What’s YOUR definition of love?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a little obsessed with love.
From as young as I can remember - the romance of Scott and Charlene in Neighbours, Marty McFly and Jennifer in Back to the Future, Ross and Rachel, Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally, I even obsessed over the Gold Blend adverts – would they ever get together?
I don’t just mean romantic love either.
I love stories of wonderful friendships and communities. In my job as a television reporter, if there’s a story about a local village coming together to save their local pub or just about anything, I love being there. This kind of love is powerful, bonding and creates change. It makes just about everything it touches, well… better.
I love it so much I write about it in all of my books.
I love the idea of will they, won’t they? The crackle of chemistry in romance. Those friendships which guide us to who we can really be. The people who love us for just being us. The magical love we sometimes don’t even realise is there.
But when I was asked the above question – what’s my definition of love? I realised I didn’t know. I’d never really defined my own personal version and then I realised I was getting quite a lot of what I thought about love, wrong.
I’d always assumed that love was a blanket term, a sort of one size fits all. Something we didn’t have to say too much about, something we just all presume is there.
But in the brilliant book Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy, he says for us all to live life as our fullest, best selves, we have to be really clear what love really means to us. What kind of relationships do we want to have? What kind of love do we want to give, and what kind of love do we want to receive?
So, what is my definition of love? And what is yours?
This is mine:
Mutually supportive, wanting the very best for that person and that person wanting the very best for me. It’s full of kindness, trust, support, warmth and is uplifting too. A feeling of being ‘in-this-world-and-whatever-it-throws-at-us’ together’.
When I asked my husband this question, this was his definition:
When I really, really like that person and feel like I would do anything for them and they feel the same about me.
Although different definitions, they were essentially the same.
However, if love is a language, my husband and I speak two completely different ones, think his Italian to my Japanese. And it’s taken me 18 years of marriage to fully understand.
I LOVE to talk about feelings… (I mean, can you tell?)
‘Come on,’ I’ll say, ‘Let’s have a chat about those feelings, what’s really going on?’ My love language is not just about the feelings, it’s a deep-dive into just about everything in life. I’ve never been a huge fan of small-talk. Weather, football scores, yes, that’s really great. But come on, I think deep down, let’s move on to the proper good stuff.
My husband, shall we say?... not so much.
While he’ll talk about feelings for a little bit, it’s more the crackle of annoyance rather than romance as I ask him for the one hundredth time what he really feels about that random commercial on TV.
For a long time, I battled with this. If we’re so different, does it mean there’s something wrong?
But, the more I researched the topic of love, the more I learned it isn’t wrong at all. Just because we don’t speak the same language, doesn’t mean we don’t feel the same. And how we feel, say the experts, is the real universal guide to how all languages of love translate.
Actions they say, speak louder than words - and for my husband his language of love is food and doing practical things.
When I’ve been out running in the freezing rain, he leaves a bowl of hot porridge with his homemade compote and a pot of coffee for when I come home. He makes my lunch for me every day. If I mention in passing, I’ve been fancying say, a Thai green curry, by the weekend he will have found a great recipe, bought the ingredients and will cook and prepare one even better than anything I could have imagined. When I’m really tired, he buys me cosy slippers and bed socks from my favourite shop, a quiet reminder, he thinks I need to slow down.
How does all this make me feel?
Loved. And I know (despite his raised eyebrows), we both feel the same.
Somewhere between his homemade compote and my chatter about feelings, we’ve found a place which is just right for us.
But what about when love isn’t right? Because sometimes love hurts. And I when I say hurts, I mean really, really hurts. At times in my own life – and I’m guessing yours too - what I thought was love hurt so much, it didn’t feel very much like love at all.
I understand we all have ups and downs we don’t always see in those romcoms. I also understand grief is the price we pay for true love and the stronger the love, the stronger the grief. But when is painful love a necessity in life, or when has it turned into something else?
A book which changed how I look at just about everything about love - is a book by Melody Beattie called Codependency No More – a book named as one of the best self-help books of all time.
She explains, with frank honesty the difference between healthy love, and the line that is crossed when it becomes else. It’s easier perhaps she explains, to look at what love is not when trying to define it. This includes:
Walking on eggshells
Controlling others or others controlling you
Fixing others
People-pleasing
Tolerating any kind of abuse – physical or emotional (e.g silent treatment, gaslighting and scapegoating)
Never saying no
Blame-shifting
Holding others responsible for your own happiness.
So what kind of love is right for you?
What if someone’s kind of love might not be right for you, or yours might not be right for them?
It makes sense that all our hearts are unique. They’ve been broken, put back together and moulded again, so something that’s right for someone else doesn’t have to be right for you.
But is walking away ever love?
One of my favourite writers and creator of Letters From Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, believes it is.
She says our unique hearts, all speak their own unique language, the language of our own love that shows us our way. Call it a soul, a spirit, something else – but in essence it’s what makes us, us.
“I mean, it’s difficult sometimes when I tell people to write themselves a letter from unconditional love, they don’t know what that means. But if I say write the thing that you wish somebody would say to you, suddenly they know the answer to that, right?”
This voice, she says, is the guide to everything we want and wish for our lives. But she warns it speaks in a whisper. So we must slow down, be quiet and really, really listen. It only ever wants the very best for us. Sometimes it tells us what we want to hear, sometimes, that painful truth we don’t.
But if we do listen, it’ll take us to the relationships meant for us, to our most meaningful work and to all the places we really want to see. It tells us when we’re spending too long fixing something that isn’t right, when we’re missing out on something or someone who is.
If you’re struggling with something at the moment, this whisper could hold the key.
So, I’ll ask again - what’s YOUR definition of love?
Because a love like yours deserves to be heard.
