Your ideas of love

Your ideas of love

“ Each one of you has held an ideal of what the perfect mate would mean, an ideal that changed over time. Those most bound by the ego might think of stature and of wealth, of physical beauty and the trappings of good upbringing. Those most insecure will believe in a partner who would shower him or her with praise and gifts, with attention never wavering. Another who prizes independence seeks a partner in good health, not too demanding, a companion and a lover who will be convenient within a busy life.

You believe you can fall in love with the wrong person and make a better choice based upon criteria more important than love. You thus believe love is a choice, something to be given to some and not to others. You hope to be a winner in this game you play, a chosen one who will have each ounce of love that is given returned
in kind. This is a balancing act you play with God’s most holy gift, resenting giving love that gains you little in return. And yet in this resentment you recognize the truth of what love is.

In no other area of life do you expect such fairness, such exchange of equal value. You give your mind to an idea, your body to a job, your days to activities that do not interest or fulfill you. You accept what you are paid within certain boundaries you have set; you expect that a certain amount of prestige will follow certain accomplishments; you accept that some tasks have to be done for survival’s sake.
You hope there will be some fairness here in what you give and what you are given back. You hope your hard work will produce results, the dinner you prepared eaten with delight, your ideas greeted as inspired. But this you do not expect. You often, in fact, expect the reverse to be the case, and are grateful for each acknowledgement the world gives you for the ways in which you spend your days. For spend your days you do, and soon that spending will deplete the limited number of days in store for you and you will die life is not fair, nor meant to be, you claim. But love is something else.

In this you are correct, for love is nothing like your image of your life and has no resemblance to how you spend your days or the way your days will end. Love is all that is set apart in your perception from what you do here. You think this setting apart gives love little relevance to other areas of your life. Love is seen as personal, something another gives in a special way to you alone, and you to him or her. Your love life has nothing to do with your work life, your issues of survival here, your ability to achieve success, or the state of your health and general welfare.

Even you who do not recognize what love is protect what you call love from the illusions you have made.

Jesus

Jesus speaks in A Course of Love by Mari Perron