Love is good, love is wonderful, love heals, love put smile on people's faces, love is compassionate. Love is the best antidepressant but many of our ideas about it are wrong. The less love we have the more depressed we are likely to feel.
Love is of great importance to your mind and body. Like oxygen, it's non-negotiable. The more connected you are, the healthier you become both physically and emotionally.
There's a mythology in some cultures that love just happens. As such the depressed often sit around waiting for someone to love them. But love doesn't work like that. To get love and keep love you must work for it.
Most of us get our love ideas from popular culture. We believe that love is something that sweeps us off our feet. But the pop-culture idea of love consist of unrealistic images made for entertainment, which is one reason many of us are setup to be depressed. It's part of our vulnerability, like constantly stimulated by images of instant gratification. We think it's love when it's in fact merely distraction and infatuation.
Most of us our problem is that when we hit real love we become upset and disappointed because there are many things that don't fit in our cultural idea. Some of us become demanding and controlling, wanting someone else to do what we think our idea of romance should be, without realizing our idea was wrong.
These following action strategies can help you get what you need out of life - to love and be loved.
•Recognize the difference between limerance and love. Limerance is the psychological state of deep infatuation. It always feels good but rarely lasts. Limerance is that very first stage of mad attraction in which all the hormones are flowing and things feel so right. Limerance can progress to love. Love mostly begins out of limerance, but limerance doesn't always evolve into love.
• Learn good communication skills. They are a means by which you develop trust and intensify connection.
• Know that love is a learned skill, not something that comes from hormones or emotion particularly.
There must always be core differences between two persons, no matter how good or close they are, and if the relationship is going smoothly those differences surface. The issue then is to identify the differences and negotiate them so that they don't distance them or kill the relationship. You do that by understanding where the person is coming from and who that person is. When the differences are known, you must be able to negotiate and compromise on them until you find a common ground that works for you both.