How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

It is, of course, true that discrimination in trusting others is necessary if we are to have quality relationships. Selectivity is important for our safety and security, because it means trusting only those who have proven their dependability. This makes sense but only in how we love, not that we love. Thus, our ways of showing love differ accordin

We feel love now as we first received it; we give love the way others gave it to us. Thus, since love is unique to each person, we read and write love, receive and give it, in the style designed by our past experience. Yet, like good handwriting, our unique signature can be read by others.

Being an adult in love means being adult about love and loving. Psychological adulthood—maturity—is letting love in carefully and showing it responsibly. Spiritual adulthood consists of expanding our love so that it is unbounded, a practice requiring recklessness. Since love sits in us someplace between trust and fear, a commitment to love requires

We will be there for others as we are now here for ourselves, fully present, calmly witnessing, not rushing in to fix or control.

Love is a connection that is caring, intended for good, respectful of freedom, and genuinely sensitive to another’s needs, even making those needs as important as our own. This shift in attention to the needs of others deflates our own sense of self-importance. What power love has to help us let go of ego!

love is not a feeling in itself, but every feeling can happen with love:

Practice is about surrendering to the way things are inside us. Our success is in noticing how our mind works and in coming back to our breath whenever we become aware of our distractions. Our success is in continuing to show up, not in being utterly free of distracting mind-sets.

We ask four assurances of love from a partner or significant other. A yes to each of these questions gives us evidence of a caring connection. Each yes can become a commitment to the building of true trust and fearless love: Are you there for me and how? Do you care about me and how? Do I matter to you and how? Are you interested in me and how?

The one thing to remember is that those who give us what was missing in our past also show us what was missing. That combination of fulfillment and grief can be hard to hold, so we have to be patient with ourselves.