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“When you like a flower, you pluck it. When you love a flower, you water it daily.”
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.
In the first ashram, Brahmacharya, we prepare for love.
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).
The second ashram, Grhastha, is when we extend our love to others while still loving ourselves.
We tend to oversimplify love, thinking of it as just chemistry and compatibility. 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.
Grhastha we will examine how to know if you’re in love (Rule 3), how to learn and grow with your partner (Rule 4), and how to set priorities and manage personal time and space within your relationship (Rule 5).
Vanaprastha, the third ashram, is a healing place where we retreat to seek peace.
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.
We learn how to love again and again (Rule 8).
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.
atma prema, self-love.
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.
First, spend one week keeping track of all the time you spend alone. This means without a companion. Don’t spend the time with the TV on or scrolling mindlessly through your phone. I want you to track active solo pastimes, such as reading, walking, meditating, exercising, or pursuing an interest like cooking, going to museums, collecting, building, or creating. No, you can’t count the time when you’re asleep.
start doing one new activity alone every week, and I want you to deliberately choose how to spend that time. Pick an activity that you’ve rarely or never done by yourself before.
“Language has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”
“Our current research with talented teenagers shows that many fail to develop their skills not because they have cognitive deficits, but because they cannot stand being alone.” His research found that young people were less likely to develop creative skills like playing an instrument or writing because the most effective practice of these abilities is often done while alone. Like those talented teenagers, when we avoid solitude, we struggle to develop our skills.
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.
Knowing more about ourselves and what we enjoy helps us feel comfortable in solitude.
Confidence is important in a relationship because it helps us talk to the person we like without seeking their approval or hinging our self-esteem on their reaction. When we aren’t looking for them to validate our tastes and choices, we can appreciate their kind words without being misled or distracted by them.
Coaching. We live in a world where experts and information are easily accessible online. Start by looking for widely available resources to help you with this issue. Find a book, podcast, course, friend, professional, TED Talk, MasterClass, or online video to help you. You’ll find that most of these resources will help you break your goal into achievable smaller steps, bringing a challenge that once seemed insurmountable into focus. 2. Consistency. Use the information you’ve gathered to make a plan for how to address the issue in an ongoing way. Set a goal for the year’s end. This goal should
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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.
Solitude gives us time and space between attraction and reaction.
Synching with other people can log us in to their bad vibes as well as their good ones.
When you come to a relationship as a whole person, without looking for someone to complete you or to be your better half, you can truly connect and love.
You want to go on a journey with someone, not to make them your journey.
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. If it did, you can break the cycle by forming a new impression, which then steers you to a new choice, from which you get a new reaction. This is the cycle of karma.
we’ll examine three influences on our samskaras: our parents, the media, and our first experiences of love.
Matha Pitha Guru Deivam is a Sanskrit phrase much repeated in Hinduism. It means “mother, father, teacher, God.” Your mother is your first guru. She teaches you about love.
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.
“Ask before you assume.”
The people who had held the warm coffee described the individuals they read about as being substantially warmer in personality than those who had held the iced coffee.
if you don’t learn anything, you repeat the same mistake. Karma encourages you to reflect on the choice, the reason you made it, and what you should do differently next time.
The supporter is an ideal to strive for. Both partners communicate as equals. Your partner is always teaching you, but you are always teaching them. And when you both understand that you’re both teaching and learning at the same time, that’s when you create a partnership.
Sex can distract us from making good choices about who to be with and whether to stay with them, and one of the biggest causes of that distraction is the hormone oxytocin.
During and after sex, we feel more in love, but it’s not actually love. We feel closer chemically even though we’re not closer emotionally. Additionally, the hormone actually has a temporary blocking effect on negative memories, so all of those “little things” that were bothering you or that argument you had beforehand—which might have been a major warning sign—could fade after sex.
The Bhagavad Gita talks about six opulences: knowledge, fame, money, beauty, strength, and renunciation.
Grhastha, is the stage of life when we extend our love to others while still loving ourselves.
I’m not saying you need to understand someone fully before you fall in love. We’re always learning new things about our partner.
Bhakti describes the journey of falling in love with the divine in stages: The first stage is sraddha, where we have the spark of faith that makes us take interest in the divine.
This leads us to the next stage: sadhu-sanga, desiring to associate with spiritually advanced persons.
After that is bhajana-kriya, where we perform devotional acts, like attending services and praying.
Then finally we reach pure love for the divine, prema. This is the supreme stage of life, where we have attained the highest form of a divine loving relationship, unbound by awe and reverence or any kind of hierarchy.
In Phase One, we feel a spark of intrigue, interest, and attraction. This makes us want to figure out if someone is worth our time and effort.
Lust is governed more by testosterone and estrogen, whereas attraction includes dopamine (the reward chemical) and norepinephrine
three dates usually provide enough time to determine if you and another person would be a good match.
In these dates you’ll focus on three areas: whether you like their personality, whether you respect their values, and whether you would like to help them achieve their goals.
