Love Styles and Intimacy – Is Your Love Style Just Practice?

Love has always been considered as the one true meaning of life. It is without doubt that without love there would be no true freedom. The concept of love as something that brings goodness and happiness to one’s life and is therefore inherent to our moral and spiritual make-up is a long standing one. In fact, the popularity of the term itself is nothing new. People have used love throughout the history of recorded time to express their respect, admiration, love, fear and other feelings that we humans experience in varying degrees on a daily basis. This article seeks to define love so that we can become more aware of what it means to us on an individual level.

Love encompasses a wide range of positive and strong psychological and emotional states, from total amour, the strongest spiritual virtue or natural habit, the highest personal pleasure, to the easiest personal enjoyment. Love is not a short-term or quick-fix emotion; in fact, it is the very essence of being human and thus something that we all experience at some point of time. However, when love becomes infatuated with physical attractions such as sex, one can experience extreme negativity and suffering. When love is inextricated from its natural state of relating to one another and is instead driven by its desire for something outside one’s relationship with another, it can result in infatuation.

The most common form of love in the world today happens to be passionate love. This type of love is the result of intense feelings and emotions that are experienced without any rational reason behind them. Passion can be quite overwhelming and can often lead to self-destruction if it is not controlled. This is why most relationships that fall under this heading end quickly and one or both partners gets bored or frustrated. In order to avoid this common problem, it is important for everyone to put some time and effort into developing passionate love. One can do this through expressing their true feelings for one another and learning how to develop a passionate form of attraction for one another.

True, lust is attractive in and of itself. However, there are several problems that arise from lust as well. For starters, a person that falls into lust quickly loses all interest in building a long-term relationship or establishing a long-term affection for someone else. Instead, they are often driven primarily by immediate needs and desires and so their interactions tend to be brief and unsatisfying.

On the other hand, true love includes feelings, thoughts and actions that are meant to build a long-term relationship with another person. Therefore, one must learn how to express those feelings of love in a way that will actually make a lasting relationship possible. One does this through feelings, thoughts and actions. Love expressed in these ways tends to last longer and tends to create more positive emotions. In turn, this leads to a higher quality of intimacy and a more satisfying overall experience in one’s relationship.

In fact, it has been noted by researchers that “the absence of love style is correlated with poor outcomes in marriages and dating relationships.” Of course, this is not to suggest that one cannot develop loving feelings and become involved in a long-term intimate relationship. It simply means that you need to learn how to cultivate passionate feelings in order to be successful at developing intimacy. To do so, it would behoove a couple to be intentional about their love style and commitment to each other. As stated previously, that can be done through marriage counseling.