| How to Determine Love from the Counterfeits of the Heart Aug 16th 2012, 02:00 A powerful emotion, love transcends time and space, moves mountains and often defies reasoning. Love is what lets us accept others for who they are, in spite of flaws or shortcomings. When you find love in your life, you'll strive to keep it but it's only natural that you'll also want to know the experience is both real and enduring. "Counterfeit" refers to the experiences that may seem real but are in reality insincere or feigned expressions of love, illusions that can deter you from finding and sharing real love. To avoid the pitfalls of counterfeit love in your relationships, this article will help you explore the ins and outs of real love, in all its glorious forms. - Look for trust. Trust is love's most basic foundation, ensuring that a relationship stands strong. Trust needs to be earned to establish ongoing confidence––it's not a given just because of who you are or what you've professed. It is by opening yourself up to love, by letting yourself become vulnerable and trusting that the other person will not hurt you that you truly discover love in letting another person into your inner world. It's a feeling that lets you close your eyes and trust that person to believe in you and will catch you should you fall.
- On the other hand, love is never about distrust. Henry Stimson once said that "The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him"––remember that distrust cannot hold a love relationship together for long, nor will it allow your love to stand the test of time. If you find distrust lies at the heart of your relationship with a person, it's counterfeit love.
- Learn perseverance as love's virtue. This is the virtue of standing and pressing on despite the odds. When you love someone truly, you enter into a deep commitment and a very close friendship. Real love means that no matter what happens, you remain there for the one you love. In return, the person you love will also stand by you when the chips are down. At the end of such a trial in your lives, both of you find that your love grows stronger for one another, as you understand one another even more deeply. Paradoxically, in persevering, you also learn the art of letting go. You let go of petty worries and silly little concerns in order to be supportive of the person you love and to stand up for his or her needs. Ultimately, perseverance allows you to fully embrace that person for who he or she truly is, a quality more valuable than any other.
- On the other hand, a lack of perseverance when things get tough between two people or a difficult situation arises, then this can be a sign of counterfeit love rather than strong, real love. A person who turns away from you when things are hard and refuses to be supportive is either a fair-weather friend or has been making a pretense of loving you all along.
- Be aware that love is never selfish. Instead, love is about knowing how to give and to receive back in return. When you love, you give of yourself, unconditionally. You give your time, consideration and support out of love. In turn, you find pleasure in reaching out and just being there for that person, expecting nothing in return. Your expression of love differs according to your individuality; each expression will be unique and worthy in its own right. It's not the amount or the value of love that really matters, but the way that it motivates all that you do and how you throw your heart into caring for others.
- On the other hand, in any relationship where you find yourself doing all the giving and the other person doing all the taking, this is counterfeit love. It's selfish when another person always insists on you supporting him or her or is adamant that you can cope without his or her support, and selfishness is not true love.
- Know that love is kind. Kindness enables you to see beyond what the biological eyes take in. You look at happenings in life with sympathy and empathic understanding when you practice kindness. Love is kind and encourages you to respond to life with goodness and thoughtfulness. Gentle and comforting, taking a loving, kind approach in your relationships helps to establish mutual respect and a realization on both sides that each person is being listened to and taken into account fully.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love tends to be impatient and rude, always demanding and frequently abrupt. If there is little kindness in your relationship with another person, there is no love either.
- Know the difference between jealousy and envy as one of love's expressions. Love can be jealous at times but it's certainly never envious. Jealousy and envy are closely related in meaning but they're definitely different in outcome. Jealousy is an occasionally legitimate emotion in response to the fear of losing someone you love. However, it should be under your control because, like fire when it becomes uncontrollable, it can result to mass devastation and loss. Only use jealousy as driving force to challenge yourself to become much better in keeping your love ones by your side and never taken for granted. Envy denotes a longing to possess something awarded to or achieved by another. It is when you become bitter and resentful of someone's success and achievement, making you feel uneasy at the sight of another person's excellence or good fortune. It is accompanied with some degree of hatred and a desire to possess equal advantages. Love is never envious but might sometimes show a little controlled jealousy when threatened.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love is awash with envy. If you're in a relationship where competitiveness and one-upmanship seem to rule the roost, then you're not sharing a loving relationship; rather, you're both quite destructive. Stop seeking to possess what other people have and start trusting in what you already possess and making the most of that instead.
- Look for endurance. Love is not easily angered but it does abide, even through times of suffering. If you're truly loving another person, you'll learn to endure difficult situations and crises, including times when it seems like things between you need fixing badly. Endurance allows you to forbear the challenges that others can raise when acting thoughtlessly or unkindly. Endurance lets you look beyond out-of-character behavior, difficult attitudes and challenging transition periods to still stand by the people you care about. Suffering in love teaches you wisdom and widens your understanding of how people can change over time and yet still be the same person you have always loved. Love helps you to discover and realize over time that people bring their own mindset, cultural upbringing, values and principles to bear on their behavior and attitudes and that through such recognition, you learn to listen without judging or taking sides. Through love you learn to let people be who they are rather than seeking to change them to your own preferred ways and you make adjustments without necessarily agreeing or conforming to their preferred way. Instead, a loving relationship is based on acceptance.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love seeks to control, manipulate and change people. It tries to force one preferred viewpoint on others, playing down the importance of diversity and differences. Moreover, counterfeit love does not endure––when things go wrong and the single viewpoint cannot be enforced, the relationship tends to disintegrate.
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Discover that love keeps no records of wrong, although it does have healthy boundaries. - On the other hand, counterfeit love does keep score, with such a person frequently returning to occasions when he or she felt you hurt or upset his or her feelings. This scorekeeping can reach back years in the relationships of some people, with bitterness and resentment the only thing keeping people close. Such unhealthy love never learns forgiveness and the practitioners of counterfeit love often have low or no self-esteem.
- Use love to sidestep perfectionism. Love is often referred to as being "blind". This adage exists because it connotes acceptance of a person in spite of imperfections. Love is a realization that no one is perfect, not even the perfectionists, and when you love someone truly, you accept that person wholly, including his or her flaws and shortcomings. Love motivates you to look for the good in a person and to expend more of your energies on encouraging forth the best from them. In accepting inadequacies and recognizing limitations as being part of the entire package, you stop judging a person for these things and work on helping the person's better qualities instead. When you expect too much and your expectations aren't met, you feel disappointed; you avoid such disappointments by being resilient and flexible enough with your loved ones simply because they are as human as you.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love concentrates too much on flaws and failures, making them into a reason to control, berate or be unkind toward another person. Counterfeit love is often conditional on a person behaving in a certain way and when this isn't achieved, the love is withdrawn. Seeking perfectionism in either yourself or your relationships with others is like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow––it's never attainable and a lot of wishful thinking replaces gratitude and acceptance for what you actually do have good going for you and your relationships.
- Give love credit for being smart. Love might be blind but it's not corrupt or stupid. Being able to discern what is right and what is wrong is innate; your conscience tells you when you have and haven't done something right or for the right reasons. Love helps you to realize the Golden Rule that runs through many religions and secular traditions, namely "Do unto others as you would have them do to you". It's a basic fact that you model better behavior by being better behaved, you model loving behavior by being loving. Set out to spread loving behavior by demonstrating it in all that you do and give love the credit for being a smart approach to living your life. For some people this includes a faith-based approach to life, while for others it's about being a good human based in sound morals; either way, love is deeply entwined with doing the right thing by others, whether the other person is a lover, a coworker, a stranger or a neighbor.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love isn't smart. It seeks to constrict the world to a single viewpoint, not accepting the ideas and beliefs of others as well as providing excuses for bad behavior while expecting exemplary behavior from others.
- Realize that love always protects. When you love someone, you open your heart and start to care and want to remain connected. Anything that concerns the other person will concern you too, even if it's just about being a shoulder to cry on or a sounding board to bounce ideas off. The littlest pain and struggle troubles you because you have loved, yet equally you know that love is strong enough to help and to protect the other person through simply being there for him or her. Love makes you protective without being invasive or controlling––you want to help when you can, reach out when it's needed and help guide to prevent unwanted outcomes for those still learning at any stage in life. Love causes you to get up at 3am in the morning to collect your exhausted partying teens instead of letting them travel home alone; love causes you to leave work earlier because your spouse sounded down over the phone that afternoon, even though your work pile is enormous; love causes you to tell the local school that you've seen cars making dangerous turning maneuvers where children are crossing the road because you don't want to see children hurt; love causes you to send letters to your local representative complaining about damage to the local environment because you don't want your community to be hurt. Love brings out the protective self in you.
- On the other hand, counterfeit love occurs when a person professes to love another but couldn't care less whether the other person is safe, healthy or happy. Counterfeit love is shown when a person simply ignores troubling signs and refuses to discuss helpful solutions because he or she fails to see it as any of his or her business. It's a way of pushing aside involvement in both relationships and community and remaining totally wrapped up in oneself instead. Counterfeit love often ascribes to the blame culture, where it's everyone else's fault and responsibility, not that of the person in question.
- Love even though you may lose. Love never fails, even when it might feel like it has. Break ups can really hurt us, whether it's a romantic, workplace, business, friendship or other breakup, the sting is always harsh. Yet, love is worth the effort, even in those times when loss hurts you. For, as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Never knowing love would be a terrible fate indeed. Love is therefore also about experience and not shutting yourself off from the world for fear of loss. By opening yourself up to the amazing possibilities of love, you open yourself up to all the beauty and wonder of the world too. Sometimes it won't work but on the law of averages, you'll experience more love than less, especially if you don't tie down your notion of love to simple romantic love but embrace love as a way of being and thinking in all walks of your life. So let love in, and be ruthless in restoring love to your life on those few occasions when it doesn't get reciprocated because ultimately, it will be for those who keep on trying.
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