What is Romantic Love To You?

I sat down to feel into what romantic love is to me. Some of the questions I came up with are as follows and maybe try to answer a few for yourself. 

What is romantic love to you?  
Does it differ from the way that you love your friends or family?  
Are you more loving and accepting of your friends and family and their mistakes than your lover?  
Do you need to have different expectations for your lover because you have a different relationship with them that involves sex?  
How does sex play into romantic love?  Does it expand it or limit it?  
Can we start moving away from time being a measure of success of romantic love? 
Can we wake up and release our romantic loves everyday and practice non attachment?  
Can we love someone in a way that makes them feel free?

I found an old email from a past love of mine and in this letter he writes to me what he believes love is.  I have to say, I agree with them.  

"That night turned what should have been one of the most boring, uneventful periods of my life into 7 of the most amazing months I'll ever know. And somewhere between the ecstasy-fueled nights and the lazy-humid afternoons of last summer, I fell madly in love with a girl.  Sure, there were signs right from the beginning. The energy I gleaned just from being in her presence, the earth-shattering sex, her sense of humor... And it wasn't something that only became true as we said goodbye for the first time last August. It was born of it's own means and took on a life of it's own. To this day, I don't know when exactly it happened. I just knew that I was re-learning what Love is and what Love could be. 


Love is not just a formal agreement to enjoy another person's qualities or company. Love is not just time-tested familiarity. It's not holding hands, kissing, not even fucking, and Love is definitely not present just because you say it is. Love is an uncontrollable, exhilarating, intoxicating force of nature that possesses your heart, mind, and soul rendering you helpless as it charges through you. It can make you fly to the edge of the universe and back and it can crush your soul to the size of a single atom. It can make years go by like seconds and it is the only known way to make time stand still. But at it's best - it's most tender core - Love is being so caught up in the inherent spontaneity, the sense of adventure, the absolute freedom of sweet surrender that you can be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing else matters. And that? That's how you make me feel. "


I think that is such a beautiful way to describe love.  We can get so caught up in the past or the future that we forget about the present, the now, the what’s in front of me.  Some may call that immature or fleeting or lusty, but I think that is how you maintain your self in love is to be present in every moment of what’s there and not just going through the motions of habit. 

 I define habit as a behavior that we are aware of and keep choosing it for ourselves in a habitual manner.  The main component I feel of romantic love is awareness in all things.  Our love relationships bring out the deepest issues that can normally hide or that might not get trigger by our family and family.  The romantic love is the juice behind the squeeze of self awareness.  

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