Love or Possession: Which One Is Your Relationship Based Upon?

“Love gives nothing but itself, and takes nothing but from itself. Love does not possess, nor would it be possessed. And do not think that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.” ― Khalil Gibran

In the modern world, love has become an addiction.

Indeed, when we fall in love our brains really do become addicted to our partner.

“Intense passionate love uses the same system in the brain that gets activated when a person is addicted to drugs,” a study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook recently revealed.

Love or possession.

So we know that when we fall in love we get addicted and attached to our partners.

So when or how does that addiction turn to possessiveness and attachment?

A lot of it has to do with fear.

If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.” — Osho

When we get attached to someone or something, a lot of the time our response becomes “how do I keep this person/thing from leaving me?”

Rather than giving love space and room to breathe, we cling to it, desperate to make the feeling stay.

This, of course, is counterproductive.

Love requires trust, spaciousness and faith. To love someone is to allow them to be who and where they are.

In modern relationships, we so often fall into the trap that the other person belongs to us. This simply can never be true.

All relationships are in a constant state of flow. To be successful, they require time, effort, patience and understanding.

For a relationship and the parties in it to flourish, love must be a practice of remembering that we do not own another.

We can only every grow and expand who we are as individuals, then from that place of fullness, tend to the love that we share with another.

To truly love means to allow your partner the freedom to be.

To release the fear that they will stop choosing you and move on to another, to relinquish control and simply focus on being the absolute BEST version of you.

Choose love over possession, when you do that, there is no need to cling to anybody or anything.

Because you finally know what it means to BE love, rather than simply being IN it.

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