According to the author of this book: All About Love: New Visions, in order to truly love another person (whether a partner, relative or friend), one must first love themselves (obviously not in an egotistical way, but a healthy one). She also disregards the concept of romantic love as “true” love and explores the topic in many different ways. In her view, various factors form the concept of “true” love, including: “… care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
When it comes to family and/or friends, which of the prior seven factors do you think is the most important and why?
Re: All About Love
Nobody cares about love? 
Strange… 
Re: All About Love
After all the MIL threads and husbands who don't care, no wonder no one wants to talk about love!
Re: All About Love
It all sounds great in theory not in practice...
Re: All About Love
Yes, I believe that you must first love yourself as well. But when you feel true love for another person, you love this person more than yourself. In a healthy family, it's like this with your close relatives, not only your life partner. And yes there is a difference between romance and love. While romance is the butterflies in your belly that look over all that things that you find wrong about a person and that make you guys not fit together, you just ignore it and enjoy the butterflies – this differentiates romance from love, romance is only on the outside, romance isn't deeply inside you (even though it might makes you feel that way), it's not really about the person's character or anything, it's just attraction. Once you found true love you will see the difference. In true love you don't care about the person's appearance, the way he lives or anything like that, but you love his/her personality so much. You feel like you have a soul mate, someone who understands everything you feel (if not at the start then through talking it out) and has a deep connection to you. You can feel this connection, but its not visible. It feels like there is a thiny energy string connecting your hearts and souls. It's like a miracle, it truly is. But I think the problem why most people never experience this love is either because they marry too soon the wrong person or they just simply don't look for the right one. If you have an ideal of a partner in your mind that goes beyond his/her personality (soul characteristics) and mind-set, then the chance you will ever meet this person or recognise him/her is very very small, because you're simply looking for something else. It's hard to put this in words properly, but I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. Since I'm european and married to a pakistani man I know the problems of both cultures in this regard, both are not ideal. It's not good to have many relationships as it destroys your soul but it's not good to just get (almost randomly) married like that neither. don't marry if its not for love, you can't learn to love somebody. you can learn to accept them as family, but that's not love, that's just tolerating (or like I said, acceptance). I'm not surprised that so many people in both sides of the world are so frustrated about their relationships and love generally, there's nowhere out there to teach us this topic properly, or well, let's say in most people's case there is nobody. True love is really rare these days. it's sad!