02/02/2024
Talking about love to our kids can be scary.
Love feels like such a massive, important topic and many of us are afraid we’ll mess it up. Seriously: how can we distill the grand concept of love in a way our kids will understand not only now when they’re young, but for a lifetime? To be honest, a lot of us are still discovering the true meaning of love.
It’s not that we weren’t taught about love growing up, but we understand it differently with time, experience, and—let’s be honest—pain. We know what love looks like in how people show up for us in our lowest moments. With that in mind, here are some things our kids should understand about love:
As unromantic as this sounds, love is often more fact than feeling.
Feelings change, but the basics of love and what it means rarely do. The strong feelings our kids may have for someone don’t always indicate love. Love often requires us to closely examine the contents of the other person’s heart and character rather than being solely focused on how we feel about them.
Love is full of compromises, but character shouldn’t be one of them.
True love will never ask you to compromise who you are. Yes, love will require you to be more flexible, more patient, and more mindful of your words and actions, but it will never require you to change your character.
Love usually requires a sacrifice of preferences.
Desire often clouds judgment. Sometimes, acting on what you want now is not always the most loving thing you can do for the other person when thinking long-term. Love considers what is right now and what is to come.
The best way to learn how to love someone else is by learning how to love yourself first.
It’s difficult to execute a lesson you’re actively learning. The same is true of love. The best case study on how to love someone well begins with how well you love yourself. There is much to learn about love when you commit to loving the unlovable parts of yourself. When you love yourself without condition, it gives you a real-life example of what it means to show grace and mercy. Learning those lessons when it’s just you involved keeps unnecessary heartache at bay and decreases tremendously the potential damage to someone else.
