The word “love” is one of the most used and most misused nowadays.
There is little or none LOVE behind what is being sold under this name. But there is still much love between people. And there is even more need of love.
The 14 February is such an example of the mankind’s longing for true love, albite through the cheap selling of the love story. Well I cannot blame the mankind for that 
For I know that behind it there is a vast and deep desire for something genuine, eternal and sacred.
This is a good enough reason to re-post my earlier post about Romantic Love.
This post follows Romantic Love: A book EVERY Western man should read  and quotes Robert A. Johnson’s bestseller “Understanding the Psychology of romantic loveâ€Â  . I arranged it the way that it gives the essence of author’s investigations on the topic, but please do read the book, it’s so insightful!
Below you will find the brilliant differentiation between the so called romantic love and true love. After reading this post, be prepared for the next in which you will lean about the amazing potential of romantic love.  In the meanwhile, let’s meditate on the truthful lines below.
WHAT IS ROMANTIC LOVE?
Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy…We are so accustomed to living with the beliefs and assumptions of romantic love that we think it is the only form of “love†on which marriage or love relationships can be based. We think it is the only “true loveâ€. But there is much that we can learn from the East about this. In Eastern countries, like those of India and Japan, we find that married couples love each other with great warmth, often with a stability and devotion that puts us to shame. But their love is not “romantic love†as we know it. They don’t impose the same ideals on their relationships, nor do they impose such impossible demands and expectations on each other as we do.
Romantic love has existed throughout history in many cultures. We find it in the literature of ancient Greece, the Roman empire, ancient Persia, and feudal Japan. But our modern Western society is the only culture in history that has experienced romantic love as a mass phenomenon. We are the only society that makes romance the basis of our marriages and love relationships and the cultural ideal of “true loveâ€.
One of the greatest paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationships as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayal; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of “being in loveâ€.
Romance, in its purest form, seeks only one thing – passion. It is willing to sacrifice everything else – every duty, obligation, relationship, or commitment – in order to have passion.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ROMANTIC LOVE AND TRUE LOVE
People become so wearied of the cycles and dead ends of romance that they begin to wonder if there is such a thing as “loveâ€. There is. But sometimes we have to make profound changes of attitude before we can see what love is and make room for love in our lives. Love between human beings is one of the absolute realities of human nature. (more…)
axinia
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