“All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly …

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.’

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”

-Paulo Coelho-

Loving freely, without trying to own another is the key to evolution as both a person and a couple. However, unfortunately, we poison ourselves with the way we understand love. In fact, we tend to give in, make sacrifices, and fight against ourselves for the well-being of our relationships.

Stop looking for love in others

“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”

– Paulo Coelho-

This is precisely where most of us go wrong. We’re looking for love in others. In effect, we’re looking for a complement to our own deficiencies and insecurities. However, we don’t realize that the only salvation lies within ourselves.

We carry the weight of our lives on the shoulders of others, holding them responsible for our successes and our failures, especially the emotional ones. This leaves us empty, without any sense of pride, or personal satisfaction. Furthermore, we destroy any seeds of healthy love that we could be germinating within ourselves.

Thus, our dependence grows and grows, undoing the envelope of authenticity and emotional identity that we should’ve created within ourselves.

We don’t realize that if we’d only unwrap the bandages that cover our wounds, we’d create a deep and sincere bond with ourselves, as well as the person in front of us.

We have to stop making excuses! Love and relationships always begin, without exception, within ourselves. We need to nourish this area within us. In this way, we’ll see ourselves grow rather than destroy ourselves.

To withdraw from passion or to surrender blindly to it?

Nobody wants their world disrupted. Indeed, some people find passion uncomfortable because they fear it’ll turn their world and all they’ve created upside down.

As a matter of fact, most people live their lives wavering between broken relationships and bad habits for the simple fact that they’re afraid to change. These people have made the popular saying “better the devil you know than the angel you don’t” a dogma, an unbreakable vital law, a guide for their lives.

However, we also meet those who mindlessly surrender, waiting for something or someone to come along and solve all their problems for them. These people place all responsibility for their happiness (and possible unhappiness) on others. For this reason, they spend their lives either being euphoric because something wonderful happened to them, or depressed because something went wrong.

What’s the right attitude? No extremes are good. However, as long as we act in a measured and responsible manner, what we do will give us hope and happiness in our day to day. Only in this way will we be able to love truly and freely.

Screenshots of AJCass

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