Conditioned by Hollywood, we tend to equate loving to being in love. I would contrarily argue that they are different. Nay, more than different: they are opposites.
Take a look at the syntax, first of all. Saying, "I love" is an incomplete sentence - it is in want of an object. So, you cannot love without having an object of your loving. To say "I am in love" can be a complete sentence in itself. So, being in love does not require an object of your loving for us to be in love.
What does that mean? In means that to love, you need someone else. You can only love someone else. The focus of your love is someone else. If you were to love someone else, only the other person is important. Whereas you do not need someone else in order to be in love, as the focus of being in love is yourself. When you are in love, only yourself is important.
Why is that so? You notice that when a person is in love, they want to spend all their time with the other person. They may even want to marry the other person and spend the rest of their lives with them. But ever stopped to ask what the other person wants? Does the other person want to spend their time with them? Actually, Hollywood tells us that when the person you are in love with prefers someone else, it is the height of your love to fight for the love of this other person and triumph over all adversaries. (OK, all of Hollywood except Tom Hanks movies, which is why I adore his movies.)
But when you love, you want only the best for the other person. And we know from some religious scriptures that the height of one's loving is to lay down their lives for the other person. Laying down one's life doesn't just mean to die in that physical sense. There are many ways to die. Someone giving up a career to care for a parent or spouse sees the death of their future, the death of their economic independence or the death of their dreams. I think the biggest sacrifice is where a person keeps a secret so that the other person can be safe, but not knowing the secret leads to an estrangement - what is sacrificed here is that the object of your love ends up thinking badly of you as a consequence of your sacrifice (if it sounds like a movie script, it probably is but I just can't think of which movie it was - I think it involved a father and a son. Can anyone help?)
So being in love is selfish, seeking what they want for themselves whereas loving is selfless, seeking only good for the other person
So, is it time to ask yourself - did you love or are you in love?
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