Love Connection

Love Connection

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways", goes the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's most famous poem, from Sonnets to the Portuguese.

All of us express love to our loved ones in different ways. Some like to show it with grand gestures of affection, some in a more subtle and indirect manner. Whatever way we choose to express our love, the act of loving is one where a soul reaches out to connect to another to form a more complete and stable "system". (I know, I'm such a geek).

Being alone, we always feel that we are incomplete. At a mundane level, we all need friends--we need to connect to other people. We need to feel that we belong to a group or community. By doing do, we achieve a sense of stability and a feeling of belonging to the world where we live in. By uniting with other souls, we evolve together and share a common destiny.

I am fond of comparing the soul and its ego to the natural phenomenon of gravity. Planetary systems, binary stars and galaxies are basically Nature's way for matter to cluster together to achieve temporary stability. Similarly, at a molecular level, bonding occurs--hidrogen and oxygen atoms choose to stick together as water molecules because it is a far more stable compound under normal conditions.

We often start with physical bonding but as we evolve higher, our software becomes more developed--the emotional, intellectual and spiritual layers awaken. These layers within us yearn to seek connection too. As I've mentioned in a previous posting, a soulmate is someone we can connect to on all four different layers.

But such a perfect layer-to-layer matching is very rare indeed. A couple who decides to be together for life often have to make compromises. There are areas where they connect perfectly and they are others where they don't. That is OK. A successful couple is not the perfectly matched couple--they are the ones who know where the strength of their relationship lie and build the rest from there.

We will all continue to show our love in different ways. Some gestures will be appreciated and some won't. We learn and fine-tune along the way. A relationship is but a lifetime learning experience. As the Carpenters song goes, "Let's take a lifetime to say, 'I knew you well'".