Love is probably the most used and misused word in the English language. Countless songs and books center on this subject. All people must deal with the issue of love, yet I feel that most people have misconceptions, if not illusions about love.

It is a story as classic as time. Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. Stuff happens and they live happily ever after. It is a sweet notion, and it does happen, every day in fact. The thing that is often forgotten in life is the “stuff happens” part.

One of the most read chapters in the bible is Corinthians 13 or the love chapter, “Love is patient, love is kind”. It lists several things about love, yet nowhere does it say love is perfect, or easy, or even safe. More often than not we enter into love relationships without an understanding of what love isn’t because we all like what it is.

1. Love is a verb: In any school child’s English book it says that love is an emotion and thus a noun. I do not feel that this is correct. There are certainly emotions involved with love but love is a conscience willing choice. One does not love another person for fifty years just because. They love each other because everyday they choose to love each other. It is an action that must be taken. A decision that must settled on.
2. Love is blind: One of the mistakes we make in relationships sometimes is loving the idea of a person over the actual person. It becomes easy to see someone better than they are, to see only the good and never consider the bad. Yet love takes both good and bad. It is impossible to love only half a person. We see a good person and always like the idea of them being a good person over true person. I can’t stress the importance of not doing this. Sometimes what a person is seen as is nothing like what they really are, and that doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. It just may be different than what one expects.
3. Love Hurts: Even in the best of relationships there will come a point where one will hurt the other. In fact, there may be several points. It may not be on purpose or with ill will in mind but it will happen. Sooner or later both parties in a relationship will have a legitimate reason to be mad at the other. Understand this, deal with this, and learn to forgive long before it happens. Otherwise it may become the death nail of a good relationship.
4. Little Things: From what I have seen it is rarely the big things that break up a relationship. It seems that it is more likely to be the small things. The everyday habits of two people. The way one chews, the way one snores, the way one approaches doing the dishes. Any number of small things can cause unneeded stress in a relationship. There is no easy way around it. A person can change but love is give and take. The person being bothered needs to change as much as the person bothering. That is the essence of compromise.

It is usually easy to look at someone with affection after being with them for a short time. It, however, may become harder as the years roll on. There is no easy key to this, but in many ways it comes back to all the above truths. Love someone for everything you don’t like about them rather than everything you do like about them.