Finding True Love

Finding true love can be quite challenging these days, and for many reasons. For one thing, there are too many among us who lack the character to genuinely love. So, finding a  partner healthy enough in character to form a wholesome relationship with is difficult. Loving genuinely and properly requires a level of maturity and commitment hard to come by, especially in most current socio-cultural climates. Finding someone who knows how to look good is relatively easy. But finding someone genuinely committed to being good is an entirely different matter.

We humans are made for love. That’s primarily why we so aredently seek it. But discerning just what it truly is has become more difficult than ever. We’re overly familiar with things that look like love or sometimes accompany it. So, too often we mistake these things for love itself. Usually, we become aware of what we initially mistook too late in a relationship, after much heartache. And that’s especially true if we became involved with someone who is not (in character) as they first appeared. (See: In Sheep’s Clothing.)

Understanding what love truly genuinely is has always been hard enough. But not knowing how and where to look for it makes finding true love even harder. Too many of us look for it in all the wrong ways, and in all the wrong places. This can’t help but leave our souls even more starving for it, sometimes desperately so.

Most modern cultures condition us to focus a lot of our attention and energy outward. We look for, and to, various people, places, and things to satisfy us. And the hungrier we are, and the more we get at least some of what we’re looking for, the more easily we can get hooked, even addicted.

The Right Starting Place

Preparing ourselves properly for finding true love requires that we look for it first in the right place. And as strange as it might seem, that is nowhere “out there.” We need to look inward, not outward. Knowing ourselves, our wants, needs, shortcomings, wounds, vulnerabilities, etc. provides us some protection against making fatal mistakes and exercising poor relationship judgment. If we don’t understand what we’re really looking for and what’s tempting us to settle for less, we’ll likely enter a relationship destined to hurt us in the end, no matter how attractive it seems at first.

The Character Dimension

Loving is not easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it and do it liberally. But as it is, by its very nature, loving is challenging. Moreover, the capacity to engage in it – even with ourselves – has everything to do with soundness character. And sadly, we live in times when character dysfunction of one type or another is more common than ever. Accordingly, finding true love seems more difficult than ever. And that’s perhaps why so many folks looking for love look for it in all the wrong ways and places. I’ve written Essentials for the Journey to help turn things around, one heart at a time. And it’s my fervent prayer that folks will avail themselves of it and recommend it to others.

You can hear more on this topic on the current Character Matters podcast on YouTube.