It all comes down to four qualities:
Loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness (equanimity).
Based on Buddhist teachings, if you have these qualities, you are experiencing ‘true love’.
Applied on a daily basis, these principles cause romance to blossom.
LOVING-KINDNESS
Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer.
This is because true love should generate joy- not pain. And that starts with making serious efforts to understand how to meet your significant other’s needs…whether or not it’s easy.
If you’re making the other person cry every other day, that isn’t love at all.
COMPASSION
Secondly, compassion is an important element of love and he emphasizes that in order for love to grow, one must practice compassion, which in turn, will also grow.
This is not only the desire to ease the pain of another person, but the ability to do so. You must practice deep looking in order to gain a good understanding of the nature of the suffering of this person, in order to be able to help him or her to change. Knowledge and understanding are always at the root of the practice. The practice of understanding is the practice of meditation. To meditate is to look deeply into the heart of things.
One compassionate word, action, or thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring them joy.
JOY
Thirdly, true love has the ability to make someone suffer less. There is an art to suffering and once you grasp it, you’ll suffer less and less. Being in the moment is truly joyous!
If there is no joy in love, it is not true love. If you are suffering all the time, if you cry all the time, and if you make the person you love cry, this is not really love―it is even the opposite. If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love.
Better still, if you help your partner suffer less, then that’s half the battle won.
EQUANIMITY
The fourth element of true love is upeksha, which means equanimity, non attachment, nondiscrimination, even- mindedness, or letting go. Upa means “over,” and iksha means “to look.” You climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation, not bound by one side or the other.
When you love, you bring freedom to the person you love. If the opposite is true, it is not true love. You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free, not only outside but also inside. “Dear one, do you have enough space in your heart and all around you?” This is an intelligent question for testing out whether your love is something real.
If your love has attachment, discrimination, prejudice, or clinging, it’s not true love.
As long as we see ourselves as the one who loves and the other as the one who is loved, as long as we value ourselves more than others or see ourselves as different from others, we do not have true equanimity.
We have to put ourselves “into the other person’s skin” and become one with him if we want to understand and truly love him. When that happens, there is no “self’ and no “other.”
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