Stop Thinking About Love As A Noun And Start Treating It Like A Verb

Love isn’t an easy concept to understand. Love itself is the purest form of energy that connects any two beings, human or other.

It’s the embodiment of all that is good and perfect. When we talk about love in the romantic sense, we are basically trying to embody something that is pure and perfect within two individuals who are neither perfect nor pure themselves.

We are taking two imperfect, flawed, darkened, confused individuals and submerging them in the waters of romantic love, cleansing their souls – a sort of baptism. We look to love as the answer, the solution to all of our problems.

Because love is perfect, we feel that once we have it, everything in our lives becomes perfect. This is the story that we were told growing up. This is the story that we continuously see portrayed in books, movies and TV shows. Our culture feeds us an ideal and urges us to find it for ourselves. The problem is that such an ideal doesn’t exist.

The way that we perceive romantic love is wrong. It’s misguided and damaging. While imagining flawed beings such as ourselves getting our hands on something so perfect excites us beyond anything else, the reality eventually will come crashing down.

The way pop culture portrays romantic love is quite brilliant really. We are told that there is one perfect individual out there for us. A person who fills the void that we feel, making us whole.

We are told that there is someone out there who will make us better individuals, who will make us happy beyond belief, and who will fall head over heels for us.

We are told that every single person has such a person out there waiting for them – waiting to be found. No matter how flawed or stupid the individual, there is someone out there.

Imagine… the greatest, most incredible and perfect prize in the world is attainable by even the lowest of the low. Moreover, everybody is said to eventually find this person – so no need for anyone to worry.

What an amazing story, no? You are good the way you are, but when you find this perfect person, whom you can’t not find, you’ll be even more perfect. This person will make your life less miserable and you’ll be so in love that nothing else in the world will matter.

Your sh*tty, boring, wasteful life will have a meaning at last! Of course, you can’t work towards bettering yourself on your own. You need your other half. No point in working on yourself anyway – just go find someone to marry and have children with.

Man, do we love those magical beans. Just plant one in the ground and you're climbing your way up to a fortune. When it comes to love, we have to be wary. We have to be sure that we have a proper understanding of it, even in its most basic forms, in order to – pardon my French – not f*ck things up.

Love doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t just fix all of your problems and it most certainly doesn’t just work its magic on its own. For love to be magical, you have to make it magical. Love isn’t simply a noun; it’s a verb just as well.

It’s frightening if you think about it… We live in a world in which people define love as a noun in the fashion mention above and most people don’t even consider it in its active form.

We find love. We don’t "do" love – and that’s the problem. People make finding love some sort of treasure hunt. They find the spot, dig that chest out of the ground, and then finish off the last page with a "The End."

There is absolutely nothing in life that is worth having that does not require an effort to both achieve and then maintain. Those things that do not require any maintenance are either dead and everlasting or not worth holding on to.

Because of love’s nature, it’s living. Because it’s a living thing, it must be tended to, maintained, paid attention to, cared for.

When you love someone, don’t bother telling that person so because the truth is that he or she won’t believe you until you show this person that you love him or her. Words have become useless in our society, as lying has become second nature.

Most people will say what they have to say to get what they want – regardless of the damage those lies cause. Love as a noun is utterly useless. Most of you have an entirely wrong definition. The rest of us will work on refining our definition for the rest of our lives.

To love is an action. It is something that you do, actively. Most couples make the mistake of getting comfortable within their relationships.

They lose the mystery, the excitement, the passion. But understand that it’s not as if they left it in the cab. The flame didn’t fall out of their back pockets. They chose not to love anymore.

It’s that simple. You chose to stop loving. You chose to stop caring. You chose to stop being curious, to stop asking, to stop proving you love that person. We are all insecure creatures who wish to find someone who will be there for us every day for the rest of our lives, showing us love and allowing us to show how much we love too.

Yet, we all f*ck it up. We play games. We get lazy. We become careless and removed. We want love to be delivered to us along with that pizza and 2 liters of soda.

We want to keep love as if it were an ornament, a thing. Looking at love this way guarantees that you will spend most of your life alone and miserable.

Photo Courtesy: Fanpop

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