Only When You Put Someone's Needs Above Your Own Can You Say It's True Love

We come into this world alone, and we leave it in the very same manner.

What happens between these momentous, life-starting and ending occurrences greatly depends on you – but not entirely, I’m afraid.

As much as we want to have full control over every aspect of our lives, we will continuously find such aspirations unattainable.

It is the single want in our lives, as basic as it is, that we will never manage to attain. You cannot control your entire life from beginning to end. You cannot have everything that you want exactly when you want it.

You can, however, increase the probability of getting what you want out of life. More importantly than even that is the realization that the most important things in our lives aren’t actually things, but people, and that finding good people to share our lives with is in our control.

We live for ourselves, and we live for others. We live to inspire, affect, improve and change those who have life. Affecting those living things that have a high enough level of consciousness to understand how they are being affected, regardless if they know what the cause of the effect is, are the only things of value.

Countless people will tell you the same, reaching that last stretch of life before walking through the door to the unknown. Life itself is all that matters to those lucky enough to have it. People, especially, are what matter most. I believe those with most wisdom expand this importance to include animals just as well, but we’ll leave that up for debate.

The truth is that what affects us the most, what molds us into the people that we are, are other people. The people that we come across and interact with in our lives have a profound effect on us.

The interactions that we participate in throughout our lives lead us to make the most pivotal decisions in our lives – and many of the less pivotal ones. We do all the things we do in order to benefit someone’s life, someone else’s or your own.

The only point of life is to affect it and the only good purpose of life is to affect it in a positive manner. Whether you choose to focus on yourself, those closest to you or those you’ve never before met – and to which degree you do so – all depends on you and your level of egocentricity.

The more egocentric you are, the more you will focus on you and you alone. The slightly less egocentric you become, the more you will begin to focus on other people.

Most will start with those closest to them, those who still have a relatively high level of relation to you, and continue to span out as their egocentric tendencies transform.

What these egocentric tendencies transform into is love. Love is a very difficult word to define. Personally, I find it much easier to define it by stating what it isn’t. Love’s opposite, in the best way that I can think of defining it, is egocentricity.

The less egocentric you are, the more you love. The more egocentric you are the more you love yourself, which – let’s be honest – is more vanity than love.

For this very reason, the only way to love is to be less egocentric – to put the needs and well-being of others ahead of your own. When you’re willing to put the happiness of another ahead of your own, you are taking the part in the phenomenon we call love.

To truly sum it up as best as I can, when you’re ready to put a living thing’s happiness above your own, you’re ready to love. If you attempt to love anytime before you are ready to do so, you will fail miserably – breaking those you attempted to benefit.

To love your family and friends is to want their happiness. To want them to smile. To need them to forget about their problems and worries and to live life the way we all wish to live it, in peace and harmony.

The definition of love is a rather simple one if you really think about it. You need to care about someone else just as much as you care about yourself, maybe even more.

To be honest, I’m not sure that it’s even possible to care about someone more than you care about yourself, just for the simple fact that by making that person happy, you fulfill an egocentric need.

Nonetheless, if you can manage to care about someone else as much as you care about yourself, then you are loving.

Most of us forget this fact the second that we fall in love romantically. I’m here to tell you that there is no difference when it comes to love -- whether you are loving your partner or your brother.

Love is the opposite of egocentricity and nothing more. Everything else that develops as the result of a relationship between two individuals has nothing to do with love.

Sex itself isn’t about love, even though it can be a representation of it. Love itself is simply caring and acting in order to physically manifest that care into a result.

If you are not ready to put the needs of others ahead of your own, then please refrain from attempting to love because you are not yet capable of it. Don’t make the mistake everyone seems to make.

Don’t promise love when you can’t deliver because you will end up breaking the only people in your life who matter to you.

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