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Removing the Barriers of Entry to Love

I went to school to get my MBA. Even with all that knowledge, it's nothing compared to what I still need to know about love.

One of the skills that I think every human being should have is how to love. Oddly enough that’s not a skill that gets taught in our culture. If it is, then it’s taught in an incorrect way that only brings toxicity to our lives and others. In a society built on capitalism, the notion is that if you want to learn to love, you’re going to need to gain something. More, more, more. It could be material things like a desirable income, or it can be something intangible like status. Can you name all the books out there that shows you how to gain confidence?

I’d like to a different approach to love. I have said this before, knowledge is the increase of something. Wisdom is when you take things away. In order for us to be better at loving, we must remove the barriers that take us away from love. The Sufi poet Rumi said it best, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” It’s something I subscribe to 100%. After years of my twenties trying to be someone for somebody, it’s time for me to peel back some layers.

Earlier in life, I would be paralyzed by love because fear would overtake it. Most of it was due to just overthinking. When it comes to romantic relationships, I think we get caught up in what we want. What I truly mean is that we create a checklist of what we want in a potential partner. If they don’t measure up to this criteria then it’s going to be a no for me dawg. in certain jobs that I’ve had, I was unable to create a relationship with others because they had certain expectations of me. Expectations are typical in the workplace, but it’s incompatible with love.

Keep Your Heart Open

Love comes from within. It’s hard to love when traumas of the past build a wall. We fear love because we are afraid to get hurt again. We give all we can to a certain someone or situation, to get nothing but pain in return. They say that love is a battlefield. Sometimes we have to fight for the love that we want. That means through the battle, we will get hurt. Yet, we still fight for love. The wounds become our battle stories. I’ve also said that love is a sacrifice. If we truly want to love, we have to give ourselves away to another. This makes us vulnerable, but without this vulnerability, there is no chance for love. Giving love is the only way to ensure that you’ll receive love back.

The common phrase we hear about our hard is to guard it. That easily becomes a barrier. Sometimes we don’t go after what we love because we are afraid of the outcome. We don’t open up that business because, working 9-5 is more stable even if we have no passion for it. Settling in this way diminishes the fire of our heart. It dwindles our passion for the things we want in life. We think it’ll keep us safe, but there’s no such thing. Everything we do is a risk. Why not commit to risks that our heart yearns for?

No Expectations

If we see love as a gift that should be given freely to those we love, we should remember to do it with no expectation of receiving anything back. Part of the reason why we were hurt in the past was because we had expectation of another person. They didn’t live up to the ideas that we had of them in our heads. It gets very difficult when we go deeper into parental issues.

We should expect a mother to be loving, compassionate and caring, but not everyone shares the same experience. We should love people for the its own sake. This is one of the biggest barrier that we have to being love and being loved. I’m getting hits of anxiety just writing this because I know I fell into the trap of expectations. Let’s treat love as a gift and every day is Christmas.

Let Love Find You

When society talks to us about love, it teaches us masculinity means to chase. If we’re talking about gender norms, women seem to do a better job to let love come as they are taught that the man does the work to establish a relationship. Maybe the song’s issue isn’t that we’re looking for love in all the wrong places, but that we are looking for love. I would rather have love flow to me. It takes much of the unnecessary pressure to find a mate.

We all sense the desperation of someone on the prowl, and it’s never a good look. There are plenty of opportunities where we can rest with another person and let love happen. Let’s not worry about what society has to say, what your auntie has to say, or our biological clock even if it is ticking. Better to find love with someone you know you’ll spend a majority of your life with rather than finding pregnancy out of desperation.

Small Acts of Kindness Builds Love

If you’re looking to find love, doing small things for people can certainly help. It could be something as simple as just flashing a smile. Love is an action. At the same time, love without action isn’t love at all. You’re friendly nature is a measure of love and should be shared to all. I don’t really think people understand the power of kindness and compassion. I don’t mean being nice. When I speak on compassion, I mean performing an action in which a person is in no position to pay you back. Love is a gift. People are only nice to those who can reciprocate, but love is not here. For instance, a person can take another person on a date. Pay for the date, only to expect something in return. This is not love. This is a transaction.

If I could summarize this blog into a key takeaway, I can easily say that fear is by far the biggest barrier to love. In most cases, we have to go through fear to reach love. We stray away because we are afraid of uncertainty, and don’t want our comfortable lives to be uncomfortable. It’s crazy to believe that we want and even pray for that husband, or entrepreneurial venture, but when the opportunity presents itself, we close up.

Today, we break that cycle. We wake up every day with the intention of being love and showing love to others. There’s nothing to expect in return. We don’t provide the receipts when we’ve been hurt. The only reason to love is for love’s sake. It’s a learning process. We have to unlearn what society’s given us and become the change that we want to see. Are you coming with me?

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