TRUE LOVE
One Reason You Haven’t Found True Love in This Life Yet
What great thinkers like Lao Tzu and Osho said about seeking true love.
“I am searching for someone to love me,” she said.
“Look in the mirror,” he replied. “You are the person you were looking for.”
We all crave love. The feeling of being loved by someone is one of the best feelings in the world. How can it not be? It feels like every love song is made for us. And every quote says something about us. Every sunshine and each droplet of rain seems just about us.
But this love comes with a string attached. If we want to receive love from an outside source, we have to open ourselves up and become vulnerable. We have to drop our armour. And dropping it means opening ourselves up to the possibility of being hurt.
The lover can hurt us. They can drive the invisible knife right into the heart. This is the risk of being vulnerable. I am telling you this from an utterly personal experience.
However, we rarely find real love these days. Today people are interested more in sex than love because it doesn’t require the involvement of the soul. It happens on the physical level. And that’s the reason pleasure is also temporary in such acts of lovemaking.
When we indulge in sex without the presence of love, we use the body of the partner to escape. And the other also use our body to do the same.
It is a momentary pleasure. It is the same temporary pleasure we experience in alcoholism or while watching a movie. During such pleasures, we are just a spectator. We don’t really experience the love the protagonist claims to feel in the movie. Do we?
Ask yourself, won’t life be more wonderful if we had an actual love to go home to? Just imagine being surrounded by the feeling of real love — not the temporary feeling of all those flings and relationships you had in the past — Something genuinely real.
Ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once told his disciples, “No one can ever defeat me”.
One disciple got curious and interrupted him, “Please tell us the secret which made you invincible. We all want to win.”
Lao Tzu said, “You cannot understand that secret because you want to win so badly that you didn’t even let me finish.”
“No one can ever defeat me,” he continued, “because I am already defeated. It is impossible to defeat me because I don’t want to win.”
As hard as this seems to grasp, this is the ultimate truth of life.
“He alone wins who does not want to win”-Osho
He is the real winner. He is the only winner. All other seemingly great winners lose much higher things in the journey to win just once. Love works the same way. If you want to find it, perhaps you have to stop seeking it.
You are incomplete
You are incomplete in yourself. At least that’s what you think of yourself. This is the only reason you go on the search for love. You search it from one person to another. You look for someone to complete you.
A friend of mine was having trouble in her relationship. She told me she was thinking of dumping the current one. I asked her to try at least once to resolve the issues and if after that, she still feels the same; she has all the right to not be in a suffocating relationship.
She then told me that she has found someone in her office. And that she is looking forward to beginning a new relationship with him as soon as this is over.
I told her, and I quote, “You’re going wrong. Just because it seems the grass is greener on the other side doesn’t mean it really is.”
I told her exiting a relationship because it’s not working anymore is completely fine. But it is utterly stupid to exit it just because it seems insipid and dull compared to the imaginary future you have in mind with someone you barely know.
She dismissed my advice and did exactly what she said. One year later, she came to me with the same problem again. She told me that she now believes true love doesn’t exist in this world. She didn’t even notice how she came a full circle from where she began.
When you dump a relationship — which obviously was not built on the foundation of love — you search for a more desirable person to hop on. While moving on to the next relationship, you think the new one will be better than the last because you believe your partner was the real problem in the previous relationship.
But once the honeymoon period of the new relationship is over, you realize that the new one is even shallower than the last. It seems even more superficial. Why? What really changes? Other than the tag of a new relationship. Nothing. In fact, you are also the same old person you used to be.
The new relationship is nothing but a compromise between two people who are afraid to be alone and who refuse to work on themselves. It’s a sad excuse to fulfil bodily desires of intimacy and sex. In such relationships, everything is fleeting and unreal. The arranged marriages are the perfect example of such compromises.
A person who has made a compromise will say true love doesn’t exist. “I don’t think there is true love, I don’t feel it,” “Life is meaningless”: these are the statement of utterly pessimistic people who have settled for less. They have already lost all faith. There is no hope for them. Then they bring a child into this world to fulfil their selfish desire for feeling complete.
“The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All they are saying is that their life has missed the love”- Osho
Only love can make you feel complete. This is not my claim. A 75-year long study at Harvard called The Grant Study says so. It says, “Happiness is Love. Full Stop.”
“Love gives meaning to life. Nothing else can. Nothing else will. Period.”
The Reason You Haven’t found True Love Yet
“Never go in search of love. Go in search of life, and life will find you the love you seek”- Atticus
The reason you haven’t found True love yet is that you were searching for it. If you are still looking for love, you probably won’t find it. That’s the paradox of life. We don’t get what we look for, and we get all that we weren’t seeking at all.
Only they will get love who have no desire of being loved by someone outside their being. The one who looks for love and relationship will only find sexual desires wrapped in superficial love.
For your entire life, you searched for love. Didn’t you? And did you find it? Then let go of the old method and try the advice of Osho just for a change.
Life is very strange
“It is the craving for success that ultimately turns into failure. Your excessive desire to live lands you in the grave. Your obsession for health is bound to turn into sickness. Here we miss the very thing that we crave for and cling to, and we find what we don’t seek. If one does not seek anything, it means he does not lack it, he already has it.”-Osho
You seek love. You won’t find it, ever. You may find it in some person, but you won’t ever choose it because an incomplete person will never choose a complete one.
Wanting love in your life means deep down, you know you lack something. You are incomplete and suffering from an inferiority complex. That inferiority is trying to hide in the idea of getting loved by someone. It is a perfect camouflage that makes you believe you are a lovable person when your partner loves you. While in reality, you are nothing more than an object of sexual pleasure for your partner.
This seems hard to accept, but lovelessness is hiding in the very desire to search for love. At the depth of this desire is the unlovable person who is looking for someone to fill the void in himself or herself.
The one who has no desire for love means they do not need it anymore. They already have it. They are complete.
Just Stop Searching
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”- Oscar Wilde
Remember, your very desire to find love will not let you find true love in this life. You will jump from one relationship to another, from one incomplete person to another, only to find yourself married to one someday. Then your entire life will be like a rose of plastic. It will look beautiful from the outside, but it can never have the mesmerizing scent a real rose carries. It might look attractive in Facebook photos, but it will be as fake as the smile in those carefully selected photos.
“The person who loves you the most in this world should be you; not your lover”-
Only a complete person who loves oneself completely and truly, who has no desire of getting loved, will find another such complete person. And out of such a great partnership will the flower of true love bloom.
You want someone to love you. Right? If you think someone can love you. Why can’t that someone be you? When you do something nice to someone, your mind resets your emotions so that you begin to like that person. It is called the “Ben Franklin Effect.” Why not apply this trick to yourself?
Try to feel the same happiness seeing yourself and being with yourself that you felt with your former partner or feel with your current partner. Go the same distances to make yourself smile, which you go for them. Celebrate your birthday with the same enthusiasm as you celebrate theirs. Buy yourself the same posters and gifts you buy for them. Write poems about yourself as you write for them. I am not saying become a narcissist. But even if you did, Narcissism is still better than looking for someone else to complete you.
“You yourself are the perfect person to fall in love with”- Shikhar
How to do this: Cooperate with the fall
A child falls every other second while learning to walk but remains unhurt. He will fall, smile, and try to walk again. But if you fall as he does, you will not only get hurt; you will also start doubting your walking skills.
A child is not stronger than you. He cooperates with the fall. He does not resist it. It is not the strength that helps him. It’s acceptability.
Accept yourself as you are. Do not find resistance in your personality. You are complete in yourself. Flawed. Broken. Unsuccessful. Ugly. Fat. Meek. That’s all society’s perspective because they compare you with other people.
“You’re not ugly. It’s the society that is”
Elon musk is not better than you. Anne Hathaway is not more beautiful than you. Those who say otherwise will die comparing themselves and others. I am not saying you should not improve. You all the more should. All I’m saying is that you are inherently incomparable.
Nobody like you- who is fun, beautiful, loving in his own way- was ever born before. Nobody like you- who is complete in herself- will ever be born again.
“How you love Yourself is how you teach others to love you" - Rupi Kaur