The Gist

People are always looking for love. After talking to some of those people, hearing their issues, and searching for patterns, I have determined three steps that can help anyone on their quest to find love. This is not to say that if you do these three things you will automatically find the love you seek. After all, three pillars alone do not make a whole building. But missing any one of these three pillars could disrupt the foundation that one’s journey towards love is based on.

In this post, I introduce what I have coined as “The 3 Pillars of Love”:

• Pillar 1: Be Confident
• Pillar 2: Be Your Authentic Self
• Pillar 3: See Other People as People

Defining Love

Love takes many different shapes for everybody who experiences it. If I asked you to summarize “love” in one word (and obviously you are not allowed to choose the word “love”) what would you say? Think about it for a second, and feel free to comment it on this blog post (but there’s no pressure to share if you do not want to). I’ve asked this question to a lot of people, and I find that their answers tend to fall into one of three categories: (1) how you know it, (2) how you grow it, or (3) how you show it.

How you know it

These are words like “pain”, “intensity”, or “longing”. They describe the sensation you get that indicates to you “this experience is love”. Those whose words fall into this category may view love primarily as a sensation. “Love” is a noun, and these feelings are the side effect of having/experiencing love.

How you grow it

These are words like “understanding” or “time”. They define how love develops and what is needed to increase love between people. In these cases, love is also a noun. Those who choose these words may believe that love has a magnitude that changes under certain conditions, and that through these conditions, love can be fostered.

How you show it

These are words like “care”, “sacrifice”, or “commitment”. They define love as a series of actions. Love is a verb. “To love” is “to care”, “to sacrifice”, or “to commit.” Those whose words fall into this category may find themselves practicing loving acts to showcase their love.

From Foucault to Lacan to Hooks, there have been many who have tried to define “love”. We are not here to define love en masse. Personally, I do not think it is possible, nor morally right, to do so. Each person should figure out what it means to them. I simply ask that going forward, you understand what “love” means to you. Regardless of how you chose to define “love” and what category you fell into (assuming you fell into one), I ask that you consider the word you chose and understand what it means to you. You can expand on this word; you don’t need to stick to a one word answer. But you chose that word for a reason, and understanding why you did so may be a helpful starting place to understanding how you fully define and experiene “love”. As is true with anything you may seek, it’s important to know what you are looking for.

The 3 Pillars of Love

Pillar 1: Be Confident

This pillar is about showing up and meeting people. That means trusting and feeling secure in yourself to the point where you can can comfortably engage with others.

A lot of times, we, unsure of ourselves and afraid of rejection, limit ourselves, thus inhibiting our ability to interact in new social situations. We lack an assuredness in ourselves that things will be alright when we open ourselves up to people. Sometimes, we even lack the confidence to “show up” to the interaction and open the door to meeting new people in the first place.

When we do not allowing ourselves to open up our lives to others, opportunities for love escape us. When we have self-confidence, we open the door to being able to build connections with others.

This is pillar one because it’s all about creating the opportunities to find love, and- beyond love– having the opportunity to develop connections with people. Self-confidence is the key to taking the first step to meeting people and opening yourself up to the love and connections you may be looking for.

Pillar 2: Be Your Authentic Self

This pillar is about embracing and showcasing who you are at your core—not the version of you that you think the world wants to see. Being your authentic self doesn’t mean presenting every version of yourself all the time. Instead, it means feeling comfortable embodying who you are at any given moment. It’s about shedding the feeling of performance and stepping into yourself.

When we present an inauthentic version of ourselves, we develop unsustainable connections. We put ourselves in a situtation with two potential outcomes: (1) we eventually reveal that we aren’t who we pretended to be or (2) we become someone we are not.

In the first scenario, we may find that the love we share with someone isn’t genuine. It feels real along the pretenses of a lie, but someone may realize that what they feel for you isn’t real because the you they know isn’t real. Similarly, you may feel loved under these false pretenses, while simultaneously feeling that this love is unearned or disingenuous because it’s not for you. In the second scenario, we risk losing ourselves and the person we have grown to become.

That said, you might not like everything about yourself and wish things were different. You may wish to be the person you are presenting yourself to be. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to change. If you aspire to change and take actions that align with a version of yourself you want to be, that’s still being an honest version of yourself. But the problem arises when you present a falsely aspirational self to others, despite not genuinely wanting to be or aligning with the person you’re trying to be. Building a connection with someone based around a false persona that you believe to be an “ideal” or “improved” version of you puts right back in the same corner. It’s okay to say, “I’m working on these things” and, “I’m at this place in my journey now, but I’m trying to be move towards X.” It’s another thing to act like someone you are not. Remember: you are you—not the person you think you “should be”.

Authenticity is rooted in sincerity. This means presenting yourself genuinely, not saying things you don’t mean, and avoiding actions driven by a sense obligation or the notion of the “right” way to act. If your actions and words are driven by sincerity, people will see your authentic self.

That said, it’s also essential to be honest with yourself. Before you can show others who you are, you need to know who you are, what you truly want, and how you feel. You can’t present an authentic version of yourself if you don’t know yourself. When you know yourself and can be your authentic self around others, you will know that it’s you they love. When you love someone, you know it’s you who loves them. 

Learning how to be your authentic self in social settings can be difficult for a lot of us and takes practice, but it’s crucial to finding sustainable love.

Pillar 3: See Other People as People

This pillar focuses on expectations. Everybody has internal heuristics they use to make judgments in their life. Even if we don’t want to be judgmental, we are naturally prone to applying these heuristic judgments to other people. That said, the judgments we make and the heuristics we apply change based on the expectations we have when we meet people. In other words, what we perceive of someone is based on what we expect to find.

Sometimes, these expectations can skew your perception to be self-affirming. I may find a person acts exactly as I expected them to. For example, if I am expecting someone to be a rude person based on stories I have been told about them, I may label many of their actions as rude upon interacting with them. That said, I may not have labeled these actions as rude if they were done by someone else. I expected rudeness, and I found rudeness.

Alternatively, these expecations can also skew your perception to be self-refuting. For example, if I expect someone to be an extrovert and they aren’t as sociable as I had been anticipating, I may perceive them as an introvert, even if they still showed extrovert tendencies. Another example is if someone says, “This is the best chocolate cake I have ever had,” and the chocolate cake doesn’t blow me away. I may think this cake is underwhelming. I expected more, and because I did not perceive what I expected, I overcorrect and ignore what was actually there… a pretty good slice of chocolate cake.

We constantly go into interactions with certain expectations. Expectations about how people should or will act. Expectations about what role a person is going to fill in our life. Expectations about how “if this person is X, then they must be/do Y.” Even before we meet someone, we may be putting them on a pedestal or harbor some fear about interacting with them. It’s natural, but it inhibits us from having the space to see them as they are. When we have expectations, we approach people with a sense of otherness rather than one of acceptance.

Another issue with expectations is that they commodify interactions and relationships. We may not have any expectation about the person we are interacting with, but we may have expectations about what they are supposed to provide us. We are expecting to get X , Y, Z out of this particular person, and we believe they are expecting something from us as well. What we build together is not based on love, it is based on transactions. Our interactions become payments, going back and forth between two parties, rather than interactions based on love and reciprocated acts of love.

Side Note: Anna Howard of the Wild Geese podcast actually has a really great episode called “how to be a better villager” that explains the concepts of reciprocity in relationships in a way that I found particularly enlightening. She puts words to the differences in a way that is both relatable and easy to understand. If you’re confused about interactions based on reciprocity rather than transactions, I recommend this episode and also suggest looking into “gift economies” and their effect on relational development.

The expectations we have of people we interact with and the expectations we have of our interactions with them inhibit us from being able to see people as they are and interact with them in a way that fosters love. We often see failure of someone else meeting our expectations as a detriment to them fitting into our lives. By nipping these budding relationships, we stop ourselves from being able to let love grow. We need to see other people as people before seeing them as categories, archetypes, identities, or roles in our lives.

Conclusion

These pillars basically boil down to “put yourself out there; be yourself; see people as they are.” If you are looking for love and having trouble with finding it, you can just ask yourself

• “Am I missing one of these pillars?”
• “Am I meeting new people?”
• “Am I being open with people that I interact with?”
• “Am I being my authentic self when I do interact with people?”
• “Am I going into things with certain expectations of the people I meet/interact with?”
• “Am I expecting to gain anything from interactions with people?”

If you don’t think so, consider asking someone you trust for their honest opinion and see if they notice anything (or even message me at the contact email down below explaining your situation and I can see if there are any pillars missing). Sometimes it takes a second opinion to see your situation and beliefs better. And again, three pillars do not make a full building. But if the foundation of what you hope to build is shaky, what you’re building will be shaky as well.

Disclaimer: These pillars are for finding “love”. This is not dating advice nor advice on how to find dates or act during a date. I honestly think a lot of advice around dating and proper manners of “courtship” nowadays tend to go against pillars 2 and 3. This is also not relationship advice. Relationships are complicated, and healthy relationships are even more complicated. Additionally, this post does not necessarily mean “romantic love” when it talks about “love”. If you seek romantic love, then these pillars are still important to finding that, but these pillars are not only for romantic love. They are also important for things like platonic love. They are generalized pillars of love.