Page 55 - Relationships101 A Guide To Building Healthy Relationships Final 1

To Love, We Need to Know Love and Feel Loved

After spending a lifetime searching for love, I have realized that society defined love
teaches us to look for love in the wrong way. I was looking to build a family with the white
picket fence. But I did not know how to build a foundation for a relationship that would
last. Honestly, my mindset was, if this person stresses me too much, I am out of here or if I
felt they were hurting me and they did nothing about it; I was going to hurt them back.
Never realizing that relationships are stressful. Becoming one with another person comes
with growing pains. You cannot avoid the pain. But I was assigning the pain to the other
person and penalizing them for it. Once I learned and understood the mechanics of
unconditional love, it put everything in perspective in a way that you will never understand
if you never learn and understand unconditional love.

I have concluded that for us to experience this kind of pure, unconditional, healthy love in
relationships, we need to first experience God's love for us. You may or may not agree. But
after a lifetime journey of searching for love, the road ended when I understood that the
only way to develop and give healthy love is to experience it to understand its
characteristics.

You cannot consistently demonstrate this kind of love toward someone if you have never
experienced it. Despite what a minister, preacher, or parent may have taught you about God,
this is your opportunity to learn about the Creator’s love for yourself, which I witnessed in
my bathroom mirror that day. You do not have to be in a church to learn about how much
your Creator loves you. Your Creator will show you when you ask. “Ask, and you will be
given, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7).
Some things are best learned through a personal experience with the one who created you.
Ask for a personal experience of the Creator’s love, and you will get it. Your Creator is the
only one who knows everything about you and loves you perfectly, and will love you and
help you grow if you are open-minded and willing to.

God's view of love is totally different from what society tells us love is. Can you imagine
yourself having a relationship with a spouse or family members/friends that exhibits the
characteristics of love that is healthy for you? God simply tells us that His love is ours for
the asking. It is our Creator’s gift to us. Not knowing this keeps us from finding true
fulfillment, true intimacy, and our true purpose in life.

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