To be truly happy and fulfilled in life, you must learn to love yourself and others. Love is a relationship characterized by shared intimacy, romance, passion, commitment, and care. It typically involves deep caring, emotional closeness, adoration, affection, support, and security.
Love is also related to several positive emotions, such as happiness, excitement, peace, vitality, and joy. People who display consistent loving behaviors tend to experience several positive life outcomes, including higher levels of happiness, more vibrant physical health, and fewer emotional problems. Emotionally healthy people tend to have balanced brain regions and various brain circuits, including the left and right brain. This enables them to experience positive affect, including love. People who are able to love themselves as well as others have high self-esteem and high levels of mental functioning. They also demonstrate greater skill in handling challenging interpersonal relationships and in working successfully with a variety of other personality styles and personality types.
People who demonstrate loving behaviors also demonstrate higher levels of physical attraction. People who demonstrate physical attraction are attracted to others in a very basic and instinctual way. Although they often have conscious control over their romantic relationships, even in the face of resistance, they are still attracted to others based on their innate physical attraction. The heart contains an extremely complex network of nerve cells and synapses that are extremely responsive to the basic needs of the body. These need include carbohydrates, fats, protein, minerals, vitamins, and serotonin. Being intensely attracted to another person causes your body to release hormones that cause your heart to beat at a faster rate and increase your blood pressure.
People who are in love experience an intense and lifelong need for closeness. Love provides an emotional and physical need for closeness that cannot be replaced. You can replace the need for closeness over throughout your lifetime, but you cannot replace the deep personal connection that love provides. You can have great friends who you are close to, but if you have nothing deeper than a surface level relationship with them, you will remain alone in your relationships for your whole life.
Loving someone is a powerful expression of our true self, and expressing our true self is a necessary component of healthy relationships. Loving another person includes connecting with our innermost feelings, so when you are in a loving relationship with another person you are expressing yourself in very powerful ways. Your love is expressed through your feelings and your actions. It is not just a physical attraction, as the popular stereotype would have you believe, but a true expression of your love for that person.
Physical intimacy can be an important ingredient in a relationship, but it is certainly not all there is to love. Loving another person is a powerful way of bonding with another person, but passionate love is also very real and often takes a back seat to other more immediate kinds of attraction. When you feel passionate love for another person, it is almost always because of an experience that you had with them. If you don’t have these experiences, it is likely because you are disconnected from your higher self and you have not yet been reconnected with that part of you.