We, as God’s daughters need to know that Heavenly Father loves us. We need to know that He sees the good in us. Feeling His love encourages us to press forward, reassures us that we are His, and confirms to us that He cherishes us even when we stumble and experience temporary setbacks.[Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
Bonnie D. Parkin testifies: “I know that He loves us, sisters, as does His Son, Jesus Christ. That love will never change – it is constant. You can rely on it. We can trust it. We must believe that the love of Christ will never fail us. All that we do…should reflect the love of our Saviour and the love of our Heavenly Father. This great love should be the source of our motivation to serve others. It must be both our point of origin and our destination!”
Do we frequently reject the Lord’s love that He pours out upon us in much more abundance than we are willing to receive? Do we think that we need to be perfect in order to deserve His love? When we allow ourselves to feel “encircled about eternally in the arms of His love”, we feel safe, and we realize that we don’t need to be immediately perfect. We must acknowledge that perfection is a process..[Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
I know there may be some who have a difficult time imagining what His love feels like. Think of a mother with her newborn baby. The warmth, safety, cherishing, and peace of a mother’s embrace can help us understand what it feels like to be encircled in the arms of His love.[Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
A young adult Relief Society sister wrote, ” Only in the love of my mother do I come close to understanding the magnitude and power of the love of the Savior.”
Mothers, can you see how essential you are in teaching this truth to your children? As you encircle your children with your love, they will catch glimpses of His love. [Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
President Gorden B. Hinckley urges us to “love the Lord [our] God, and love His Son, and be ever grateful for Their love for us. Whenever other love fades, there will be that shining, transcendent, everlasting love of God for each of us and the love of His Son, who gave His life for us.
A mother who knows her relationship with God helps her children to know Him and to be encircled by His love. I was touched by the comments a daughter shared at the funeral of her 100-year-old mother: “When I was a teenager trying to plan my class schedule, I would come into the kitchen where Mother was ironing. I would present possible options for my studies…She would listen to all of them. We would discuss the possibilities…and then she would say, ‘OK, Cathy, have you prayed about it?’ That was kind of embarrassing to me, and i would hesitate and then add, ‘Do you have to pray about everything?’ She answered simply, ‘I do’. [Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
This mother listened. She shared her faith in the Lord; she set an example; she shared her expectations for her daughter to return continually to the Lord. As we approach the Lord, we feel His love draw us closer. Mothers, teach your children to always include the Lord in their lives, and help them to recognize His loving influence..[Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
The greatest evidence of our Savior’s love for us is His Atonement. His love overflows with grace, patience, long-suffering, mercy, and forgiveness. [Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
We must not allow pride or vanity, selfishness or personal agendas to displace our reaching out to others in love. Quite simply and profoundly, we must first allow ourselves to be encircled by God’s love. We do this best by embracing the Savior’s eternal Atonement. Then we can expand that circle to include our family and all others. Such a circle is indeed heaven. [Bonnie D. Parkin, September 23 2006- General Relief Society Meeting]
Naomi Botha is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and writes in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Naomi also shares her experiences as a woman, wife and mother.
To find out more about family values and the values of womanhood, please visit http://magicwomanhood.blogspot.com or http://www.lds.org
Feelings are best expressed through few wise words. They do not have to be vocabularies. A simple love letter speaks to the innermost part of the mind of a receiver and fills her/him with butterflies in the stomach. There are some people who can hardly express their love feelings through spoken words but would easily pour down their deepest feelings through a love letter or love poetry. A love quote such as “If loving you is wrong, i don’t want to be right” speaks for a thousand ordinary words. If writing is your thing, do not feel old fashioned in this era of mobile technology. A text message will limit your words and so the weight of your expression. Get a a pen and do whatever you do best. It can be a love letter or a poem.
Most people have adopted a different writing media. They seldom use writing paper pads since the invention of computers. They are embracing the technology of using a text area on the e-mail window on the Internet or the many text editors. Word processors like Microsoft word program are used. A love letter written as a soft copy is modernized but have you ever thought about being unique in your expression? Most of the times it is not what you say but how you say it. Are you unique, are you different? Retrace your steps back to the paper business. Venture into love poetry or a love quote on a paper and stand out of the crowd. It makes you look different.
On the other hand, Internet has helped some people who lack originality to borrow some love quotes from experts. Browsing through the Internet provides you with much love material. A sweet love letter, alluring love poetry and love quote of the day are available in most of the top dating sites or their respective blogs. All these can be the benefits of joining a dating site. Relationships are created and well nourished in professional dating sites. These love materials are key ingredients to a successful romantic relationship. However some of the marriage quotes are just for humor. They act as funny jokes so you should be wise to read them and laugh them off. Do not believe every thing you read otherwise you better not read.
A love quote has the capability of unlocking all the doors of intense passion and unleash all the potential to love. It is an open secret to everyone that a hand-written letter has a way of creating a soft spot for someone. To keep the fire burning in romantic relationships, it is always wise to employ love poetry in your love techniques. It works efficiently as the extra effort is appreciated. A little simplicity goes a long way. It is a clear indication that someone took time to think about you. What a wonderful feeling. A genuine love letter is all you need to get what you have always wanted from your partner. Did you do something wrong and you have always wanted to say sorry? Write an apologetic love letter.
Francis K. Githinji Is A Online Dating Expert. His Latest Project Love Letter Shows How The Power Of Online Dating Can Be Harnessed Internationally and With Great Success, Or You Could Post Your Valued Comments On His Blog At Love Letter
Why is it that so often when we feel we are in love, we also feel we are in bondage if anything happens to shake the feeling of “security” in the love? Why does love so often make us dependent on the other person? Shouldn’t love be a marvelous and freeing feeling rather than these other sensations of need and fear and dependence?
Songs Say it All
Songs so often say it all: “Can’t Live, if Livin’ is Without You”, “I Need Your Lovin’”, “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone”, “I Fall to Pieces”, It’s You I Need to Take the Blues Away, It Must be Love, “Without You I am Nothing”, “I’m Drowning Without Your Love”, If you Leave, I Won’t be Able to Breathe”, etc.
The message each of those songs gives is that when the person we love is no longer with us, we can’t go on. We need that person to be able to stay alive…at least figuratively speaking. Without the person we love, we are nothing, we can not bear to live.
And while we all know that this is not exactly true, most of us have certainly been in the position of feeling something akin to those words.
So what does it mean? Does it really mean that loving someone implies that we need the other person so much that we simply feel we can not go on without them? Or could all that be a fallacy?
Typical Love Scenario
Let’s examine what happens in a typical love scenario…
Boy meets girl (man meets woman), chemistry, infatuation, bliss, love, we’ve all been there and know how that part of it goes. But what is really happening? Raging hormones answer only a small part of the question, even though they can create a vast impact. An article in the weekend supplement of Spain’s daily El Mundo (8/7/06) refers to University of Pisa’s Donatella Marazziti’s work on romantic love activating parts of the brain associated with addiction. She has found that falling in love is a bit like going crazy from the point of view of brain chemicals and hormones (see also New Scientist).
Jung and the Intelligent Psyche
Carl Gustav Jung said that our psyche is so infinitely intelligent that it attracts us to certain individuals (as certain individuals’ psyche causes them to be attracted to us) in order that we experience precisely that which we need to grow. (See my April 2006 Newsletter: Committed Relationships: Use Them to Grow Towards Self-Understanding and Real Love).
So how do we typically grow? By going through an experience of some sort that may not be easy. We grow at school by learning, studying, and taking exams. We grow in life by becoming more aware, and we generally tend to become more aware when some life experience obliges us to do so.
By extrapolating, we might say that in relationships we grow most quickly through experiences that are not necessarily easy. And going back to Jung, he clearly proposes that throughout the course of our lives it is our psyche that in its infinite intelligence leads us to be attracted to precisely those individuals who most have the potential to be instruments in our individual growth. In order for that to work, evidently we first have to be fully in relationship with those people. So we fall in love, we begin to feel that our happiness depends in some measure on the other person, and so begins our need of that person.
External vs Internal Needs
An external need, in others words, when we depend on something external to ourselves for our well-being, frequently carries within it the seeds of failure. In the case of a relationship, it may often be the cause of power plays between the two people, the less needy one being the one to dominate the relationship, and the needier one to resentfully accept this dominance due to his or her need for the other partner.
Obsessiveness, Possessiveness, or the Need to Control
Power plays are not the only manifestation of relationships mired in mutual need. Another frequent expression is obsessiveness or possessiveness, or a need to control. And you can imagine – if you haven’t been there – the kind of resentment and negative feelings that this can generate on the part of both people. Akin to any substance addiction, obsessiveness or possessiveness or the need to control can take people to hellish places in their hearts and minds that few of us would wish to visit. I have created an entire workshop on this topic, because although this type of addiction is often masked by a veneer of sophistication, it occurs more frequently than most people suspect, and makes the existence of those that suffer from it a living nightmare.
Does Needing Mean You Really Love?
So why do we become needy in relationships? Of the roughly 40% men and 60% women that come to my private practice, many would initially answer that ‘needing’ your love partner is how it should be. But why should love imply a feeling that almost always develops into something negative, and at best, makes those who feel it, as said at the beginning of this article, that they could not live without the beloved, thus ‘proving’ in their minds, that this is really love? Is that really what love is all about?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that love means freedom rather than independence? (See my article Are You in Love, or Do You Love?). So what does needing our partner tell us?
Falling In Love With Yourself…
Let’s start with the falling in love part. What are we actually falling in love with? Stated simply, we fall in love with those bits and pieces of ourselves that we have not yet recognized, but that we find (via projection) in the partner. Is she tender and understanding? Is he funny and the center of the party? Is she strong and enterprising? Is he confident, with a great sense of integrity? All of those qualities may well be part of your partner’s character, but the fact that you fell in love with those specific traits, tells you that they are actually part of your own character as well.
Since you do not yet manifest those qualities, because you have not yet recognized them in yourself, you need your partner to be able to ‘be in touch with’ that part of you. That is what ‘hooks’ you on your partner. Your partner’s presence in your life gives you contact to those parts of you that you have not yet developed, making you feel that your partner is absolutely indispensable to your well-being.
When Your Partner Leaves
So then, when something happens to the relationship, or your partner leaves, or threatens to leave, is when the strong feelings of need arise. This is the time when you should realize that these strong feelings of need are a vast red flag letting you know something is going on inside of you that only you can do something about. If you ignore it, or translate it into “I was deeply wounded by my partner”, or “my partner did not return my feelings when I most needed him/her, so I guess that means I always choose the wrong people”, or “next time I will choose better, so that this kind of thing never happens to me again”, then instead of resolving your inner dilemma, you will merely perpetuate it by maintaining the status quo inside of you, falling in love with yet another person that puts you in touch with bits of you that you have not yet recognized in yourself, and thus setting yourself up to be ‘needy’.
Can it be Solved?
So what is the solution? Simple to state, less simple to execute (mainly because it requires some of that inner discipline that most of us don’t want to exercise): work on those bits of yourself that you catch a glimpse of in the beloved. Examine yourself to see where they might reside in you. Work at developing them; growing them. If you do this, I guarantee you that the next time you fall in love, it will be with a smaller degree of external need, and hence, a greater degree of internal freedom. Or, if you remain with the same person, your love will grow into something infinitely more loving.
Note: look for an article in the near future about need in love relationships that is the consequence of an early dysfunctional relationship with one of the parents. This may cause the individual to grow up believing that love means hurting in some way. Then, when the individual finds someone who ‘plays’ that role for him/her, that person becomes necessary to the first person’s emotional survival – or so it is believed. The need that arises from this has more to do with a lack of self-esteem or poor boundaries, than with getting in touch with unrecognized bits of the self, and thus the work that needs to be done is on one’s self esteem in connection with the construction of healthy boundaries.
Dr. Kortsch is a psychotherapist, clinical hypnotherapist, relationship coach, author, and professional speaker. She broadcasts a live weekly radio show on the Internet and her website. She works with clients to move them towards greater personal, professional, and relationship success with her integral and human potential raising approach to life. Sign up for her free cutting edge and inspiring ezine at http://www.advancedpersonaltherapy.com
Love is a feeling which you have little or no control over. It has made many people commit suicide, sell plots of land and remain bankrupt. It makes most people to behave in an abnormal manner. To the people around them they act stupid but to themselves they are only responding to some queer forces. Extreme crazy love is usually associated with love spells. A love spell is dangerous because it is like your life stands still and all that is important is the other person. It becomes endless love. This is usually used by people who their love is un reciprocated. It is a bad feeling to love somebody who does not love you back. It can even cause a bad heart disease. Love spells are also used in revenge missions. I have heard of married women who have used love spells on their promiscuous drunkard husbands in a trial to tame them.
People who are subjected to love spells become real slaves of the other partners. In most cases, no amount of verbal abuse or even physical abuse that is enough to make the love disappear. The endless love cannot be easily reverted and it mostly calls for intervention from friends and relatives. It is the extreme form of crazy love. I once read a story about a girl who was subjected to a love spell when she was sixteen years old. The amount of audacity and courage she explained left my mouth agape. She used to escape from school at the middle of the night, jump over electric fences amidst much darkness and run over the bushes only to have a glance at a teenage boy.
Love spells blind your eye in such a way that you are not responsive to any amount of mistreatment. She used to be beaten over a small quarrel and she even miscarried. Her mother was very touched that she had to save her from the hands of death. She got her a school far away from the bustard and her life continued. What disappointed me was her confession that she still had love feeling towards the guy but she restrains herself. This means that love which is influenced by a spell is endless love. It is very unfair to see someone struggling to free herself from crazy love and yet she can’t.
Crazy love is very disturbing especially if you do not need it. Love spells are known to mess people’s lives. There should be a social court where such offenders are judged and persecuted. Love should come from within without any external forces. That is the real true love which you should celebrate. It does not feel good to be loved by someone because you had to use a love spell on her. You live feeling guilty since endless love will haunt her for a life time. It is not possible to revert the already done damage. Be patient with life and with the advent of dating sites you will find love so effortlessly.
Francis K. Githinji Is An Online Dating Expert. His Latest Project Crazy Love Shows How The Power Of Online Dating Can Be Harnessed Internationally and With Great Success, Or You Could Post Your Valued Comments On His Blog At Crazy Love
There are so many true love symbols in the world. Most of them are love symbol but when they are sent by someone who really loves you, it is a true love symbol. So if someone sent you a cupid it means that he or she loves you. A cupid is sometimes depicted as a picture of a baby naked and blindfolded with wings. It is referred to as Putto. It is said to be the son of the Goddess of love. It has a bow and arrow aimed at a heart. When someone sends you this symbol, they simply mean that they love you and somehow, you have made a mark in their heart. Legend has it that when someone is hit by the cupid’s arrow they fall in love without them even wanting to. So if you are lucky enough to get hit by a cupid arrow you are on your way to falling in love with someone.
A heart is another true love symbol that is used to depict that someone loves you. A heart is a very important of a human being. Most people say the love people with all their hearts. You would never hear someone saying ‘I Love you with all my kidneys or liver yet there are also very important. There are funny people who however say that and another group that say they love with all they have but loving with all the heart still remains the most favorite of all. A heart is a symbol of love and if someone sent you a heart symbol you should know for sure that the person intended to say that they love you.
Another true love symbol is the love knot. These love knots are commonly used today by so many people around the world. If you happen to get a love knot from someone you should know that the person loves you and that you should reciprocate in a way. A long time ago, women used to send messages through the knots of a carpet to tell the men that they are interested in them. These messages were mostly sent by Muslim women but a lot of other people have adopted it. It is a very interesting way of telling someone that you like them. Go right ahead and make a love knot today and tell the person you love that you really love them.
The butterflies are also a true love symbol that people send to their husbands and wives. However, there are people who still send them to their partners. This is because a butterfly is said to represent a soul and in the Asian culture it means a happy marriage. There cannot be a happy marriage if two people do not love each other. People who love each other and intend to get married always send each other butterflies to signify that they love each other and they have given their soul. Say you love someone today by sending one of the true love symbols. Have a lot of fun while doing this.
Francis K. Githinji Is An Online Dating Expert. His Latest ProjectTrue Love Symbol Shows How The Power Of Online Dating Can Be Harnessed Internationally and With Great Success, Or You Could Post Your Valued Comments On His Blog At True Love Symbol
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