So what is “love”? 

Love is a set of emotions and behaviors characterized by intimacy, passion, and commitment. It involves care, closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust. 

Love can vary in intensity and can change over time. It’s something that everyone craves, because we heard so much about “love” and loving someone sounds almost magical, the “cure” to the loneliness. 

But is it actually the “cure”? 

If we run the history of the meanings of love we’ll find some philosophical or theological perspectives, as for Plato “to love is to love the Platonic form of beauty, not a particular individual, but the element they posses of true beauty for the desire is for the the company of another and shared values and pursuits.” But there is a problem of conceiving the idea of love in this modern society, driven by a specific idea of how love should look like, that sometimes involves behavior that are really toxic. To love and to be in love are now an idealized “state of being”, the cinematic universe gave us the term of “pink lenses” to talk about when people are in love, it involves specifically seeing the world in a positive way. If this is partially true, we need to be aware that love is not just positivity, happiness, hearts and etc. but also moments of anger, frustration and sadness. 

Your partner and you won’t be perfect all the time, because you’re human beings with all sorts of emotions, and to make a relationship work, you need to talk. 

Healthy relationships involve honesty, trust, respect and open communication between partners and they take effort and compromise from both people. 

There is no imbalance of power. 

Partners respect each other’s independence, can make their own decisions without fear of retribution or retaliation, and share decisions.
These are some characteristics of healthy relationships.

What Does a Healthy Relationship Look Like to you?