What Makes Love Last?

What makes love last? Giving love ensures the giver will receive love. Even if our lives were full of love we would still want to experience more of it, because love is never ending and the more love we have the more we will have to give away. But how do we give love away? Before we can answer that question, we must attempt to define love or agree upon what love is. Because love is fathomless, we cannot completely understand its depth. And our attempts to define it often confine its meaning and eternal quality. However, we know when we experience love. And we can identify love in how it is expressed. Love is communicated to us in many ways. Sometimes it is in words or someone’s thoughtfulness. We recognize it when we are treated with kindness and respect. We also communicate our love by our faithfulness, generosity, and selflessness. There are many different attributes that we associate with love. I believe there is a mindset that communicates it most fully, and makes love last. Love is more than words and it runs deeper than feelings. Love is what we live for. We love and we want to be loved. We look for loving qualities in people and that is what often attracts us to them. Besides being drawn to their personality, appearance, common interests, and so forth, we look for qualities that communicate love, warmth, and acceptance. If we want to build a relationship with someone, we want a connection that is deeper and founded on the attributes of love. A loving person makes love last, and draws others to them. We all like to be around someone who makes us feel valued and who treats us as important. We like being around someone who is thoughtful toward us; someone who cares about our feelings; someone who can be trusted and is honest with us. We like people who make us feel good about ourselves—people who listen and understand us; people who want to help us and will go of their way for us; people who are happy when we succeed; people who appreciate us. We all like to be around people who make us feel genuinely loved. Earlier we said that what makes love last is giving it, the more love we give the more we will have to give. Love isn’t love until you give it away. We give love away when its attributes are evident and expressed in our life. We can all grow in the various attributes of love, and we can begin to express love more fully in our lives and relationships. So what makes love last is simply giving it.