How We Confuse Love With Longing

How do you tell the difference? It’s simple. If you feel a warm glow and your heart expanding, you know it’s love. If it feels like appendicitis in your chest, you’ve fallen in longing.

What Is Love?



Love is the delight you feel in another person’s company, and the joy you feel in your own.

Here are some facts about love – your love checklist:

§ Love feels joyful.

§ It never hurts.

§ Only pain hurts. This includes loss and grieving.

§ You don’t fall in love.

§ Love is a state of being.

§ Love grows over time, as you get to know someone; as you get to know yourself.

§ You can’t love who or what you don’t know.

§ You never stop loving someone you’ve loved.

§ Love is not dependent on someone else.

§ There is only one kind of love – the kind that expands your heart and makes you feel good.

Love is the opposite of fear. Love and fear are the basic emotions; all other emotions stem from love or fear.

The Behaviour, Not The Person



You can love someone but not like them.

It is possible, and OK, to love someone and

– reject their behaviour.

– not want to be with them.

If you love them, you can let them go if you need to or they need you to.

What Is Longing?



Longing is the pain you feel when you’re grieving for something you’ve lost. It is usually a rerun of your past. You fall in longing because you recognize:

Something you believe you’ve lost.

Something you needed once, but may not need now anyway.

An ideal state you would like to be in.

You can fall in longing with your own reflection. This is not love. If you love yourself, you will not fall in longing.

Longing is about loss you haven’t grieved. If you’ve learned to associate love with pain and loss, you interpret the familiar feeling of longing as love. This is dangerous. It can lead you to choose painful relationships.

Remember, love doesn't hurt. Only loss hurts. Love doesn’t cause pain. Loss causes pain.

What To Do



Try to identify your pain. Grieve for what you believe you have lost. Think about whether it’s something you need now anyway. Is it appropriate to your current age and degree of maturity? Assess what you can have now and (re)claim it.

There are three major losses you may be suffering from:

– Mother love,

– Father love and, most important,

– Self love, loss of a sense of self, including loss of self-esteem and self-worth.

Loving Yourself



You do not need mother love or father love as an adult. You are capable of parenting yourself. When you regain your sense of self, you are in your ideal state. If, as an adult, you try to get someone else to mother you, father you or create an idealised state that is not real for you, you are diminishing and compromising your true self. It may be OK to make other compromises in your life, but, if you compromise your self, who you really are, you will not be happy. You will continue to long for that ideal state because you are not being your authentic self, which is ideal for you. Self-sacrifice doesn’t work, although other forms of sacrifice might. You will have pain and conflict in your relationships and in your life because you are not loving yourself, the true self that you long to be reunited with. You may look for this union with a partner, but it is not possible to unite with another person when you are at odds with yourself.

Only you can return to your authentic self to reclaim the joy of being, which isn’t dependent on someone else. Then what you are, on your own, is enough. When you feel this, you can share it with someone else.

You cannot fulfil your potential through someone else.

Falling In Fantasy



When you fall in love, you feel like you know the other person. In fact, you recognize your own reflection. You fall in longing for yourself. You may feel love, but it’s not for that person. It may be for yourself. Don’t waste it by sacrificing your identity or your individuality to what is, as yet, only an illusion of love. When you fall in love you lose your personal boundaries.

This doesn’t mean you can’t grow to love the person you have fallen for, but you will have to come to know them first. Remember, the person you think you know when you first meet them is, in fact, a reflection of yourself.

The reason you create the fantasy/illusion you fall into is to comfort yourself for your loss of self. You try to use love as a painkiller. The purpose of a mature relationship is not to comfort; nor does love kill pain. If you heal your own pain, then you won’t need comforting; then you can have a mature relationship with all the love and joy it brings.

Love and Desire



Loving somebody and wanting them aren’t the same either. If you want someone you don’t know, it’s not love. It’s lust or longing. In itself, lust is a healthy feeling, but, alone, it doesn’t signify a healthy, or viable, relationship. Desire is a feeling between mature people who love each other. Even when there is initial attraction, it develops over time. Much confusion arises in relationships between love and desire. You may love someone dearly, but not want them. Remember what I said about behaviour? You may not like their behaviour or lifestyle. They may not turn you on sexually. Love itself does not make a viable romantic partnership. You also need to be compatible on many levels.

What To Do



Be honest about what you do want and what you don’t want and don’t confuse this with love, which will endure, whatever kind of relationship you choose to have with the other person. If you’re saying, ‘I don’t love you any more,’ then it wasn’t love in the first place.

Obsession



So why is it so hard to let go of a relationship that doesn’t have all the ingredients you need:

– love

– lust

– desire

– compatibility

to name a few? The answer is longing. Back to the painkiller. You’re struggling with one another to heal your pain. You don’t want to face that pain. You’re filling up feelings of emptiness, which come from not having a sense of your own self, by obsessing. Obsession is an addiction. Obsession, in relationships, stems from fear of loss. It also creates more pain.

The pain you feel by facing pain and grieving is sweet and releasing. The pain you feel by denying pain and obsessing is hard and enduring.

You have a choice between love and longing.