For some, love is the best thing in the world. Love is the source of all the joy and beauty of life, and without love, life is a shell, empty of meaning. For others, however, love is an illusion, largely fabricated by medicine over the millennia, accredited by religion, the tradition of speech, and the tradition of writing, without scientific support or a reason to consolidate its effective credibility.
For some of these individuals, this may legitimately be the case: love may just be a chemical reaction aroused by novelty and shared interests. For others, however, this vision of love has been carried away by broken hearts and dashed hopes. And functions more as a protective mechanism than as a real deeply ingrained belief. For these individuals, learning to let go of doubt and consider the possibility of love can lead to emotional freedom.
What is love?
Ah, the poet and musician’s dilemma: what exactly is love? Fortunately, scientists have an answer to this question, as do centuries of artists trying to uncover the truth. From a biological point of view, love is a series of chemical reactions that create a bodily sensation, which transforms into other bodily sensations and culminates in an attachment due to evolution. From an emotional point of view, love is a feeling that evokes images of flowers, smiles, and shaking hands; from a spiritual point of view, love is an experience of being willing to sacrifice one’s life for another, of moving towards sacrifice and wholeness in communion with another person.
All together they can love, while none of them can adequately and accurately quantify what exactly love is. Despite the countless researches, poems, and plays. And works of art devoted to this question – devoted entirely to determining what love is and what it is like – love remains stubbornly elusive and entirely personal to each of us. What love means to one person does not mean to another. And what love looks like to one person is completely different from another. For this reason, love cannot be quantified but is typically satisfied by this: feelings of affection, willingness to sacrifice, and some form of commitment.
Losing faith in love
Loss of trust in love can happen in various places. Although heartbreak due to a romantic connection is often referred to as the cause, this gives a narrower view of the damage potentially done to loved ones as a whole, including family, friends, and relatives. A perceived betrayal – or a series of betrayals – by someone you trusted has the potential to decimate your vision of love and create doubts that your love is not real or fully imagined.
A broken relationship with a parent can cause you to lose your belief that love exists. Parents or caregivers are usually the first people who are taught how to form connections and what love should (and does) look like. If a parent is negligent, cruel, or even constantly reckless. This can quickly collapse your vision of love and create a suspicion that the love being talked about is not real, after all. But is built by people with an agenda or by people who simply can’t do better.
Failed friendships can damage trust in love. Friendships are also one of the most trusting and vulnerable relationships you can have. If a friend cheats on you, forgets something important, or lets himself fall, you too may experience a loss of faith in love, especially if it’s a close friend who dropped it.
Usually, mentors or other people who watch create doubts about love because of their own failures in love, or their own losses. A respected mentor who is in a relationship and divorce, for example, might lead you to wonder if love doesn’t exist. When you look at someone, you often work to understand their choices and their behavior, and witnessing a fall – especially a romantic or love fall – makes you question whether unloving is in your favor.
Let go of doubts
There is often a good reason to doubt love, and neglecting this reason altogether is not helpful for healing, nor for learning new ways of looking at love. Instead, finding and recognizing the reason for your doubt is crucial. Working with a qualified healthcare professional to search back to your childhood, and adolescence. And even adult life for traces of family pain is an integral part of healing. As you work through old trauma, years of suffering, stress, and guilt can start to arise and can cause a lot of unexpected emotional pain and stress. Having someone to work with you and guide the youth through the process will help keep the transitions and healing phases smooth, direct, and appropriate.
Once you have started to heal, you can start defining your ideas about love and what it might be like for you. Again, this doesn’t have to be romantic in nature. You can identify what kind of parental relationship you would like to have, or what kind of friendship you hope for in the future. You can do this in the form of a simple list, or you can make a journal about anything you would like to do to move forward in your life. The diary can be enormously useful and therapeutic and can help you on your healing journey.
Finally, reaching out is the final step in learning to free yourself from doubts. Reaching out is the final step, putting your hopes into action. This step can be the most difficult to overcome and has the potential to be the most damaging if you are rejected or landed back on the ground. When entering a new relationship with someone. You always run the risk of disappointment: you may not connect as you hoped, you may find yourself wanting different things, or you may simply not be able to move forward in the relationship. Moving forward with self-confidence and the possibility of love and self-love relieves some of that pain. Because it doesn’t put too much pressure on the relationship to be successful.
Move forward with hope and care
As you move forward, having overcome some of the problems you had previously endured, you still need to be on your guard; any new relationship is bound to flourish. Consequently, you don’t have to throw yourself headlong into every new relationship you come across; Finding time for yourself, prioritizing your healing, and continuing to reflect on what you want and hope for is essential to ensuring that you continue to heal and grow in your loving relationship and relationship with yourself.
In order for your relationship with yourself to continue, you must recognize and live as if you believe you are worthy and capable of loving; failing to do this, any new lack of relationship, even after working through past trauma, will cause pain, confusion, and failure, because you will not have the emotional capacity to give yourself to someone and receive love and attention in return.
Despite the pain of being neglected, lied to, disappointed, or hurt, you have a particular advantage in the love movement that others who have not experienced such difficult things might have: you know the importance of doing and being better. Once you have known the pain of neglect. You can better understand how to neglect others; if you have experienced the pinpricks of betrayal. You understand the importance of staying faithful to someone; and if you’ve been severely tested by infidelity, you know better than not to be unfaithful.
Doubting love is difficult and painful. However, if you work to improve your relationship with love and heal wounds, you can not only get out of the painful pity you have immersed yourself in. But you can emerge as a man more suited to emotional relationships, commitment, and care. And you can move forward, moving away from the wounds others have inflicted on you. You can pay for your healing for your life and show those who doubt and those in the midst of healing that love exists and you are proof of it.