I love you, but I am not ready for this. I love you, but I cannot be with you. I love you, but I need to love me first.

Loving someone else can be simply defined as an intimate relationship between two people that care and love each other, but they respect and freely walk side by side without invading each other’s space.

Loving someone else means that you only want the best for him or her. Loving someone else requires you to love yourself first and then share your infinite love with the other.

Many relationships begin with a fired passion. The spark of something new and fresh, the relationship is full of excitement to share and know everything about the other. Healthy relationships need space and time to sow good seeds and water their roots, so they can flourish.

Many relationships do not follow this natural cycle and people fall into a convenient and comfortable relationship with no honesty and faith in each other. Those relationships vanish like dust the wind and, if both people agree to keep going with a blind eye towards the truth, their flowers never bloom and their fruits never mature.

To survive lots of rainy days and stormy night, a healthy relationship must have a good foundation.

Love is a mystery. No one really knows how love works. The only way of getting closer is to take the risk and find out for yourself. Love is the most powerful force that exists. Love can give you years of happiness but it can also take away everything you work and care for.

If you want true love in your life, visualize it. If you want true love start giving true love to yourself. If you want true love give up useless relationships and find out what it is that you are truly looking for. Perhaps it’s not love at all.

Once you do find out what it is, it will lead you to the same path. Love is connected in so many ways that if your intentions are pure and good, love will always come back to you.

Loving someone else means respecting and honouring yourself so that you will respect and honor the other. Sometimes we love but we are not ready for commitment. Sometimes we rush because we so like the idea of being with someone else that we end up burning the opportunity to have a healthy relationship.

Explore yourself first, then love will find you. There is no need to keep having or continuing on with unhealthy relationships that hurt us as well as others. Be true, be honest, be you.

Look around. Love is everywhere. Love is in you, in me and in every living creature that surrounds us. Open your eyes and feel the beauty of our world.

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Editorial Assistant: Ffion Jones / Editor: Rachel Nussbaum

Photo: elephant archive