“Love Defined”
Question.
Dear Dr. Ty
I have been hurt in relationships most of my adult life; falling in and out of love, giving myself to men that didn’t love me back and then left holding the bag. I am 29 years old, and I’m tired of waiting for marriage. At the same time I want to give up on finding someone because of all the hurt I’ve experienced. How will I even know if he’s the one? I’m scared that I’ll end up just like a lot of other marriages, divorced. Will I ever find love or should I just give up on it and be alone the rest of my life?
Signed,
Longing for love
A.
Dear, Longing for love. I’m afraid that you, like many people, are searching for something that you don’t even know what it really is. You are looking for love in the arms of a man, going from one relationship to the next, in hopes of them giving you something you don’t already have yourself. You’ve tried to equate love to a few temporal short-lived relationships that fizzled after you attempted to trade yourself in through sexual and emotional promiscuity; all at the expense of your self-respect, your dignity, and your identity. And what’s worse, the bag you’re carrying gets heavier every time you leave another relationship. You’ve compounded a lot of excess junk and contamination and now you’re an emotional and spiritual wreck and don’t have the capacity to receive love. You’ve been practicing divorce, by allowing your single life to be a constant, reckless, emotional abandonment of relationships. And now there’s been a blow to your confidence and your self-esteem; you don’t even believe you are capable of receiving real love or worth having it. One of the prerequisites to giving love is loving yourself first, but that self-love has been damaged and now you are giving out of your brokenness.
You’ve formulated an emotional pattern, your own prototype of what you believe love is but it is nothing more than a framework of destructive relational bonding. This is why you continue to attract the same type of relationships your entire adult life. It’s like an adhesive; whatever it sticks to, it picks up the DNA, becoming one with it. You end up sticking yourself to men like glue every time you have sex with them giving you the ability to only attract the previous relationship that you had. When severing yourself from these men, you’re ripping you apart: an internal divorce of your spirit. And falling in and out of love? That wasn’t love. You’ve defined sexual and emotional affairs as love but the artificial ends up disappointing you every time because it doesn’t have the ability to produce what real love is. You’ve violated one of the truths of love: purity. (1 Corinthians 13:6) You can’t express love in sex that’s not pure. Therefore, having sex alone can never produce love.
We’ve distorted the meaning of “I love you.” Let me define what real love is: God. He is the essence, the epitome of love. You’ll never have to wonder if it is, because love is action, always moving in the direction and service of giving. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” (John 3:16) You can always judge love through God’s relationship with His bride, The Church. He laid down His life to have His bride. I know, in your search you’ve laid down your life and haven’t found it, but I can assure that love still exist because Love is permanent.
Since there is no end to God, There is no end to love. Love is married to eternity. It obligated itself to keep on loving. That’s why there is no where in the Bible that you can find out why God loves us. In fact, Deuteronomy 7:8, He says, I love you because. God doesn’t have a reason, He just loves you. His love is unconditional and that’s why He promised He’d never leave or forsake us. You don’t have to fear being subjected to divorce, because real love has built in power to protect itself from being assassinated. And that’s why many marriages end in divorce; they are not founded on real love and they’re nothing more than mere arrangements until effort and unconditional love has to be articulated. Divorce interrupts love’s strength, but love builds its strength in testing hardships and when couples divorce, they never give love a chance to prove itself. Love wants to prove its permanency. (1 Corinthians 13:7)
Love wants to prove itself to you. You’ve been looking for love, well here He Is. God wants you to experience this permanent, unconditional love. Your love life can only be as good as your love life with God and you will always feel alone even with a man, if you don’t have God. But if you only have God, you’ll never be alone. So, I invite you to develop a relationship with the Lord. It will not only heal you of your past wounds but it will restore self-love, giving you the ability to give and receive love from someone else. When you receive God’s unconditional love, you then, will be able to love like you’ve never been hurt, love without fear, and stand in love without falling.
Dr. Ty
Inspiration Physician
Dr. Ty, a relationship advisor and sex expert, is the best selling author of “Single, Saved, & Having Sex” and “I Do” For more advice, visit her online www.tyadams.org
