One cannot love what one cannot accept. But the real power of love comes in loving someone in such a way that they feel freed by that love.
To love someone in the hopes of changing them to suit your needs or to suit your tastes, to love them on those conditions or more to the point make your love conditional on reaching goals they can never reach, well that love is counterfeit. It's not love. It's control and manipulation but it is not love.
When I think of true love I think of my wife but more than that I think of Christ. That love makes me feel freed. And obedience to that love helps me grow spiritually in this life and likely the next. I feel like my authentic self rather than the person others want me to be.
And that freeing feeling that I get when I think of Christ's love, that makes me feel more like me than the version others want me to be, is exactly how others should feel from our love.
You can't change who you've been and you can't change who you are but you can change who you become. But that should be a better, healthier and more authentic version of you. Instead of the person you're expected to be or being told to be or being manipulated and "loved" for being.
My wife is the only woman I've ever been with to truly accept me for me. And because her love is true she wants me to be the better, healthier, and authentic version of me. She has loved me and I am healthier and better as a result.
The other women I dated I changed for, I switched jobs, went to college, moved across the country for but it was never enough because I just wasn't right for them and they couldn't "love" me or manipulate me into being who they wanted me to be and things always flamed out.
You can find counterfeit love wherever you look but real love that's life changing and it is priceless. You can find fake people everywhere but to find sincerity is to have found eternal treasure.
When we stop fighting the current and just go with the flow things happen more naturally.
But there has been a lot of talk of counterfeit and alternative lifestyles. But the only love that is counterfeit is that which manipulates, seeks to change the "loved" to suit tastes or needs.
Real love makes you feel free. Real love encourages one to be healthier, authentic and true to oneself and others. Real love turns us into who we were meant to be, who we were created to be.
And when I experienced real love after a lifetime of counterfeit or fake love it was life changing. I am a better man, a better husband and a better Christian/Mormon because of it.
