Practical Love

Sometimes we struggle through our relationships because we feel we are owed something. We withhold love; we withhold affection. We use our love as currency that can only be withdrawn when someone makes a deposit. We wonder why those around us do not give us more of what we want. The ones we love the most, we treat like dirt because...well..."they know what we like, what we need and they don't give it to us." So we don't give them what they need. Growing up, I learned that sex was for marriage. So naturally, getting married meant I could have all the sex I wanted. You marry your spouse and that is "supposed" to be the last and only person you have sex with. TV, movies, etc. teach us that we are not "normal" unless we are having sex at least every day. There is a sexual entitlement that comes with marriage, I think, especially if you are male. If you are not getting what you are entitled to get, then someone is withholding. A man's virilit...

Husbands, wives, dads, moms, girlfriends, boyfriends...you all have a role. When you are in a relationship with someone, you have a commitment and a responsibility to them. This is what we all hope for, long for in life. You want someone to share in your life and to be there for you, but you also long to be there for them as well. Love is a funny thing.  I think that most people will say that they love their wives, husbands, etc., but love is not enough. It is not enough to say, "I love you." Although, that is very important. It is not enough that you pay for everything or that you clean up the house or that you take care of shuttling the kids around. It is not enough that you fix the oven or the washer or put gas in the car. Even if you sacrifice your own dreams to accommodate your family, it is nothing if you don't take care of yourself. In the simplest terms, your love to your spouse is a gift to them. They don't earn your love. It is not capital. It is a gif...

  After my Dad had his first stroke, he came home a different man . It was very scary in the hospital. I know my Mom was wondering if she was going to be taking home the equivalent of a baby when this was all done. Her sister, my aunt, was taking care of her husband after a stroke and he was wheelchair bound and very hard to understand. Was this going to be her life too? But he didn't turn out that way. He could walk and talk and lead a very normal life. What happened next was surprising. He started to become effusive. He kept complimenting my Mom and telling her he loved her. He really started to do that with everyone. Now you might think that this was because of a near death experience and he was feeling lucky. It might have been. You hear that happens with a lot of NDEs. I just finished watching an episode of "Castle" on ABC. The show was centered around the premise that the main character had gone to an alternate reality where his girlfriend didn't know hi...

I had an observation today. After all this blog is about observing Love in the world and reporting it so we can practice it. You can disagree, as I have stated in the last post, I am no expert on Love. But, with practice, we can all be better at it. My observation is this: All people want to feel beautiful, loved and young. All marketing seems to point to these three pillars. Some people equate beauty with youth but they are far from being the same. Why is it that if a hundred people tell us that we are beautiful and one person tells us we are ugly that we believe the one and not the hundred? I have taken a number of arts and humanities classes and learned the same thing from every class. There is no ugly. God made all things. God knows no ugly. Everything is formed out of Love because God is Love. In the same vane, an artist creates art and that art is created out of love even if it is an expression of angst. I don't want to get into a discussion about art except to say tha...

I guess it has been a long time since I wrote in this blog. I guess it is because I don't find myself an expert in this arena. I never set out to be an expert, but reading my posts, I found that I was giving more advice than observation. Love is not something you can be an expert in, but some are better than others. I also find that I have more loving intentions sometimes than loving practice. Practical Love is about the every day practice of love. We are only taught by example how to love. I find the words of experts, the bible and other sources to be confusing at times. I think we can ponder the words and what they mean for so long that we can make them mean whatever we want. "Turn the other cheek..." Matthew 5:39, for example, is not the advice that I necessarily want to give my 13 year old when dealing with bullies in middle school. Learning and teaching Love is a challenge. Practicing Love every day is like a battle of wills within yourself. How do we stand up...

When you fall in love, you have the ability to filter out all the bad traits and actions about the person and only see the good. Love paints its own picture. It is a combination of reality, attraction, and what you want to see. Oh, our friends and family see the whole reality, but we seldom do. But Love changes our eyes and we see things differently. Things may not be changed but they are to us. That is not reality, it is our reality. But there is no other kind of reality but our own, because that is how we record things in our own mind. When you are duped or dumped or cheated on by the person we love, that perspective changes in an instant. Over the next minutes, hours, days, weeks, months that person we saw through Love's eyes changes. It gets flipped. The mind only remembers all the bad things and probably as a defense mechanism, they turn ugly. You see, consciously or unconsciously, we choose to love. Falling in love is an expression that we use to describe it, because i...

There are no less than 32 reality TV shows about weddings. "Four Weddings" is the marriage competition where 4 couples compete for the best wedding on national TV. Then there is "Bridezilla" where we get to make fun of the nightmare bride. But lets not forget about "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" where we get to watch as people compete to win a bride or a husband. It makes the fight to save marriage from the Gays seem a little ridiculous. It also makes you wonder what they are fighting for. Does marriage equality mean they are getting an opportunity to be exploited on TV or to be divorced? The conventional wisdom and research seems to point to 40-50% of first marriages and 60% of second marriages end in divorce. Although I am skeptical of the research and statistics on that one, I certainly know a lot of people who have divorced. In my immediate family, the statistic is 30%. I don't exactly want to get into the reasons for divorce,...

Why do we get married? Lord knows that marriage in this country has become a temporary transition to the next person. We live in a disposable society with water in plastic bottles and everything has packaging to discard. Our electronics are even disposable as we are encouraged to throw out our computers, iPods and cellphones after a year or two. But marriages were meant to last. ...'Til death do us part. But society has taught us that when something seems old and/or broken, you ditch it for a new model. Even if it's not, there is something better that just came out that you HAVE to have.   So WHY marriage? The wedding is expensive. Takes nearly a year to plan. You invariably piss someone off. And then there is the gifts, and should she change her last name? Ahh, there it is, change the name. The woman gets married to the man to become his property and to produce heirs. Right? That is where marriage originated, but it has transformed over the years and recently love even en...

I think it is hard to understand the concept of Love. We are told that God is Love and to love and that we are loved, but what is it? What does Love mean? I have been pondering this question, because it is so hard to fathom the depth of the meaning. And, of course, there are many contexts and meanings. It is a noun and a verb too. In the Christian Bible, in 1 Corinthians 13:4–8a , we read that "Love is patient, love is kind..." While this is beautiful and often said at weddings, it is less than tangible for us. I thought about this and how Jesus of Nazareth might have answered this question. He would have used analogy or parable to do it. "The kingdom of heaven is like..." So what is Love like? I like "water" to answer that question. So what if God was water? Love was water. I am not suggesting that he/she/it is water. This is analogy.  About water Every day we wake up and take a shower or go to the river to clean ourselves with water. This is comf...

Life is a matter of perspective. This is illustrated so beautifully in the TV show Downton Abbey, on PBS. For the two of you that have not seen this program (Mitt Romney, because it is on PBS and another guy), it is about aristocrats and their servants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downton_Abbey and you get to see both sides with their struggles and triumphs. Of course, they are very different. Another great cliché is that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Which simply means that we all have our own perspective and what it means to us is quite different. Most of what we hate about others comes from two places: 1) They are too different from us and 2) They are too similar to us. Think of the last time someone "wronged" you. It is either that they acted in a way that was different than you or what you would want from them. Or, they acted exactly like you and you hate that about yourself. My favorite act to talk about, because it is so universal...

Is family different? I think for most of us, the answer is yes. You would do anything for your family, your kids, you spouse. Most of us would agree that we would give our lives up to save a family member. We might not make that commitment to a stranger or maybe even a a friend, but family... We treat family different. If I were to tell you that you had a brother or sister that you did not know about, you would be shocked, then excited. When you met them, you would stare at them and then embrace them. That is family. You would instantly bond. Even at the cousin level. "You're my cousin? We're related?" You instantly feel connected. What connects you though? Is it blood? Is it your spirit? Sometimes a family member does something heinous. Maybe it is to themselves or maybe to you or another family member. And that hurts even more than if it were from a stranger. But we can be more honest with family. You can tell your brother that you think he was being a jerk. A...