21 Love Lessons They Didn’t Teach You in School.
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Don’t you sometimes wish you had a pocket guide to love, something to walk you through all the dos and the don’ts before you do or don’t do them, a sort of manual to fall back on when in doubt, something or someone showing you the way?
Why don’t they teach us Love in school?
If we came into existence out of love, and if we can’t live without love, and if through life we keep running, bumping, crashing into love, time after time, then how is it not one of the most essential courses we should be required to take while growing up? Not even an elective?
If it is true that love must be lived in order to be understood, it is also true that it must be learned in order to be truly lived. Anything worth our while is worth at least our wisdom. But by the time our wisdom kicks in, we’ll be too old to burn, so why not learn while we’re still on fire?
There is a multitude of bright minds and big hearts who’ve tasted love before us and whom we can safely adopt as our mentors — you can always choose dead masters if you don’t trust the living.
Love is the most democratic feeling. We all have a say and every sigh adds up. It’s the old, universal language everyone speaks, no matter their dialect or accent.
So hear me out, yo Loving Human: Let’s co-create a Love Manual that contains all our collected love wisdom, so we can pass it on to future generations saying, “Here, child, add this to your beating heart.”
Who knows, maybe it will prevent some tears or some wars, fight some crime or some loneliness, add some extra honey to their boiling tea, remind them (and ourselves) the lessons we were all born knowing.
Here are 21 essentials I’ve picked up along the way:
“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.” ~ Hafiz
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“Love is giving someone the power to destroy you but trusting them not to.” ~ Unknown
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“We were together. I forget the rest.” ~ Walt Whitman
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“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart. I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
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“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” ~ e.e. cummings
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“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ~ Lao Tzu
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“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life…” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
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“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love.” ~ Dr. Seuss
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“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~ C.S. Lewis
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“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” ~ Paulo Coelho
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“Real love is never perplexed, never qualifies, never rejects, never demands. It replenishes, by grace of restoring unlimited circulation. It burns, because it knows the true meaning of sacrifice. It is life illuminated.” ~ Henry Miller
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“Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now, and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest, and making someone fall in love with you is easy, and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.” ~ Harvey Milk
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“Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.” ~ Amelia Earhart
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“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ~ John Lennon
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“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” ~ Kahlil Gibran
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“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” ~ Anaïs Nin
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“I love you without knowing how or when or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride:
So I love you because I know no other way than this:
Where I do not exist nor you,
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” ~ Pablo Neruda
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“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.” ~ Viktor Frankl
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“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:4-13 (Bible)
So tell us, how do you spell Love in your dictionary? How do you not?
What would you tell your children? And yourself?
Add your drop to this ocean. ‘Cause “what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”
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Andrea Balt
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