What Are the Leading Qualities of Love?
We are all attracted to love. To love is more complex than to lust or love. Love encompasses a whole range of positive and powerful emotional and psychological states, from the deepest personal love for your mate, the most profound interpersonal bond, to the easiest pure joy. When we are in love, it is easy to focus on the love we have for ourselves. But this sort of love is only possible if our other loves are also strong. Only then can love be fully understood, appreciated, and experienced.
It was discovered long ago that when you are in love with yourself, you are much less likely to experience painful and unpleasant side effects from falling in love. This is because you are in an environment that provides you with strong feelings for yourself and your own values and talents. You feel loved deeply and are able to provide your partner with those strong feelings for love. It is much easier to give love to a partner who is strong in character and whom you admire.
So when we are in a committed relationship, we spend much of our time together. We often eat, sleep, and work together. We talk, discuss, and grow together. This kind of close connection strengthens the quality time we have with our partner. When we spend quality time together, we are much more likely to be happy in our relationship. So, when I asked you to imagine how happy you would be in a relationship where you had no close connection with your partner, or where you seldom spent time together, or if you rarely got to speak with your partner, you might very well conclude that you would not be happy in your relationship.
The highest quality of love includes feelings that are shared with another person. In a committed relationship, you meet a whole range of new people. In addition, you have strong feelings for your other half, whether these are positive emotions such as friendship, or negative ones such as jealousy, anxiety, fear, and insecurity. The quality of love you have for your partner includes both positive emotions and negative ones.
The next highest level of quality in love is affection. This is closely related to the quality of love that includes strong feelings but also involves being attentive to the needs of your partner. This might mean that you are always there to listen to them when they need something, and that you are there to offer support when they need it from you. It might mean that you give your partner encouragement when they are feeling down, or that you are gentle with them when they are being argumentative.
The last type of quality in love is emotional attraction. This is closely related to physical attraction, but on a much smaller scale. People tend to fall in love with each other based on their own feelings for each other. However, as we mentioned before, feelings alone are not the only thing that attracts people to one another; physical attraction may also be a major factor.
