Love keeps you who you are!
Sharing a life filled with love is very important, but equally important is having a life you love, and that can be on your own or with someone. I think the attachment phrase, “I can’t live without you” is so unhealthy. You should be able to live by yourself, with contentment and accountability, but should you choose to share that life cultivated by yourself with someone, the love can only serve to enhance the joy you feel.
Attachment is commonly understood as how and why we connect with others. For example, psychologists describe secure attachment as connections that evoke safety, balance, and stability — or insecure attachment as codependent, unstable, fearful, and avoidant.
As with many cases, the spiritual and psychological philosophies on attachment differ. Spiritual philosophy warns that most attachment is a form of emotional bondage that leads to suffering. In contrast, non-attachment liberates our relationships from limiting unconscious behaviours.
A key indicator that you may be attached to a person, job, town, or habit is when you know it’s bad for you. It’s obvious how destructive it is to your well-being. You’re surrounded by evidence that it limits your growth and healing. And yet find it impossible to walk away and let go.
A key indicator you share love with someone and not attachment is being at peace with the impermanence of their presence and being able to love them despite any role they may or may not play in your life.
Love doesn’t offer the same addictive, confusing nuances as an attachment. Love exists on its own, within you. It cannot be defined by how you relate to or connect with another. It is simply held and shared.
Whether you subscribe to psychological or spiritual understandings of attachment, the nature of love is unchanged. It thrives where space is left for it, and attachments tend to lean toward dependence and fear, which notoriously creates an atmosphere where love isn’t nurtured.
Find more ways to appreciate things, people, and yourself without attaching a reason why or a list of expectations and conditions. Love for love’s sake, and you will never run dry.
