5 Myths About Love That Are Holding You Back

A few years ago, when I began writing a book about love (appropriately titled Real Love), one publisher told me, "The love market is saturated." I thought about the aisles at major bookstores devoted to self-help books about how to get a relationship, fix a relationship, stay in a relationship. I knew what I wanted to write would be different

If you look in a dictionary, you will find love defined as "intense affection," "romance," "adoration," "strong attachment," and "personal attraction." A day like Valentine's Day encourages us to keep these definitions of love at the foreground of our understanding, but thinking of love exclusively in terms of pop cultural definitions keeps us from experiencing it more directly, more organically.

Above all, we often don't realize that we can redefine love—by ourselves and for ourselves. We can choose to recognize that pop songs and romantic comedies give us a version of love we are used to and perpetuate myths about what love is and is not. But despite these myths, we can explore an infinite world of possibilities and experience love in a more essential way—for ourselves, for friends, family members, and romantic partners and even for life itself.

Of course, most of us are familiar at least with the idea of loving ourselves whether or not we prioritize practicing it in our own lives. But often lurking within each of us is the idea that love is something to be found elsewhere, a shiny object that we have to search for—and then cling to—once we find it.

We all know the clichés that go along with romantic love: At the beginning is the chase; then comes the "honeymoon phase," laden with ecstasy; after the honeymoon phase wears off, we may experience flatness, or worse, torment. We wait for the waves of torment and ecstasy to swap, or call upon Cupid for a new arrow. We tell flowers to give us the answer about who loves us or loves us not.

Nothing can fix us or complete us—and the idea that any one thing could strips us of power and reinforces the belief that we need fixing or that we are not whole.

Of course, this isn't something any one of us made up. We are often reminded that meeting a "soul mate" is the process of finding your "other half," someone to "complete" you. We tend to think of love as the process of seeking and assume the act of finding is the greatest moment of all. But once again, this myth keeps us separate from the potential for authentic connection that's available to us in every moment.

Many people love this one, as it certainly stands out among the other myths about romantic love as the Holy Grail. However, I have known plenty of people who are incredibly loving and supportive of others though they don't give themselves enough attention and care.

This doesn't mean that we cannot love others before we love ourselves; it just means that we may be offering love from a place of hunger rather than abundance. We may be trying to fill a hole by giving others love, or we may simply have trouble receiving the love that others want to give back to us. In either case, this myth can be damaging as it puts a certain amount of pressure on self-love.

The process of loving oneself is similarly difficult, and, like all forms of love, a dynamic process of expanding our perspective to allow more direct connection with our experience, each and every moment. When we think of self-love as the key to another kind of love, we don't recognize the practice of self-love as ongoing, continuous, and inextricably linked to our ability to connect to our experiences and relationships in all facets of life.