Love is a choice and a voluntary act – Susy Pujiro

After talking to my friend about relationship and love.  I cannot stop thinking about the conversation we had, how love can be manipulated.  We both agree that love and relationship go hand in hand.  We also agree the ingredients to have a healthy relationship are love, trust, respect, communication and of course, chemistry or some say “sparks” 🙂  Love can bring us happiness and also heartache.  Love is the foundation  and glue to the relationship.  Without love, you have nothing to work on a relationship. Same with chemistry or sparks, without them, nothing lits up 🙂

Love has many facets.  There are lover’s love, family love, brotherly love and friendship love. All relationship has love as its foundation.  That is why you fall in love first, then you want to be with the person because you can’t imagine living without them.  Because of your love to the person, you want to build a relationship which you hope will turn into a marriage and make a family.

Can love be forced? No.  Even if you succeed in forcing love, that love can turn into hatred.  You cannot force someone to love you if they don’t have it in their heart.  They can fake on loving you, but it’s only temporary.  Because that forced love will turn into resentment, bitterness and rejection.  Instead of happiness, forced love makes life miserable for both parties.

Can love be manipulated? Yes, you can manipulate love for personal gain or for whatever reason you have.  In this case, you will make the person, whose love you manipulate , a prisoner of love.  The question is whether that love will last forever.  Just like the bird in the cage, waiting to be free.  It will always look for an opportunity for a little crack in the door, to push through and fly.  Once it flies, it will never come back or it will die. What you will have is love zombie 🙂

Love that is forced and manipulated will only last a while because it’s not truly love.  Because love is a voluntary act and a choice.  You can’t control when you fall in love, but you can choose to fall out of love.  I can choose who I love and I don’t love.  I can choose to love my dogs, my parents, my children, my home.  I can choose to love voluntarily.  I also can choose to fall out of love for some reasons, or I let love dies.

Love is also a matter of the heart.  The Bible says “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”.  Everything is conceived in the heart, then it goes to the mind and finally the mouth speaks.  So, when love dies, it first dies in the heart. When love dies in the heart, it can only be  revived if there is still a seed of love that with some TLC, that seed of love will grow again.  That’s when your relationship is restored and it has to be a 100% effort on both parties.  If there is no seed of love, no matter what you try to revive love, it will not come back to life. Just like the saying “home is where the heart is”.  When the heart is not in the home, love flies away.

In my personal experience with love, relationship and betrayal of love.  I learned without love, I have nothing to work on a relationship.   I can force and manipulate love and make the person to stay.  But it’s temporal, because soon or later, that person will leave because his heart and love have flown away.  I only hold the person as my prisoner of love without the heart, it’s an empty love.   I want a relationship with love and a heart that are given to me voluntarily 🙂