do you make this common mistake about love?

Hopefully, you have had the chance to love someone in your life, and if you have, I'm sorry to inform you but you probably have made a common mistake.

When I'm asked about my love for someone, I often look into my heart and search for a particular feeling there. Ah yes, there it is, my heart yearns for them and there is that indescribable yet totally known feeling. I love you. 

And yet, you and I make a faulty assumption here: since I feel it, you must also feel it. Not that you must also love me, but you must know I love you since I know and feel it towards you.

Wrong. Sorry. Here's the rub in relationship. Although having love for someone is important, translating that love into their love language is equally important. What do I mean by this? My wife loves me but I really feel that love when she shows it to me in particular ways. And these ways often come from my childhood (and potentially innate desires). I was a second child in my particular family system and thus, I was the one to enter an already established environment. This meant I created a belief that I had to move towards others to connect and feel love instead of others moving towards me. Unconsciously, that was a hard rule to live by and thus it created a love language need where I truly FEEL love when someone moves towards me. Back to my wife, this means I only really feel her love when she: hugs me randomly, is truly curious about my day and life, when she seems to internally deal with her own needs while she addresses mine, etc. etc. etc.

She feels her love for me without doubts or qualifications, but I only feel it when it expresses itself through this particular love language desire (someone coming towards me). And of course, I married a person who is more independently minded and likes her space because that's what we do, we fall in love with people that mirror our childhoods. Therefore, expressing her love for me in my needed way is not necessarily natural for her. And I'm not picking on my wife here because I am just the same. She has a particular love language and I equally am unnatural in expressing love they way she needs it expressed so she can feel it for a host of reasons.

So what does loving someone really mean? We mistakenly think loving someone means having an internal feeling of love for them when in actually, it's the art of learning their love language and acting on it so they are the one's feeling the love. This is true for husbands, wives, children, friends, etc. You and I must take time to listen, understand, and practice their love language. Love is an active art-form, not an internal feeling.