Emotions | Understanding The 'Love' Emotion

This post is way out of the ordinary for me but I decided over the weekend to get a little bit more real, I'm not talking about spots, lipstick issues and the typical stuff. I'm talking about feminine issues, emotional issues and the real stuff that we as ladies go through - Over the last four months I've come to realise more about myself as a person and a female (weird right?) and it dawned on me that hell, there's probably loads of people out there who are in the same boat. This first post covers emotions - something I've never been good with dealing with and showing/sharing due to vulnerability and trust. By numbing myself to most emotions throughout my life I suppose I never really understood exactly what they meant and how they felt. So went through a large chunk of my past just being emotionless.

The most major emotion that I was defunct on was the 'love' emotion now don't get me wrong here, I am married and have been married happily for twelve years. I can honestly say that I love husband more every single year and funnily enough he said the same thing to me a few nights back. If we didn't love each other, we wouldn't be together. However, the love emotion terrified me. Before I wasn't someone who wanted marriage, I didn't trust love, so I didn't let love affect me. The same can be said for a few other emotions.

The issue with ''love'' and emotion as a whole was that I honestly believed that there were a handful of emotions and that was that. You either loved someone or didn't - there was no middle ground. It's clear I was very detached from feeling any of the ''feels'' as I believed that the emotions that we felt as a human fell into a few categories with no deviations.

Those emotions were - happy, sad, angry, love, lust, and lost.

I honestly believe that everyone who was happy had to be the same type of happy because happy describes the same thing, right? Similarly, I believed that all forms of lust were the same - if you were lustful for someone you simply wanted them, with no attachments. I believed that all anger was the same and, I believed that all love was the same. Love was someone who you lusted for and wanted to be with, to wake up to each and every day. Clear cut and very simple...! As a married lady love comes naturally to me. I love my husband wholeheartedly. I know love to be a real, heart-achingly deep, stomach filled with butterflies type of love - surely this is ''love'' in its only form? But then I started to think about the actual term and came to realise that I was an idiot.

See my daily life changed a few months back - I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who were like me, who treated me like an equal and that was weird. Good weird, but still weird. In such a short space of time I bonded with this new bunch and for the first time in oh, gosh, years I know I'd found 'my weirdo's' like these people were cut from the same cloth. So yes I called them friends. And I meant it. I cared about their lives, how they were and I genuinely loved finding out more about these people - with each question and communication I knew what I felt was rare, at least for me. It was strange - feeling emotions for people I'd just met, I felt vulnerable. But, instead of being an idiot, I wanted to keep chipping away at them, at myself and to see if maybe if this was what it felt like to have friends, to feel accepted - normal almost. These people fascinated me. It was strange, I've never been much of a people person but here I was excited about going to work to see my weirdos and with each day that passed I only found that they were more and more awesome. I'd come home and my face would light up when I talked about them - even hubster grew to know them without having met them.

I soon came to realise that you can come into contact with people throughout your life who bring something amazing into it and in the same breath, I realised there are some people who bring the opposite. Those people usually disappear as quickly as they came and, over time you forget about that type of person and why they were ever in your life. Then there are people who come into your life and you feel that you've known them for years, forever even.

So how can you care about people that you know you'll never play a defining role in their lives? Who you'll never date, marry, live with, hate kiss, have any sort of sexual interaction with? Surely you would have to do one of those things to feel an emotion - say lust, hate or sadness? So what did it all mean? My original little list of emotions didn't fit with this new situation. This bamboozled me.

I knew that I was married so it was never a lust sort of emotion (and to be fair I'm not a lusty type of person). I knew that there was an emotion there - but how can you have a variety of people in your life all sharing the same emotion - it boggled me. But then I remembered that you can care for more than one person at a time. Caring for more than one person doesn't mean that you feel for the same for each and every person, it just doesn't hold the same value - for example, I have my husband and I then have other people who I am so overprotective about even though there's no need for me to be but yet, I am, I feel those people apathetically, they inspire me, they wake up my mind, and magnetically their energy is similar to mine so much so they touch me deep in my heart yet, but also not in the same way as other people do? Was it a kindred spirit type of connection, again that's not an emotion or I didn't believe it to be, it was a term used loosely but I was starting to doubt my preconception that it was 'only' a term or label.

Yet if you look up the descriptors for this new sense of emotion Google would define it as love - so surely that meant it was love? But I knew it was different, that could only mean that love wasn't always so cut and dry. Love or at least the original pre-conceived idea of what love was. Or so I was starting to believe.

Then I thought back, I knew that the love I felt for husbster, was a different love from my parents, and again it's a completely different kettle of fish to the love that I feel for my sons. Even all of that love is different from the kindred love you can feel for others. This gave me a huge ah-ha moment like I'd just found out something new that no-one else had, again I knew I was wrong - I knew that I was trailing behind others when it came to really understanding and feeling emotion but at thirty-two this was an incredible find and a bit of a personal breakthrough.

So the word 'love' I suppose simply means someone who lives in your heart, whether they stay for a while or forever. I'm not too worried about the length of time they stay but it feels nice to have felt and understood this emotion in my lifetime. I've come to the conclusion that I can say I love someone without it meaning anything negative or scary. Another great part of understanding this was the fact that hubster understood it - he agreed from a male perspective that yes, you can absolutely love more than just a select few and that hey, that's OK. Again he agreed that so many people are scared of the term - his words 'that's their issue'

So many people are scared of the word ''love'' and what it equates to possibly because they must feel the same way I used to - have those people not clicked onto the many variations of what love is, how it's felt and that it's not always about fancying people, being sexually in love with a person or wanting to be? If so that makes me slightly sad. But because I'm generally closed off to people in person I'll stick to labels such as soul mate, friend, kindred spirit, twin flame and all of the other cutesy bohemian type labelling to actually describe the place that people live in my heart. Love - is just a generic label. Funny how things change, especially as I viewed words such as kindred spirit as being the 'generic' labels.

But, in the short term this lady is slowly getting it - understanding the world around me and the world inside me and it's breathtaking. I recommend you join in! Don't be scared to say you love someone - even if they don't get it. If anything watching them squirm, once, twice, three times or more will only break down their walls so they are more comfortable with being told that they are loved.

Sometimes people just aren't told that they're loveable enough. You should change that for them.