What is love?

"Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking,
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves.”
Author: 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Finding love in these modern times is not easy. Everyone wants and expects so much of each other. We’re all so busy rushing around, juggling work, family commitments and social lives, trying to keep up with everyone else, wanting what everyone else has.
We’re so absorbed in the material world and in our striving, struggling to obtain and achieve, that we’ve forgotten that the material world is in fact immaterial to our ultimate deep-down, internal happiness.

The big car sits in the driveway of our large garden, while inside our fancy house we sit mindlessly watching our forty two inch high definition plasma television; killing the hours, and a little bit of our souls, until we go to sleep in our top of the range orthopaedic bed, when we wake up to start the endless cycle again.

We have forgotten that the most important and fundamental part of us needs and wants to love and be loved in return. Some of us are lucky enough to fall off our daily treadmill of chasing the materialistic dream, and realise that we have very little love in our lives. It’s never too late to find love, true love. We need to remember that we are born to love and love is there for us if we just open our hearts.

The internet has changed not just the way we work but the way we love. Meeting new people, dating, falling in and out of love have all become part of the modern way of living and loving. Finding love online is the modern way to find that special someone for most of us in our hectic lives, and we can find true love on the Internet. It is important to be careful at first, reveal yourself slowly but honestly, until you are comfortable to meet and start dating.

I’d like to finish this article with a passage from one of my favourite films, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.”

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

Click here to read more of My Love by Joanne Clancy. It is available now at Amazon.