Life was never been easy for me since my childhood. I had to put up with many people’s faces, and took in humiliation as part of my growing up.

 

        What I am today is pretty much due to what I had to put up during my past struggling years. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason is always for me to grow to my best authentic self by showing me a noble path to a deeper meaning of living my life. That was what I came to realize when I was in the mid 30s. Somehow, I always find ‘real love’ fascinating me, because I was never experience love in my critical tender years. Real love seems to elude me always.

       

        Since then, I have been very mindful in my daily living to find the authentic meaning to real love. I knew how real love feels like deep within me, but somehow I could not verbalize it when someone will to ask me what real love is to me.

 

        I’ve come across many different interpretation and teaching of real love, ranging from Bible, sutra, Tao Te Ching, and many other books published by the guru, but none of them could really resonant my feeling of real love that I feel deep inside me.

 

        Lately, since I was diagnosed with Carcinoid tumor, so many good and challenging things happened to me and to the people around me. I knew there would be a great lesson for me to learn this time. However, what was it? I have no clue of it.

 

        Somehow, just few weeks ago, I came across an author’s name Mira Kirshenbaum in the internet talking about her book called “Everything happens for a reason – Finding the true meaning of the events in our lives. I went to the neighborhood library the next day to look for that book, found it but it was on loaned. I placed a reservation immediately and got the book a week later.

 

        Right from the start, I knew it is my destiny to read this book now; it is the right time for me to make that great connection with this book. True enough, on page 150, I found those words that truly reflect my feeling about what is the real love.

 

        Now I would like to share those words, the excerpt from Everything Happens for a Reason by Mira Kirshenbaum, with you here.

 

·        Real love is not just how you feel about your partner. It’s much more how your partner makes you feel about yourself.

 

·        Real love is not about losing yourself in your partner. It’s about becoming true to yourself with your partner.

 

·        Real love is not about how great your partner is. It’s about how great you can become alongside your partner.

 

·        Real love is not just about how much you love your partner. It’s about how your partner helps you love yourself.

 

·        Real love is not just about your partner finding room in his or her heart for you. It‘s about your partner finding room in his or her life for your energy, drive, ambition, passion, interests, and needs.

 

·        Real love is not just based on how good your partner is “deep down.” It’s based on how much you actually experience your partner’s goodness as you live your life together.

 

·        Real love is not based on how your partner makes you hungry to be with him or her. It’s based on how much your partner makes you feel at home when you are with each other.

 

·        Real love is not about the love you say you share. It’s about the life you really do share, fully, equally, deeply.

 

·        Real love is about treating your partner the way you’d want to be treated.

 

·        Real love is about falling in ‘like’.

 

        These signs of real love constitute a pretty high standard. Most of us fall short of this standard a lot of the time in our relationship. But some of us aren’t even close. Then something happens, and it turns out that the reason it did was to give us what we need to find real love like this.

 

        The result is that if you look at our lives as they actually are, there’s too often little real love in them, love that truly bring us close, love that makes us feel good about ourselves and bring out the best in us, love that’s based on truly liking and respecting the other person. No wonder we so often need to learn a lesson about love.

 

        “Love is richest, most genuine, and most long lasting when you focus on being yourself and doing everything you can to make it possible for the other person to be him- or herself” – Mira Kirshenbaum