By Craig Owen
Date: 25 March 2001

How Do You Know When It's Love?

From the book The Six Faces of Love

By Craig Owen

c 2001 Craig Owen

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¨ Confusion About Love

*Cheryl and Peter: After being single for sometime, Cheryl and Peter meet and fall in love.  After six months together, they are fighting and feeling little of their earlier passion.  What happened?

*Larry and Beth: After surviving an auto accident, Larry needs a spiritual purpose in his life.  He breaks his engagement to Beth and begins searching for the reason his life was spared.  After years of drifting from relationship to relationship, he is alone and has no answers.  What happened?  

¨ WHY ALL THE CONFUSION?

*Peter and Cheryl: Peter and Cheryl are confusing falling in love with being in love.

*Larry & Beth: Larry is confusing spiritual love with romantic love.


¨ ARE THERE ANSWERS?

*The Six Loves: friendship, romance, spiritual, community, marriage and family love.

*The purpose of this chapter: To explain what all six loves have in common.

*The purpose of this book: To explain the uniqueness of each of the six loves.

¨ LOVE DEFINED

*Love is a choice to be committed, vulnerable, and responsible to the one for whom you care.

*Love is a choice, a decision we make, a matter of the will.  Love is not to be identified with emotions alone.  

*When we make a commitment to the one we love we accept their imperfections as well as their strengths.  We choose to have a personal stake in the growth and life of the one we love.

*Being vulnerable in love means that we willingly accept the pain and struggle of love as well as the joy and happiness of love.  

*Responsibility in love means we are accountable to and for the one we love.


¨ PRINCIPLES TO HELP YOU DISCERN REAL LOVE


1. FIRST PRINCIPLE: HOW DO I NEED YOU?

*"Do you love them because you need them, or do you need them because you love them?" (The Art of Loving Erich Fromm)

*"Do you love them because you need them?"  You should carefully examine the dynamics of your relationship and why you are attracted to your loved one.  You might have some personal issues to work through before you can achieve the kind of love relationship you seek but cannot seem to find.

*Do you need them because you love them?"  In a relationship where two people deliberately choose to become interdependent, the good qualities in each person are more predominant in their choice of a loved one.  If you need someone because you love them, then the good qualities should more than compensate for the bad.

2. SECOND PRINCIPLE: WHO AM I?

*"It is not just how much you love someone, it is who you are when you are with them." (The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler)

*Macon Leary lives a sheltered and predictable life.  After his divorce, he is terrified of trying to meet new people.

*Muriel is spontaneous and outgoing, the perfect opposite of Macon.  She takes a liking to Macon and gets him to go out with her.  They become romantically involved.

*As their love grows, Macon becomes more outgoing and spontaneous.  He begins to see the joy in life he had missed before.  

*Muriel's love has allowed Macon to become a new and different person than he was before.

*At the end of the story, Macon tries reconciling with his ex-wife, but it does not work.  He has changed too much to go back to the same old rut.  He goes back to Muriel and the 'new' person he has become with her.

3. THIRD PRINCIPLE: SANCTUARY

*"The essence of love is a sense of sanctuary." (Author Unknown)

*The sanctuary provided by love gives us protection, a safe place to share our hurts and fears, joys and hopes with our loved one.  These are the things we usually do not share with just anyone.

*The sanctuary provided by love gives us a place we can be renewed and re-energized.  We no longer carry alone our burden of fears, hurts, joys and hopes.  This gives us the strength to continue on in our lives.
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