it?
Our commitment must be real, free, that generates effort, demand, sacrifice, joy and finally peace and for this we must ask ourselves, what is it then love? Love goes beyond a "I like you, I feel cute next to you, you attract me, I wish you".

In me there must be the decision to put my life in your life to be one thing, sacrificing what is necessary. Love does not necessarily involve pleasure, that they say it if not the mothers who wake up 3 or 4 times at night to feed or care for a sick child, we cannot talk about it being a joy that produces us immediate pleasure, yet we do it for love and in the long run this produces many satisfactions.
That, together with the kind of "love" offered to us by the means, let alone happiness based on pleasure, but also in what physical models are presented to us, physical beauty of him and her that generate expectations in the unconscious, the marked muscle, the precious hair, the perfect figure, are not love.

Where then is the basis of love, what does "I love you" mean?
Love is a decision, it is an act of will, what we can call the Law of Convergence: to save love it is necessary for the couple to impose themselves above the divergences, to turn to each other, to accept unity, rejecting estrangement.

Because every moment of our lives is a decision. Choosing is quitting. I prefer, nailing myself at work or leaving early to see my family. Go out with my friends or dedicate to my wife tonight. Get to watch TV or sit down and talk. How you establish love, where and how you handle it, these should be the questions we ask ourselves every day and the answer lie in our own essence. Human beings have three dimensions: physical, psychological and spiritual.

A relationship cannot be based on the physical, the physique deteriorates, this is obvious, but also the psychological begins to fracture, decreases tolerance towards those "small per defects” and habits. Conflicts leave small grooves in our affectivity. Then we can say that the essence lies in that spiritual dimension.
To remain forever, the foundation of our family must be found in that spiritual structure that manifests itself in affectivity, in our sexuality, in the formation of our children.

It is the foundation, the spiritual one, that will sustain the building that we are building today in our family. Once the foundation is laid, we can build rooms, decorate them, plan windows that let in the light and let us see outside, doors to receive and leave us to others. 

By Robert., NSINGA