Show me someone who loves, and I'll ask you what they're willing to give up. That may sound like a strange way to talk about love, because we're accustomed to thinking of it primarily as a feeling: longing, affection, yearning or attraction. But lasting love isn't just something we feel. It's also something we do. Every action is a choice, and every choice involves some degree of sacrifice.
A Buddhist parable tells of a student who asked his teacher about the difference between wanting a flower and loving it. The teacher replied: "When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily."
In this sense, we can think of love as three things: sacrifice, attention and nurturing. Sacrifice makes room for another person, attention allows us to see who is really standing before us and nurturing consists of all the small, consistent actions that grow out of that attention.
Time and energy are precious resources for all of us. If you're getting to know someone new and they increasingly make time for you, even at the expense of other things they could be doing, they're showing early signs of love. This doesn't mean just the time they spend trying to impress you or presenting themselves as the person they think you want to see. When someone is genuinely invested in you, their focus gradually shifts from the impression they're making to who you actually are.
They're curious about you as a person. They want to know your story, what makes you happy, sad or afraid and what you want out of life. They make genuine room for you in their lives. That's very different from someone who remains inconsistent, fails to reciprocate and makes no real effort to get to know you on a deeper level.
If you're getting to know someone new and they increasingly make time for you, even at the expense of other things they could be doing, they're showing early signs of love.
The same holds true in an established relationship. Imagine a couple sitting on the couch at the end of the day. She's absorbed in her phone, while he's watching a television report that interests him. He turns to her and tries to share something that caught his attention, but she doesn't even look up. "I'm not interested in politics," she says.
Love doesn't require her to develop an interest in politics. It asks for something more subtle: recognizing that something deserves a moment of her attention simply because it matters to her partner. The ability to briefly step outside our own world and enter someone else's is one of the most everyday expressions of love.
If you build it, love will come
We're surrounded by images that portray love as something that simply happens to us. But lasting love is something we build, slowly and patiently. When someone loves you, they invest time, energy and thought not only in the relationship but also in what they themselves need to learn and change.
When we love someone, we let go of the need for everything to go our way. We learn to give up always being right, winning every argument, having the last word, avoiding confrontation or endlessly keeping score.
When we love someone, we let go of the need for everything to go our way
(Photo: shutterstock)
Love requires us to confront uncomfortable aspects of ourselves, work through disagreements, have difficult conversations and sometimes be willing to set our egos aside. Sometimes we care for another person in areas where they struggle to care for themselves, forgive even when it's difficult and stop trying to mold them to fit our needs.
The true test of love
One of the clearest signs of love, and one we sometimes overlook, is our willingness to be influenced by the person we love.
Does the fact that something matters to me change the way you think or act? When I tell you that you've hurt me, can you pause long enough to be curious before explaining why I shouldn't have been hurt?
When I tell you that something is missing, do you hear only criticism, or do you also hear something important about the person you love? Can we allow ourselves to change a little in response to what we've learned about each other, without either of us feeling that we're losing ourselves?
This doesn't mean erasing our own identities, of course. Love that repeatedly requires us to abandon our boundaries, values and basic needs isn't healthy love. Perhaps a more precise way to put it is that love means giving up our place at the center, not giving up ourselves.
Love requires us to confront uncomfortable aspects of ourselves, work through disagreements, have difficult conversations and sometimes be willing to set our egos aside. Sometimes we care for another person in areas where they struggle to care for themselves, forgive even when it's difficult and stop trying to mold them to fit our needs.
This becomes even clearer when conflict arises. It's relatively easy to be loving when we both want the same thing. The more interesting question is what happens when I want one thing and you want another, when you've hurt me, when you disappoint me or when one of my needs asks something of you that doesn't come naturally.
Even in an argument, love is the ability to avoid reducing the person in front of us to the hurtful thing they've just done. We can be deeply angry while still remembering that we're dealing with a whole person — someone who has been there for us, someone with weaknesses, vulnerabilities, fears and intentions that cannot be summed up by a single disappointing moment.
Love doesn't eliminate anger, but it can help us avoid turning the other person into an enemy every time we're angry with them.
It's relatively easy to be loving when we both want the same thing
(Photo: shutterstock)
This is where the importance of repairing a relationship comes in. None of us knows how to love perfectly. We hurt each other, miss the mark, become selfish and react out of fear, exhaustion or old wounds. That's why perhaps one of the most important signs of love isn't that we never hurt one another, but that we're capable of making things right afterward.
Can they reach out again after a disagreement? Apologize? Acknowledge their role in what happened? Make another effort?
Repair doesn't have to look like a dramatic embrace accompanied by cries of "It's all my fault. I've sinned." Sometimes, after acknowledging the hurt, it's the small gestures that say: Even after what happened between us, you still matter to me.
Ultimately, a relationship isn't something we simply enter and hope will keep working. It's something we build. Not by keeping score, but through the sense that two people are moving toward each other: both asking questions, taking initiative, trying to understand, occasionally making adjustments, expressing their own needs and showing interest in what the other person needs.
Someone can say they love us and may even mean it. But if, over time, a relationship lacks curiosity, room for the other person, reciprocity, openness to influence, nurturing or efforts to repair what has been damaged, that gap deserves to be taken seriously.
Not because it necessarily proves someone is lying when they say "I love you," but because there's a difference between feeling love for someone and knowing how to love them within a relationship.
That's why the question "Does he love me?" may be less useful than another question: "What does his love look like in our everyday lives?"
Because ultimately, love is reflected not only in what another person feels toward us, but also in the space they're willing to make for us within themselves and in their lives.
Roi Tzur is the founder of Derech Hakesher (The Path to Connection), a center offering individual therapy, couples therapy and online counseling.