The Story of 2!

Have you ever found yourself in a good love relationship, yet feeling like something is missing? Have you gone from relationship to relationship looking for a certain fit, a certain depth of feeling, but never finding it? You are not alone!!

I don't know why recently i feel incline to blog about emotions, love and all that. But it was a love story i stumbled across over the internet that made me think "So, what is love??"..........Can anyone tell me that? "How do you know if it's love?"......I have asked myself the same question alot of times and just like the story I am gonna tell you in a few seconds.........there are two types of love(in my opinion i mean, so don't shoot me!!)

The story of *Luke and *Sharon:

Luke and Sharon planned to be married once Luke finished college. Their plans were disrupted when Luke survived a serious auto accident. Luke felt he needed to find meaning and purpose in his life before he could marry Sharon. He broke their engagement and spent the next several years traveling. After studying philosophy in India and Japan and finding few answers, he drifted back to his hometown and lived with his parents. Luke wandered from one relationship to another, never finding a woman with whom he felt happy. One day he awoke to find that he was 40 years old and very much alone. What had gone wrong in his search for love and purpose in his life? He never got married and ended up living alone.

Reading the story above made me question myself. So what is love? and how many forms of love there are? To me right now, i think there are two forms of love. Spiritual love and romantic love. the couple mentioned in the story above are confused about love. Luke is confusing a spiritual form of love with romantic love. Expecting to find both in one relationship, he has been unable to find either.

So what is spiritual love? And what is romantic love?

While sexual attraction can be an important part of romantic love, it is not a defining characteristic. The basic idea is that our understanding of who we are comes from the many relationships we have: family, friends, community. The hallmark of romantic love is that we have a partner with whom we mutually discover and create a shared sense of self and identity. Our restless search for the purpose of love and its meaning pointed in the direction of a different but related love-spiritual love.

The primary focus of spiritual love is transformation of the self. Transformation into what?? That depends on the particular religious or philosophical tradition in to which you belong. Transformation of the self usually involves the learning and practice of a cluster of key values, such as compassion, mercy and kindness. The goal is to have all of our relationships tempered by these key values, including our romantic relationships. Only then will we find a sense of purpose, a feeling of being connected to the world in a positive way.

While transformation of the self and creation of a shared sense of self are closely related, they are different. No wonder we were getting confused! How has this affected our search for love? When we stop looking for all the wrong loves in all the wrong places a funny thing will happen. If we stop expecting romantic love to do double duty as spiritual love, our wandering ways would come to an end. I have not solved all of the struggles to be found in romantic love. But I think and strongly believe now that having the right expectations will help me avoid the search for that one true love I would never have found.