The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.  ~Mother Teresa

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.  ~Albert Einstein

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.  It is God’s finger on man’s shoulder.  ~Charles Morgan

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover’s arms can only come later when you’re sure they won’t laugh if you trip.  ~Jonathan Carroll, “Outside the Dog Museum”

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  ~Eric Fromm

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  ~Kahlil Gibran

Infatuation is when you think he’s as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners.  Love is when you realize that he’s as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford – but you’ll take him anyway.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook, 1949

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

When love is not madness, it is not love.  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.  ~Malagasy Proverb

Do I love you because you’re beautiful,

Or are you beautiful because I love you?

~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

For you see, each day I love you more

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

~Rosemonde Gerard

Forget love – I’d rather fall in chocolate!  ~Sandra J. Dykes

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.  ~Mark Overby

Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown

Love – a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.  ~Author Unknown

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly.  ~Proverb

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.  ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.  ~Peter Ustinov

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, 1595

The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.  ~Albert Ellis

Love one another and you will be happy.  It’s as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig

Who would give a law to lovers?  Love is unto itself a higher law.  ~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Who, being loved, is poor?  ~Oscar Wilde

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.  ~Henry David Thoreau

To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.  ~Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, “Love Story,” original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye

A baby is born with a need to be loved – and never outgrows it.  ~Frank A. Clark

Shall we compare our hearts to a garden -

with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,

swooping birds and sunshine, rain -

and most importantly, seeds.

~Grey Livingston

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.  ~Robert Heinlein

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it.  You and you alone make me feel that I am alive.  Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.  ~George Moore

We loved with a love that was more than love.  ~Edgar Allan Poe

If I love you, what business is it of yours?  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The hardest-learned lesson:  that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

My debt to you, Belovèd,

Is one I cannot pay

In any coin of any realm

On any reckoning day.

~Jessie B. Rittenhouse

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.  ~Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.  ~Bill Balance

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.  ~Rose Franken

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.  ~Ben Hecht

A bell is no bell ’til you ring it,

A song is no song ’til you sing it,

And love in your heart

Wasn’t put there to stay -

Love isn’t love

‘Til you give it away.

~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, “You Are Sixteen (Reprise)”

(Thanks, Krystel)

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.  ~Swedish Proverb

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.  ~Henry Van Dyke

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Passion makes the world go round.  Love just makes it a safer place.  ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader’s Digest, “Quotable Quotes,” February 2002

Love is no respecter of age or practicality

Neither morality: unabashed

She enters where she will

Unheeding that her immortal fires

Burn up human hearts…

~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.  ~Lord Dewar

When you’re in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.  ~Natalie Clifford Barney

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Love burns across the infinitude.  ~Meriel Stelliger

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer

‘Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.  ~Lord Byron

A hundred hearts would be too few

To carry all my love for you.

~Author Unknown

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots.  ~Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.  ~Lynda Barry

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.  ~Ursula K. LeGuin

Love is not singular except in syllable.  ~Marvin Taylor

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.  ~John Ciardi

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.  ~Douglas Yates

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.  ~Hannah Moore

The past is behind us, love is in front and all around us.  ~Emme Woodhull-Bäche

Ah me! why may not love and life be one?  ~Henry Timrod

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.  ~Robert Browning

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.  ~William Shakespeare, “Sonnet CXVI”

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.  ~Leo Tolstoy

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.  ~Marguerite de Valois

You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from.  ~Werner Erhard

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation.  And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Love me and the world is mine.  ~David Reed

It would be impossible to “love” anyone or anything one knew completely.  Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.  ~Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943

The love game is never called off on account of darkness.  ~Tom Masson

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there’s moonlight all about and there’s no moon above.  ~E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song “Old Devil Moon” in the musical Finian’s Rainbow  (Thanks, Katherine!)

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.  ~David Byrne

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.  ~Robert Frost

You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.  ~Dr. Seuss

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.  ~Zora Neale Hurston

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.  ~Emily Brontë

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.  ~Portuguese Proverb

Will you love me in December as you do in May,

Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?

When my hair has all turned gray,

Will you kiss me then and say,

That you love me in December as you do in May?

~James J. Walker

Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren’t even there before.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is the poetry of the senses.  ~Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game that two can play and both win.  ~Eva Gabor

Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house.  ~Author Unknown

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters.  It is not sufficient for a kite’s dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.  ~Francis Quarles, Emblems

Love is like those second-rate hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby.  ~Paul-Jean Toulet

We don’t believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.  ~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism

It’s hard to defeat a woman in love.  ~Destin Figuier

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.  ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld

Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can’t.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966

Love, and a cough, cannot be hid.  ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651

Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what’s missing.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved.  ~Christopher Paul Rubero

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.  ~Latin Proverb

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,

After the day’s great sun.

~Charles Hanson Towne

A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be.  ~Nicholas de Chamfort

Love is not consolation.  It is light.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights.  If you hear bells, get your ears checked.  ~Erich Segal

Loving is never a waste of time.  ~Astrid Alauda

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.  ~Fyodor Dostoevski

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.  ~William Butler Yeats

Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.  ~Author Unknown

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.  ~James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960

Love is being stupid together.  ~Paul Valery

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.  ~Charles Baudelaire

Open your heart and take us in,

Love – love and me.

~W.E. Henley

On a cloudy night, when nothing seems above, still, there is love.  Always love.  For something, from someone.  It’s never done.  Never.  ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com

Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love.  I’d stepped in it a few times.  ~Rita Rudner

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.  ~Charles du Bos

I love you like crazy, baby

‘Cuz I’d go crazy without you.

~Pixie Foudre

What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another.  ~William Carlos Williams

I learned the real meaning of love.  Love is absolute loyalty.  People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades.  You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them.  And that’s love, even if it doesn’t seem very exciting.  ~Sylvester Stallone

Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,

It passed into thy lifelong regency.

~Gilbert Parker

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.  ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.  ~Plato

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.  ~William Shakespeare

Love floods us with hope.  ~Jareb Teague

Love is like a friendship caught on fire.  In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.  As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.  ~Bruce Lee

Life only starts when love comes.  ~From the movie Bill of Divorcement, 1932

Tell me how many beads there are

In a silver chain

Of evening rain,

Unravelled from the tumbling main,

And threading the eye of a yellow star: -

So many times do I love again.

~Thomas Lovell Beddoes

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.  ~George Jean Nathan

Love makes time pass; time makes love pass.  ~French Proverb

True love stories never have endings.  ~Richard Bach (Thanks, Bonnie)

I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

There’s nothing more freeing than the shackles of love.  ~Emma Racine deFleur

When you’re attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they’re a perfect match.  ~Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle

Platonic love is love from the neck up.  ~Thyra Smater Winsolow

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.  ~Tom Robbins

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.  ~Margaret Atwood

You really shouldn’t say “I love you” unless you mean it.  But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.  People forget.  ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica

Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.  ~John Milton

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.  ~Zelda Fitzgerald

Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.  ~V.F. Calverton

Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.  ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Greg

Lust fades, so you’d better be with someone who can stand you.  ~Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, The Story of Us

Ah! a blessing beyond all fate

My sole mate ’tis my soul mate.

~Pixie Foudre

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.  ~Victor Hugo

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.  ~Pablo Picasso

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down.  That’s the thing about girls.  Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.  ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945

Love means nothing in tennis, but it’s everything in life.  ~Author Unknown

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.  ~Pearl Bailey

Once a man has won a woman’s love, the love is his forever.  He can only lose the woman.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.  ~Germaine Greer

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.  ~Author Unknown

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.  ~Voltaire

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.  ~William Shakespeare

While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

Love is metaphysical gravity.  ~R. Buckminster Fuller

Love is my religion – I could die for it.  ~John Keats

Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.  ~Dan Greenburg

Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion.  ~Author Unknown

Just because somebody doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.  ~Author Unknown

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?  ~Author Unknown

Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.  ~Author Unknown

Love is missing someone whenever you’re apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you’re close in heart.  ~Kay Knudsen

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry.  ~Author Unknown

Sometimes we make love with our eyes.  Sometimes we make love with our hands.  Sometimes we make love with our bodies.  Always we make love with our hearts.  ~Author Unknown

True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall – but you are there to catch them.  ~Author Unknown

You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well.  ~Author Unknown

Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.  ~Author Unknown

Trip over love, you can get up.  Fall in love and you fall forever.  ~Author Unknown

Love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image… otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.  ~Author Unknown

Love is not blind – it sees more, not less.  But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.  ~Julins Gordon

To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world.  ~Author Unknown

No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Today’s Multiple Choice Thought

There is no place where a loving touch so completely compensates for an unskilled hand as in:

   a. the bedroom

   b. the nursery

   c. the garden

   d. all of the above.

I guess, when you get down to it, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand about everywhere except in an airplane cockpit.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

It’s so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you.  ~Author Unknown

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls a romance.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Candle light, moon light, star light,

The brightest glow is from love light.

~Grey Livingston

Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Come live in my heart and pay no rent.  ~Samuel Lover

Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.  ~Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.  ~Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation

I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art.  ~Thomas Moore

Love isn’t blind, it’s retarded.  ~Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men

Free love? as if love is anything but free.  Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.  ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.  ~Miguel de Unamuno

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.  ~Michel de Montaigne

I don’t wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.  ~Javan

Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.  ~Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon  (Thanks, David)

Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men’s behavior is measured with a feminine ruler.  ~Francesca M. Cancian

What I need to live has been given to me by the earth.  Why I need to live has been given to me by you.  ~Author Unknown

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.  ~Claudia Ghandi

Falling in love is so hard on the knees.  ~Aerosmith

In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged.  ~Hans Nouwens

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.  ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain, 1922

In springtime, love is carried on the breeze.  Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head.  ~Emma Racine deFleur

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.  ~G.K. Chesterton

I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long.  If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can play together all night.  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.  ~George Bernard Shaw

The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.  ~Edward Thomas

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.  ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

People love to be in love. Yet “love” is a big word. It’s the biggest word
in the language. Any language. So we have to ask…

What is love, really? Author M. Scott Peck says that love is a decision
not a reaction . It’s a choice, not a response. That may be one of the most
important things anyone could ever say on the subject.

True love is never the result of how another person looks, behaves, or
interacts with us. It is a choice to be loving no matter how that they
looks, behaves or interacts.

This doesn’t mean that true love requires us to stay in a relationship that
is abusive or that is no longer working or that’s not fulfilling. Do not
confuse the words “love” and “relationship.” We are not proving that we love
someone by staying in a relationship. Indeed, there are instances when we
may be proving we love someone by leaving.

So it is not true that love demands that we love long after our own
happiness has disappeared.

If a person is abusive to us, it is abusive to that person to allow their
abuse to continue. For if we allow their abuse to continue, what do we each
them? Yet if we make it clear that the abuse in unacceptable, what then have
they learned?

If we are no longer happy in a relationship, we confront one of the most
important questions in life: Do we have a right to be happy?

The answer is, yes. To remain in a relationship in which you are no longer
happy because “you said you would” only produces unhappiness all the way
around. Maybe it’s time to get out.

Of course, it is true that no one can ever really “get out” of a
relationship. We are always in relationship with each other, and the only
thing that changes is the form the relationship takes.

You cannot end a relationship, you can only change it. So do not think =n
terms of ending your relationship, think in terms of changing it. You =ay
wish to change its form , or you may wish to hold onto the form, but =hange
its content.

Deciding to love someone – truly love them – is a very high choice. It’s
the mark of a master.

Loving someone as a “reaction” is a different kind of experience. It is the
mark of a student.

The danger of loving someone as a reaction is that the one we love may
change. In fact, it is certain that they will.

They may gain weight, or lose it. They may change their ideas about something important to us. And if we are in love with what others bring to us in relationship, we could be headed for enormous disappointment.

So we come to the second big truth about all this: love is not about that
the other brings to you , it is about what you bring to the other. Indeed,
the purpose of all love relationships is to provide us with an opportunity
to decide and to declare, to announce and to express, to become and to
fulfill, Who We Really Are.

This is perhaps another way of restating the first truth, because Who we
Really Are is a choice, not a response. It is a decision, not a reaction
although it is true that most people think it is the other way around.

When I talk to young people about love, I tell them that there are two
questions having to do with life and relationship that everyone could
benefit from asking.

1. Where am I going?

2. Who’s going with me?

It is important to ask these in the right order. Many people switch them
around – and suffer for it the rest of their lives.

First they ask, who is going with me in my life? Then they ask, where am
going? Often, the choice of destination is conditioned and compromised by
the choice of companion. This can make for a very rough journey.

Recently a young woman in her twenties asked me, “What does it feel like to
be in love?” I told her I could not answer for anyone else, but I know what
it feels like to me. It feels like there is only one of us in the room.

When I am with my beloved other, it feels as if there is no place where “I”
end and “she” begins. When I look into her eyes, it is like looking into my
own. When I sense that she is sad, it is as if the sadness pierces my own
heart. When she smiles, the heart of me smiles with her – as her.

I wish I could feel this way about everyone. That is what I am working
toward. I am feeling it with more and more people very day.

A Course in Miracles says, “No special relationships.” In their words, no
one person should be more special to us than another. That is how God
experiences love. There is no condition, and no one is more special than
another.

It is difficult for most people to understand that. How can God loves
all equally, the “good” and the “bad” alike? It is because God does not see
any of us as “good” or “bad.” We are all perfect in God’s eyes, no matter
how we are behaving. Human beings have a long way to go before they can
claim that. Most of us place condition after condition on our love, and we
are very fast to withdraw it when those conditions are not met.

So the third great truth about love is that it knows no conditions. There is
no such thing as “I love you IF…” in God’s world.

The fourth great truth about love is that it knows no limitations . Love is< BR>freedom, experienced. Total and absolute freedom. And so one who loves
another never seeks to restrict or limit that other in any way. This is a
tough one for many people. For many, love translates, roughly, into
“ownership.” Not that this is ever expressed, of course. It is simply felt.
It is a felt sense of “you’re mine.”

Of course, in true love nothing could be further from the truth. And in true
love, such ideas or thoughts are never part of the experience. No one wins
anyone , and no one acts as if they do.

This has major implications, as one might imagine. So now I am going to list
the fifth, and perhaps the most “controversial,” truth about love that I
know.

Love never says no. Not to persons of equal maturity and intelligence. We
are not talking about children here. Let’s limit this discussion to adults.)

No matter what the request of the beloved, love says yes. This does not mean
that personal opinions are not expressed, or personal preferences not
announced. It means that, in the end, a request from the beloved is never
denied. Who are we to deny anyone anything?

Again, that is difficult for many people to grapple with. Yet this is the
way that God loves. I am fond of saying in my lectures and retreats that God
has only one word in her vocabulary. God always says yes.

No matter what you want, no matter what you choose, he never says no.

This idea can be reduced to two-words: God allows.

I believe that the words “God” and “love” are interchangeable, you could
then say, “love allows.”

In the end, that is what love does. Love allows. It never restricts, it
never limits, it never stops, it only allows. In true love relationships,
you get to have what you want.

The final truth about love is that it always renews itself. It never runs
out. So make every day your wedding day in your heart. Even if you are not married. Because you are, you know. To everyone. We are One.