True Love?

Do you believe in love at first sight?  Or not even at first sight, necessarily, but quick love (a few weeks or a few months)?  Real love.  Is that possible, for it to happen that quickly?

I think when you're young you absolutely think that what you feel is real, true love.  It's an intense, new feeling, and since you have no other way to describe it, because it's new, you call it love (correctly or incorrectly).

Fast forward several years, and you definitely learn that, as intense as your feelings were when you were younger, with your current partner or a previous one, that it probably wasn't "really" love.  Let me clarify what I mean by love.  I think that you can have a certain love for people you've only known a short time (include in this the possibilities that it could just be deep 'like', or lust, or just a caring for that person).  But real, true, soul-completing, love?  Nope, I don't believe it, not in the way I mean.

I mean a love that is so intense, that you climb mountains together, and through the worst of storms, you eventually come out on top, and together.  A love that you are sure that though sickness, health, rich or poor, you REALLY would stay together.  And I don't think you can honestly answer that in a newer love, because you haven't faced any of those challenges yet, so truly you don't know what you would do.

True love transcends time, trials, troubles.  And through all of those things, your love may not always be as intense, but it's always there.

Also, I totally think that through the course of your life you can have a real love with more than one person.  People get remarried all the time, and I believe that they loved their first spouse at the time, and some relationships aren't always going to be forever.  And I believe you could love your second (or more) spouse with as much, if not more, love than the first.

But in saying that, I don't believe it's possible to love EVERYONE you've ever been with.  I don't think that every relationship is true love, regardless of how you think you feel at the time.  There is no way that every person you have a relationship with is "the one".  There are those relationships in which the dating is really enough.  And it's new and fun, potentially lustful, and caring, but are they all "love"?  No.

Don't be so fooled and rushed to fall in "love" that you sacrifice you who are, just to be in "love".
And don't ever be afraid to be alone.  Or just date someone.  Every single relationship doesn't have to be the end all, be all.

Love yourself first and foremost.  And love yourself enough to just "be".  You don't have to be constantly in a hot and heavy relationship just to feel validated as a worthy human being.  You are enough just as you.

XOXO