Let's go into detail about the five components of love.
What exactly are the five components?
A quick brief overview.
Absolutely.
The first one is grief.
And that's a strange place to start.
People very often react to that one about you're
talking about love and you start with grief.
Yes, because you talk to someone who has put up emotional walls,
keeps people at arm's length, fails to connect with even
people who love them.
These are people that have been hurt.
These people will tell you a story of heartbreak.
And when we go through these tough times in life,
when we go through divorce, when we go through a terrible breakup,
when someone close to us dies and where our heart is broken,
we have a tendency to want to avoid that pain.
And so we put up emotional walls that keep people out of our life.
We distance ourselves even from the people we love most
and end up damaging and even separating ourselves
from the relationships that we could have.
We're not going to get through life without scars.
Life is going to be painful sometimes.
But what I try to, the message that I want people to hear is that, yes,
there is pain in life that is so heartbreaking it can leave a hole
in your heart.
But you can live a really good life with a hole in your heart.
And that's what I want people to see.
That you're not going to escape pain, but we
can learn to make those connections, those emotional
connections, those connections of love, despite the hole in our heart.
We can live that good life anyway if we learn how to grieve those hurts of life.
So the first component, the foundational component
that keeps us engaged in love is grief.
The second one is emotion.
This is the bubble gum and butterflies.
This is the connections that we all think about, the sweet and beautiful,
those wonderful connections that we make that are the connections of the heart.
And for some people, that comes really easy.
Other people are not as emotional.
They don't know how to express their emotions as much.
That's OK.
It's a practice.
We practice the components of love.
And so even if love, maybe if you came out of an abusive background,
the word love may have bad connotations to you.
Say things like, I appreciate you.
Find ways of expressing emotion.
The third one is practicality.
I always say that emotion brings us together.
Practicality keeps us together.
The practical side of love is learning how to deal with finances
in your relationship, in your family, in your marriage.
Dealing with communication skills.
And it is a skill.
We can learn how to communicate.
Dealing with mental health issues.
Mental health is key to a relationship.
And it condemns so many relationships that could be salvaged
and could be thriving if we got help with our mental health.
And that's a practical matter, just like getting help
with our physical health if we have an ailment.
Mental health is treatable as well.
And so if we take care of our practical issues,
our practical matters of life, we thrive in our relationships
because we can stay connected.
We sometimes hear people say, I love them.
I just can't live with them.
And that's when we know that the practical side of love has failed.
The emotional side is still there.
But practicality has fallen.
The fourth is acceptance.
And of course, we have to accept people as they are.
People are not going to be perfect.
But that's a small part of it.
What we're really talking about in acceptance
is learning to love and accept ourselves.
Brene Brown has done some tremendous research on this.
Many people don't realize you cannot love other people more
than you love yourself.
That's the limit.
That's as far as you can go.
You have to love yourself because love is not a commodity like money.
If you need more money, you can get a second job.
You can take out a loan.
You could steal money.
I don't recommend that last one.
But you can get money in a lot of ways to give it away.
But love is organic.
It has to be grown.
And it has to be grown within us.
And so the only way you can love other people more
is to love yourself more.
And finally, the fifth component is passion.
When we say passion, we often think about intimacy
and romantic relationships.
That's part of it.
But it's not the whole story.
We're talking about a passion for life, being
able to enjoy the life you have.
That's the wind in your sails.
That's the fuel in your engine.
It gets you going in the morning to see what life's going to bring.
And the way to have passion in life is fun, to keep life fun.
Now, of course, life is serious.
That's why practicality is the third component of love.
And yes, there is tragedy.
That's why grief is the first component of love.
But despite those things, learn to have fun.
Keep fun as part of your life.
That keeps passion in your relationships.
It keeps passion in every area of your life, what you do for a living,
your connections and family, your connections and community.
Go to the job.
Have fun with your coworkers as much as you can in life.
When we do those five things, when we know how to grieve,
we know how to connect emotionally, we know
how to live life in a practical matter, to make life
livable with each other.
We love ourselves first, and we keep life fun and keep the passion in life.
You can build healthy relationships, even if you've never
known how to have one before.