How would you want me to love you? How would you answer this question?
It seems difficult. It is usually clear to us that we want to be loved, to be loved very, very much. But what do you need others to do to feel loved?
Love needs to express itself, to be in action, to cease to be love in order to be love. However, in the resulting actions and words, love sometimes hides and goes unnoticed.
What things do others do for you that make you feel loved? What things do they do for you that don't make you feel loved? What things do you do when you love? How are they interpreted and experienced by your loved ones?
Tools to bridge the gap
We spend our lives guessing and waiting instead of asking, asking, asking ourselves. Just look at the Valentine's Day advertisements: In this life nothing works better than a subtle suggestion. Is it really like that?
We want to love ourselves and it turns out that there are unfulfilled expectations, unappreciated sacrifices and a long list of unhappiness. We have some beliefs that do not help us. For example: if you ask, you haven't been attentive enough or you can't ask for love. So, we love as we can, as we sense, as we did in the past, as we think we should love. But how can we be more sensitive?
In love there is a gap like the gap between what I say and what you hear, because the listener interprets. Therefore, we can use the same tools we use as coaches to bridge this gap. If I don't ask, I am more likely to be wrong and spend a lot of time and energy analysing clues. If I ask, I can then decide. If I ask genuinely, the other person will know what I need and will be free to say no to me.
If that freedom does not exist, because I presuppose that there is a way in which I must be loved and that this way must be known but not said, whether the other meets my expectation or not, I will remain just as dissatisfied since it was his obligation, it was what he was supposed to do, what was expected.
One of the things I have learnt in the programme of Emotional Awareness CONEM is to broaden my perspective on how different we are in the way we express affection and how different our needs can be when it comes to receiving it. I believe that it is important to improve the communication of love by being more sensitive to recognise its manifestations and more effective in choosing with each person how to express it..
