“Love for yourself and love for others go hand in hand”

1. Love is the will to expand one’s own “I” in order to nourish one’s – or someone else’s – spiritual development. When I truly love, I expand my “I”, and by expanding it, I grow. The more I love, the longer I love, the more I become. True love is self-fulfilling. The more I feed the spiritual growth of others, the more nourishment I receive for my own growth.

The act of expanding one’s limits requires effort. Limits can only be expanded by overcoming them, by breaking them, and this breaking is impossible without effort. When we love someone, our love becomes visible and real only through our tension, when we take an extra step or travel an extra mile for that someone. Love is not serene; on the contrary, it is filled with action.

2. We all have addiction needs and feelings of addiction – even when we try not to show them… No matter how strong, caring and responsible you yourself are, look into yourself calmly and attentively: you will find that you also want to at least occasionally be the object of someone’s worries … But these desires and feelings in most people are not dominant and are not determine the development of their individual life. If they govern your life and dictate the very quality of your existence, then you have more than just a sense of dependency or a need for dependency; you are addicted.

Addicts try so hard to be loved that they don’t have the strength to love. They are like starving people who constantly and everywhere beg for food and never have enough to share with others. As if there is a certain emptiness hidden in them, a bottomless pit that cannot be filled. They never have a feeling of completeness, fullness; on the contrary, the thought is constantly beating: “I miss some part of me.” They do not tolerate loneliness well. Because of this incompleteness, they don’t really feel like a person; in fact, they define, identify themselves only through relationships with other people.

Addiction can be very similar to love, because it appears as a force that binds people tightly to each other. But it’s not really love; it is a form of anti-love. It is about taking, not giving. It promotes infantilism, not development. Ultimately, it destroys rather than strengthens relationships; it destroys rather than strengthens people.

3. True love is predominantly volitional, not emotional work. A person who truly loves does so by virtue of the decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving, whether or not the feeling of love is present. If it is, so much the better; but if it is not there, then the determination to love, the will to love still remains and acts. Conversely, it is not only possible, but obligatory for the lover to avoid acting under the influence of any feelings. I can meet an extremely attractive woman and feel love for her, but since a love affair can destroy my family, I will say to myself out loud or in the silence of my soul: “It seems that I am ready to love you, but I will not allow myself to do this.” My feelings of love may be inexhaustible, but my ability to be loving is limited. Therefore, I must choose a person on whom I will focus my ability to love, on whom I will direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling that overwhelms us; it is a binding, deliberate decision.

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4. The work of love takes many forms, and the main one is attention. True attention, full concentration on the other person always means the manifestation of love. An essential part of listening is the technique of “bracketing” – a temporary rejection of one’s own ideas, prejudices and desires, a temporary transition “in the shoes” of another person in order to feel as deeply as possible, to experience his world from the inside.

Focus on the endless and incoherent story of a first grader, teach a teenager how to drive a car, really listen carefully to the wife (husband)’s story about how the day went at work or what happened in the laundry, understand their problems “from the inside”, trying to be always patient and extremely attentive – all this is often boring, uncomfortable and always tiring, takes energy: this is work. If we are very lazy, we will not do it. If we are not very lazy, then we will do it more often or better. If love is work, then non-love is laziness.

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5. Superficial or deep, commitment is always the foundation, the foundation of a truly loving relationship. A serious commitment does not guarantee the success of a relationship, but contributes to its strengthening more than any other factor. It is our sense of duty after marriage that allows us to endure the transition from falling in love to true love. In the same way, the sense of duty after conception transforms us, biological parents, into psychological parents.

6. Avoiding confrontation when confrontation is necessary to fuel spiritual growth is the same lack of love.as with thoughtless criticism, scolding, and other forms of outright denial of care. If parents love their children, they should, however moderately and gently, but still actively criticize and argue with them, and also allow them, in turn, to criticize and object to their parents. In the same way, loving spouses must periodically confront each other if they want their marital relationship to contribute to their spiritual growth.

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7. The most important sign of true love is that the distinction between self and other is always preserved and protected. The true lover always sees in the beloved a completely separate entity… The inability to see and respect this separateness is extremely common and is the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.

Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the partner, but, in fact, tries to cultivate it, even under the threat of separation or loss. The highest goal of life is reduced to the individual spiritual growth of a person, an individual journey to the top, which everyone can overcome only on their own.

8. The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering is at the root of all emotional illness. If we can live knowing that death is our constant companion following our “left shoulder”, then, in don Juan’s words, it becomes our “ally”: he is terrible, but always ready to give us good advice. With death as our advisor—a constant awareness of the limits of our time for life and love—we can always find the best use of our time and live our lives to the fullest. But if we do not want to openly look into the face of a terrible ally – death over the left shoulder – then we deprive ourselves of her advice and, apparently, will not be able to live and love clearly. If we avoid death, the ever-changing nature of things, then we inevitably avoid life.

For more details, see S. Peck, The Road Less Traveled (Sofia, 2008).