8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go

by Jay Shetty

“When you like a flower, you pluck it. When you love a flower, you water it daily.”

We are drawn to love as we are drawn to a flower—first by its beauty and allure—but the only way we can keep it alive is through consistent care and attention. Love is a daily effort.

The ancient Greeks said there were seven basic types: Eros, which is sexual or passionate love; Philia, or friendship; Storge, or familial love; Agape, which is universal love; Ludus, which is casual or noncommittal love; Pragma, which is based on duty or other interests; and Philautia, which is self-love.

The Vedas introduced me to the fundamental ideas that love has stages, that love is a process, and that we all desire to love and be loved.

We can’t know where and when we’ll find love, but we can prepare for it and practice what we’ve learned when we find it.

We are meant to be learning at every stage of life. Think about life as a series of classrooms or ashrams in which we learn various lessons.

We acquire skills like compassion, empathy, and patience (Rule 1). This prepares us to share love because we’ll need these qualities when we love someone else. We will also examine our past relationships to avoid making the same mistakes in relationships going forward (Rule 2).

Done this!! Gw keren jg

Romance and attraction are indeed the initial connection points, but I define the deepest love as when you like someone’s personality, respect their values, and help them toward their goals in a long-term, committed relationship.

In Vanaprastha we learn how to resolve conflict so we can protect our love (Rule 6). We also protect ourselves and our ability to love by learning when to break up, and how to deal with it if we do (Rule 7).

The fourth ashram, Sannyasa, is the epitome of love—when we’re extending our love to every person and every moment of our life.

Love is not about staging the perfect proposal or creating a perfect relationship. It’s about learning to navigate the imperfections that are intrinsic to ourselves, our partners, and life itself.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found through a series of studies that when we’re afraid of being single, we’re more likely to settle for less satisfying relationships. Specifically, we’re more likely to become dependent on our partners and less likely to break up with them, even when the relationship doesn’t meet our needs.

Loneliness makes us rush into relationships; it keeps us in the wrong relationships; and it urges us to accept less than we deserve.

The difference between loneliness and solitude is the lens through which we see our time alone, and how we use that time. The lens of loneliness makes us insecure and prone to bad decisions. The lens of solitude makes us open and curious.

Remember, in a healthy relationship, you manage the intersection of two lives best if you know your own personality, values, and goals already.

You spend more time with yourself than anyone else in your lifetime. Take the time to appreciate your strengths and admit the areas where you need work. Then, when you enter a relationship with someone else, you’ll already have a sense of what you’re bringing to the table and where you could improve.

Worked and still working on this!

If you don’t have the same values, you don’t have to fight about them or defend them, but you need to know your own so you can respect yourself, and know theirs so you can respect them—and vice versa.

Knowing our goals helps us prepare for love. Then, when they come up in conversation with a potential partner, you can explain why they’re important to you.

In fact, when people with high self-esteem had a relationship that went on the rocks, their self-esteem was unaffected. They did not view the level of happiness in their relationship as a direct reflection of their self-worth.

When we’re alone we fully rely on ourselves, figure out what we care about, and learn who we are. We learn to navigate challenges on our own. We can, of course, welcome help if it comes along, but we don’t expect or depend on it.

In other words, if we’re not careful, we can be attracted to something superficial or inauthentic. We have to train ourselves not to instantly like and trust the most attractive person in the room without remembering that we don’t know this person or understand them.

Whoopsie

Solitude helps you recognize that there is a you before, a you during, and a you after every relationship, forging your own way even when you have company and love.

Hoping a partner will solve your problems is like trying to get someone to write your term paper for you. You need to take the class, learn the material, and write the paper yourself, or you won’t have learned anything.

You want to go on a journey with someone, not to make them your journey.

Any step toward knowing yourself in solitude will help you love others because in addition to knowing what you bring to the table, the very process of learning to understand and love yourself helps you understand the effort required to love someone else.

In youth, choices are made for you. These become impressions. As an adult, you use these impressions to make your own choices. Those choices generate an effect, a consequence, or a reaction. If you’re happy with the consequence, you probably won’t change your impression. But if you don’t like the consequence, you can revisit the impression and decide whether it steered you wrong.

The impressions we form in our youth tell us what love should look like and feel like.

But if we don’t understand how our impressions were formed and how we make choices, then we keep repeating the same karma. The same impressions lead to the same choices. We love others in response to the way we’ve been loved by others. But if we can put our impressions in context, so we see and understand their origins, then we have the perspective and opportunity to form a new impression.

Even if we feel there’s nothing to heal, sometimes the wounds are so deep, we can’t see them anymore.

If there is a gap in how our parents raised us, we look to others to fill it. And if there is a gift in how our parents raised us, we look to others to give us the same.

We first seek validation from those closest to us. Then, unsatisfied, we look for it from everyone. And finally, we find it in ourselves.

The more aware we are of our expectations and where they came from, the more we can communicate our needs and adapt to our partners. We all respond differently to the gifts and gaps we faced.

It might sound like we’re doomed, but I promise you we are not. We’re just focusing too much on what our parents should have done or wishing they’d behaved differently rather than figuring out what we ourselves can do.

Whether our parents neglected or fulfilled us in ways large and small, when we first leave the nest, we are hardwired to look outward, to others, for validation and satisfaction instead of inward, to ourselves.

We gravitate toward partners who may fill our voids, but we may also fail to open our minds and hearts to people who might suit us better.

Romances want us to believe in love at first sight. But in his book Face Value, professor Alexander Todorov shows that first impressions are likely to be wrong.

When it comes to meeting people, the context effect refers to how the atmosphere in which we encounter them can impact our impression of them.

Often, when we believe that we have bad luck in relationships, the real problem is that we keep ignoring the data and refusing the karmic lesson. In other words—if you don’t learn anything, you repeat the same mistake.

Being attracted to someone who bucks the system isn’t necessarily a mistake. But if you keep hoping adventure and mystery will give way to loyalty and responsibility, it’s time to learn from your choices.

Are you drawn to them because you are looking for someone who is as busy as you are? Or did you grow up with an unavailable parent, so that is the only level of love you think you deserve?

SLAPPSSSSS

For instance, if someone is attractive, we’re more likely to assign other positive attributes to them, like intelligence, wit, or kindness.

Being attracted to our partners for what they have or what they’ve achieved is not a bad place to start, but it’s not a good place to end.

The only way we can know what qualities a person truly has is by spending time with them and observing them. Only when we know someone intimately and deeply do we find the sweetness in them.

Even if your self-positioning is more subtle, and you’re willing to play out the role you’ve invented indefinitely, you will always know in your heart that you aren’t loved for who you really are. You’ve made them fall in love with a character that you created, not you.

Our relationships aren’t supposed to be responses to what our parents did and didn’t give us or balms for the insecurities of our youth.

A partner can’t fill every gap. They can’t unpack our emotional baggage for us. Once we fulfill our own needs, we’re in a better place to see what a relationship can give us.

In the three minutes you’ve set aside in the morning, sit by yourself and pick one thing you can do for yourself today to improve your day.

In the last three minutes of the day, assess how you felt about the one thing you picked. Did it help your day? Should you try it again tomorrow or choose something else?

I’m not saying you need to understand someone fully before you fall in love. We’re always learning new things about our partner. But too often we leap to love based on a very small amount of information.

As soon as we say “I love you,” we’re going to have to live up to those words, not by our definition, but by the definition of the person we love. On the flip side, when we accept someone else’s love, we have to realize that they aren’t using our definition of love.