: very holy

: highly valued and important : deserving great respect

So Knowing These Definitions, Is Love Sacred Anymore?

You may be wondering, “Why is it important to ask this question?” Simply put, because there may come a time in your life (if it hasn’t happened already), when you’ll get discouraged about what the true value of love is, especially when you look outside yourself hoping to find its importance.

The solution? To look inside.

We cannot do the question “Is love sacred anymore?” justice by only looking at the external world for an answer without first looking at our internal life.                     – Haydee Montemayor

In other words,

• Is love sacred to YOU in your life?
• Or do you give other, more mundane things, priority based on your everyday actions?

These are undeniably very hard questions to answer because no matter how good your intentions are to give love one of the top spots in your life are, loving congruently, with your words, your actions, and your desire is tough. Extremely tough, actually… especially when you’re hoping to cling on to any justifications that you have for not being able to love congruently with your words, actions and desires or for any other feelings you may or may not be ashamed you have.

So, in a nutshell, why is answering the two bullet point questions above extremely tough? Because we engage in actions that go against love almost on a daily basis and multiple times a day.

Ways In Which We Treat Love With Little Reverence, As Though It’s Not Sacred

It’s sad and scary to realize how often we take love for granted, and more importantly, how often we treat it like trash. We treat it profanely and without the reverence it deserves. It’s almost as though we KNOW the value of love so well, that we’re playing hard to get. Almost impossible to get, at times. We don’t want to let love know how much it means to us, because we don’t want to get hurt by any type of disillusionment when it comes to love. We don’t want to commit to love… because we know that it has the power to change everything. We prefer to pretend that we don’t know its value in order to justify our mediocre justifications for living a mediocre life. We’re afraid of how fulfilled we’ll be with love alone. Why? Because we’ve been conditioned to go after things, and not necessarily after love. Here’s some proof of what we do:

• We forget to say thank you to those who give us their generosity and/or their sacrifice
• We take our family on vacations once a year hoping to make up for the time that we purposely didn’t give them the rest of the year. We think that a week of vacation will make up for lost time. It doesn’t matter if your reasons are justified or not, you CHOOSE not to spend time with your family regardless of how much you want to spend time with them, deep down. This is particularly a trend in parents because in an effort to give their children “everything,” they leave their children in the care and company of someone else, and in the end, the children often feel like their parents gave them nothing…. because what they want is their parents themselves. They want the parents’ love
• We pretend we fell asleep instead of doing a favor that we agreed to for someone we say we love
• We throw money at our problems instead of love
• We give love and we expect servitude
• We choose to diminish other people with our criticism instead of encouraging or uplifting them with love and kindness
• And perhaps one of the worst offenders is that we THINK we’ll have tomorrow to make up for what we deliberately didn’t give our loved ones today
• We would rather hold grudges, than hold hands
• We’d rather be right, than be loved
• We get in fights when people hurt our ego, our pride and our heart. Yet, instead of consoling our own hearts, we retaliate to protect our ego
• And we often value our pride more than we value our love. We want our pride to stay intact, but we hardly ever say that we want our love to remain intact– and it hardly ever does
• Our ability to love unconditionally seems almost like an impossibility. We’ll do it if, and only if, the other person proves to us that they’re worth the effort
• We rather talk about the superficial, the mundane, and the obvious, instead of the deep, purposeful and meaningful

I do it. You do it. And we feel terrible about it.

We get distracted with giving ourselves and others everything that we think they want instead of giving them our time, our love and ourselves. We fail to give them us, just as we are.

• Not when we’re richer.
• Not when we’re thinner.
• Not when we’re more charming.
• Not when the people who won’t be by our side when we’re dying approve of us.
• Not when we finally feel like we have our life together.
• And certainly not when we have more time, because we don’t know if we’ll have time in the next minute, let alone the next second.

And we let love pass.

Treat Love As Though You Give a Damn About It

In the midst of taking a close look at how we love, at how we demerit love, at how we devalue it and often do nothing about it, there is hope. We certainly CAN do better.

As a matter of fact, let’s take a moment right here, right now, to make love sacred. I invite you to give it your full attention and answer the questions below. For your convenience, I’ve also included a Love and Treasure this Moment of Introspection- Is Love Sacred Anymore? PDF that you can print out and answer. The purpose of this introspection is for you to get to know your love. Don’t view answering these questions as a chore, view the answers that you obtain as a lifeline for truly having a life that’s worth a damn. Sorry to be so blunt, but you and I know that without positive love of some sort, life is worth nothing.

• What is one thing that you do to reduce the importance of love in your life? Why do you think you do this? What are you running away from?
• What is one thing you can do this week to prove to yourself that love is important to you?
• Take a look at your life and answer this question: What do you tell yourself you “NEED” to do instead of loving your spouse and loving your children the majority of your waking hours? Is what you’re doing really worth it to take you away from your family, or is there a better way?
• Why do you love?
• When you love, what do you HONESTLY expect in return? More love? More prestige? Greater recognition? A halo? An altar? An inheritance? A steady paycheck? An alternative to a nursing home? Eternal gratitude?
• What do you love with? Your body? Your soul? Your money? Your power? Your manipulation? Your time scraps? The 5% of your attention that you have left over after you’ve done everything that you consider is more important than love?
• Where do you love? Only in public? Only in private? Excessively in public? Or in a clandestine way?
• Do you as a person honor holidays, traditions and celebrations out of love or out of obligation? If you participate in them out of obligation, why do you participate at all?
• Do you celebrate your wedding (or dating) anniversary every year? Why or why not? Is the reason that you say you don’t celebrate your honeymoon the REAL reason that you don’t? Is that reason you tell yourself truly justified?
• Do  you keep your love for others front and center or in the back corner or back burner of your life?
• What do you pursue the most in life? Happiness? Power? Riches? Love? Approval? Acceptance? Respect? Prestige? Comfort?
• If you could look into the future and see yourself as you’ll be then, who would your older self say that you need to love more as a way of showing that you do believe that love is sacred? Why would your older self recommend that you love this person more?
• What is family to you? Do you love them according to your definition of family?
• What is self-love to you? Do you love yourself according to your definition of self-love?
• What is marriage to you? Do you love your spouse according to your definition of marriage?
• What will you do moving forward, to treat love as though it’s sacred?

Remember,

Love to you will be as sacred as you treat it. If you have no respect for love, you will have a very difficult time seeing, appreciating, giving, receiving and really experiencing true love.

And that, unfortunately, will have negative repercussions for everybody, not just for you and your family, but believe it or not, for the world as a whole, because love is like a pebble, when we give it to someone or withdraw it from someone, it has effects that extend far beyond what we can see.

• Share one insight that you gained from your article.
• Or, if you want public accountability, share your response to one of the questions above.

If you haven’t done so, subscribe to the Love and Treasure newsletter, so that you can ensure that these types of thought-provoking and heart-stirring questions reach you. That’ll be one way to show that love is sacred to you.