7 Lessons That Helped Me Learn To Love Again

Loving is great. We all know that. Sharing our love with others could be the most addicting thing possible in the world. However, there are those moments that love crushes us, turning us into shattered pieces pathetically trying to put ourselves back together. I, myself had my fair share of those moments, and I understand how annoying, perhaps even traumatizing all those fluctuating emotions are. Because of this, we sometimes find it easier to refrain from loving again. Don’t get me wrong, we still know that loving is great. I mean that’s what people say right?

People can always remind us how opening ourselves up once again and loving could be truly amazing, but we never really do it. We continue to live our lives normally, except for the part that we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, keeping a safe and secure distance from everyone around us. We end up thinking it’s easier that way. And having this type of lifestyle, this abundance of certainty in our relationships, could arguably be just as addicting as loving, especially for people like me, who have grown anxious with all sorts of relationships.

Nonetheless, I, personally found myself learning how to love again. I’ll be honest, it’s not something any person could just do overnight. I think it takes a conscious effort of to a certain extent, redirecting our brain and emotions, until it becomes second nature once again. This is also why I would understand those who choose to rather live their lives limiting the love they give to others. But for me, I chose otherwise and here are the most important reasons why I did so. I guess it’s nice to know your drive and source of determination before doing something that may change a lot about you. With that said, I highly recommend you to do the same, and I hope these reasons will help with that.

1. Choosing not to love is tiring.

As social beings, loving is generally part of our nature. We are born into a wonderful family that we love and loves us just as much, or even more. We unconsciously develop love for others. I don’t command myself to love someone. I don’t expect you to do so either. And this would mean that if loving is part of our nature, then choosing not to love or even just limiting it is going against our nature. You would have to exert effort in the aspects that seamlessly progressed through your life before. You may not even be able to be who you truly are. Furthermore, the thing with making that choice is that it never ends.

Yes, there will come a time that it seems like it’s natural for you not to love, but I don’t think that’s true. There will be moments that you’d ask yourself, “what if I love them more instead?”, “would it be fun to love again?”, and so much other questions. It’s an endless, vicious, and tiring cycle. But the point is, you will always have a slight memory of how blissful loving was to you, and no matter how much you tell yourself that it’s nice to live not having to go through the pain that comes with loving, you’d probably still never be able to push the choice of loving away.

2. To avoid loving is to deprive others of your love.

This is something most people would oversee when they choose to limit the love they give for others. But the thing with doing that, is we’d also be depriving them of our love. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like I completely have no right to do that. Perhaps it’s understandable to do to those who have hurt us in the past, though for those who just happened to come into our lives later on, they never really deserve this kind of treatment, especially when they’ve been loving us all this time.

Everyone in this world deserves to be loved. Those people in your life deserve to be loved just as you are. You hold so much love within yourself, and theoretically, that capacity you have is endless, so might as well use them for others right? It doesn’t have to be big deeds. It could just be a simple gift, message, or coffee. All those are great acts of love.

3. Just because you love, it doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself.

People, myself included often forget this one. We continue to control our love for others thinking that loving and not loving are extreme opposites, that when you love, you can’t have any sense of control for yourself. But that isn’t always true. It may be true of course, that loving makes ourselves more vulnerable, precisely because we open ourselves up to others. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t be cautious with how we love.

As we love someone, we can still be sensitive, pull back if need be, or completely turn away for our own good. We can still protect ourselves or at least to a certain extent, prevent the pain that comes with loving. The beauty here is that you should find more upside in truly loving already. You don’t just get to experience the greatness of love, but you’re also able to find safety. It may take some effort to do so at first, but I promise, it gets easier overtime. Even more, there will be times that you won’t have to protect yourself anymore , as the people who you love and love you back will do that for you. Great!

4. When you learn not to love others, you may be learning not to love yourself as well.

This point is very important. Many of us don’t realize that the love we share to others could be related to the love we keep for ourselves. Most think that with less love for others, we love ourselves more. Isn’t that why we’re protecting ourselves anyway? This could make sense, but loving is complex. Your love for others and for yourself often overlaps, and when you try limiting your love, you will find that you can’t just limit one of them. You can’t just teach yourself not to feel much for others, and feel the same way for yourself. If ever you do, you’d go back to #1, and make yourself even more tired.

And I can not stress how important it is for you to love yourself, more than others. I promise, it’s normal if you don’t notice it, but try to see for yourself what acts of love do you do for yourself and compare that with what you do for others. Speaking from experience, I found out that I ended up trying to play safe, even with myself. Others are able to give more for others, but I don’t think that you’d always want to be that person who tries to give it all to yourself.

5. Truly loving allows you to be who you truly are.

This is in a way, related to #1, but I’d like to stress on it as well. For most of us who has been pushed and pulled from all sorts of directions as we loved, it’s hard to remember much of the good things that came with it. We turn out perceiving loving as a way of making ourselves vulnerable. But what’s buried beneath that, is the fact that loving allows us to be who we are.

I understand that it’s hard to see, especially after all the pain and suffering that you may have gone through, but just try to think about it, who are we most open to, least shy to, and most comfortable with? The people we love the most. This is no surprise as we really are meant to stand together with others. We, humans are here to be there for each other. But then, if you limit loving so much to not even reach that stage of love for anyone, then you may find it difficult to be yourself, especially with others.

6. Regardless of how a relationship is now, the love that you once shared is still real.

This really sounds like something simple, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you have forgotten about it. I forgot about it too. That’s the thing. It’s true, some relationships of love aren’t so stable. Some last, while others don’t. That is reality. But when a love that we once shared with some turned out hurting us, our normal reaction is to assume that the love was never real. Perhaps it’s easier that way, rather than accepting that what once was real has faded. But regardless of what you think of it now, it was real.

All your shared experiences, memories, simple joys, and so much more were all real. The love was real. Love is fleeting sure, but true love finds its place in one’s heart. No matter what happened to lead you to where you are now, the love that once made you feel like you’re on top of the world is still there, existent in your heart. It is real. Love is real. It is the most real feeling that you may feel in your whole lifetime. Let’s not waste it.

7. Loving is living. Living is loving.

If you think about it, it’s so easy to interchange “live” and “love.” There is literally only one letter difference between the two words, and personally, I felt that they were intertwined with each other. To a certain extent, this binds all the previous points as well. The happiest moments of your life may arguably be with the ones you love the most. And that is no coincidence. It’s great to be with others. There aren’t millions of people in this world to live individually. No matter what your past may be, you aren’t expected to live without loving. In the same way, when you love, you really live.

When life puts us down, we can’t just lie down and stop ourselves from living. We stand up, and continue to live our lives, learning from our mistakes. And that is how we love as well. That is how I must love, how you must love. When we trip, fall, even get ourselves bruised in the middle of loving, we shouldn’t stop there. I know it hurts. I understand that it’s hard. But please, don’t give up. I didn’t give up, and I am happy to be where I am now. We are to continue loving, continue living our lives. Living is amazing, and so is loving. A day without any act of love, is ultimately a day not lived.