Love can sneak up and take hold when you least expect it. It scrambles your brain, stirs your belly and messes with your head. Your concrete reasoning heads straight out the window and your heart aches for more. You wonder how you ever managed without it.
What have you learned in your life about love?
Daily prompt
It can also sneak out the window or the back door slowly and quietly when you aren’t looking. The whirlwind of the days, the weeks, the months, occupy your mind until one day you notice something is missing. You spend some time wondering what exactly – till you realise what has gone.
How did that happen? Why didn’t you notice? Could you have done anything different? Could you have saved it?
Love comes in many forms. I love my cat, I love my friends, I also love my family but each is very different. This makes a definition hard to pinpoint and it’s why, if you google the word, you will get a million different opinions on the subject.
What have I learned?
- If you don’t love YOURSELF first, then everything else will either fail, or not last very long.
- You can fall in love seemingly easily. To keep hold of that takes work. Constant work from both parties.
- When we change or evolve as people, so does our love for one another. The key to sustaining it in the long term is good honest communication along with some compromise.
- You can live with it. You can also live without it. What I mean by that is as long as you have effectively completed step 1, you should not need someone in order to fulfil your life. The best and strongest kind of love is one where you are choosing to have that person in your life.
I have done a lot of work on myself over the past few years since I had my left leg amputated. The place I started was self love. I had a whole new physical identity that I had to get used to. So it was essential that I got used to that to quite simply get my confidence back if nothing else. The rest bloomed from there and I think I’m probably a better person than I have been in many years. I’m certainly in a much better headspace than I have been in for a long time.
It is this self love that I believe has changed everything else.
- How I see and interact with the world
- How the world sees and interacts with me
I now get regular compliments about how I manage to look so amazing every day. So I put the question out to my friends with a then and now photo. Apart from small simple physical characteristics like different lighting or glasses or lipstick, nothing else really stood out as being the thing that made it different.
So I truly believe that my self love, self confidence and new positive outlook on life (all personal things I have been working on under the umbrella of self care) are what is being seen through my recent photos.
You can see and feel that in someone.
So, back to my first point on the answer to the question.. unless you truly do love yourself 100% – love with a partner will be short lived, if you find it at all.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this so please do leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.
Melanie Magowan 
Melanie you have shown yourself to be a strong lady…with everything you have had to put up with these last few years… knowing your story and just read your quote about love…maybe it wasn’t just lossing your leg below your knee that your ex found hard to cope with and left…maybe things were not good before that and sometimes we are so busy we didn’t notice.. because if someone has so much love for there husband or wife they would want to be there to help them through the heartache ect …that was a very cruel thing to do to you when you needed him ….but look how well you have moved on! and I know it wasn’t bloody easy for you but you did it and should be so proud of your self xx
Thank you for your comment Thelma. My examples were not necessarily reflective of my reality, I was pre-supposing a few possible scenarios. I didn’t expect him to leave, I certainly didn’t want him to at the time, but I have re-invented myself and re-discovered myself, plus a few new bits. I’m very happy with where I’m at right now.
This is great. A wise man once told me, “Don’t fall in love. If you fall once, you’ll fall again. A strong love doesn’t fall. It doesn’t give in to a feeling.”