In and Out of Love

I had more thoughts to add to my last blog, though thought they deserved their own spot!

One thing that I have learned over time is that if I ended a relationship every time I thought love was gone... oh wait... I DID do that... 

I was sitting here thinking about the past relationships and trying to see the pattern of "love" and when/how they ended.  I ended relationships only weeks after thinking I "loved" them because that feeling was gone.  And honestly, a lot of times that feeling was probably not love as much as it was lust.  But either way, they ended the moment that feeling was gone.

The few relationships that I can honestly say that real feelings were involved still ended the moment I thought those feelings were gone.  I always thought love was involuntary and that if it was gone then it meant we weren't supposed to be together.  And even though I can admit now that things did happen how they were supposed to, it was a pattern I kept repeating, even into my current marriage.

I married my first husband for what I thought was love.  We were so compatible and I thought I loved him.  But, the problem there was that we allowed our love to be shared with other people rather than keeping it confined to our marriage.  And because we weren't loving each other, I thought my love had faded and I left.  And I soon found myself loving someone else.

Now, because I kept up that same pattern, even my second marriage faced ending too many times.  I would threaten divorce just because I was unhappy with something.  I would withhold my love if he upset me, or when he withheld his love.  And those were the times that I felt like we were in a "loveless" marriage.  And, it was loveless, because we weren't putting love into it.

But if we had ended our relationship, and I continued my pattern, I have to wonder how many relationships I would have been in and out of by now.   And I would still have never learned the true beauty of what real love is and how amazing it feels!

Love isn't always involuntary.  There are times that we really have to make an effort to love, and be very purposeful about it.  There are going to be times that people are just simply unlovable, but we have to choose to love them anyway.  And to love someone isn't just a feeling we have for them, it is the action we take for and to them. 

I have never known love like this before!  God's love is the only thing better than the love in my marriage!  Fil and I do not HAVE to love each other, we CHOOSE to.  Our love isn't something we just feel quietly within our own hearts, it is something we act on and show each other every day!  Our love is more than something that just exists, it is something we built by CHOICE, TOGETHER!