“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ~Lao Tzu
The Meaning of Love and Being Deeply in Love
As we approach Valentine’s Day (Valentine’s Day truly is every day), our minds turn to love and relationships. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu profoundly stated, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” This quote encapsulates the reciprocal nature of love—how love requires both giving and receiving to fully flourish.
Love Overcomes Life’s Challenges
Feeling deeply loved, comforted, and accepted by your romantic partner or close friend empowers you with inner strength and confidence. Their affection makes you feel worthy, supported, and able to overcome life’s challenges.
Love Boosts Your Immune System
You draw resilience from knowing someone cares deeply about your well-being. Scientific studies have shown that social support boosts the immune system and aids physiological functioning.
Love Bolsters Your Spirit
The safety net of a loving relationship provides the security for you to be vulnerable and weather emotional storms. Every time your partner listens to you understands you or offers words of encouragement, it bolsters your spirit.
Love Takes Effort
However, Lao Tzu recognizes love cannot be merely a passive reception of affection. For love to endure as a transformative force, we must also extend courageous effort toward the beloved.
Love Takes Risks
Loving deeply emboldens us to move past our fears and open ourselves to intimacy. It compels us to risk vulnerability, assert caring gestures, navigate conflict healthily, and support the other’s growth.
Love Provides Power
When in love, you find the power to push your own boundaries. The spark of care for another kindles determination to understand them, communicate openly, and reconcile differences. For instance, you might find the courage to discuss anxiety-provoking topics that previously seemed too daunting to broach.
Love Takes Sacrifice
True devotion also drives you to support the ambitions of the beloved, even when it demands sacrifice. Loving deeply motivates you to act generously, even without guaranteeing that the affection will be returned equally.
Love Means Saying Your Sorry
It gives you the bravery to apologize after arguments instead of withdrawing defensively. When someone comes to matter dearly, you suddenly tap into wells of strength to pursue connection rather than flee from emotional discomfort.
Loves Ask You To Challenge Yourself
You challenge old ways of isolating or lashing out that no longer serve you or the relationship’s bonds. This courage stems organically from the seeds of profound care.
The Street of Love Has Two Lanes
Hence, in Lao Tzu’s quote, you find the truth that love’s road runs in both directions—receiving love offers strength, just as giving love demands courageous effort.
Holding On and Holding Up
As a couple, you walk hand-in-hand and model this two-way street: your partner is uplifted by your visible affection, symbolizing the strength drawn from being loved deeply. At the same time, your partner’s accompanying hands represent the courage required to return that loving gesture openly and generously.
Continual Care
You must receive love to fully blossom, yet you must also extend courageous care for the garden of the relationship to be nourished. When you simultaneously walk this street, giving and receiving affection with vulnerability and devotion, the alchemical love process reaches its highest peaks.
Love That Withstands The Test Of Time
There, you discover your strongest, truest, and most unshakable self. You become empowered to stretch past old limitations and nourish each other’s flowering. This interwoven tapestry generates a love that can withstand a lifetime.
My Wish For You
So this Valentine’s Day, may you appreciate Lao Tzu‘s wisdom—that real love flows both ways on the street of courage and strength. Truly have a deeper understanding of the meaning of love.
Open Your Heart
As you open your heart to intimacy’s risks and rewards, may you find the power to blossom and grow with one another. May you walk hand-in-hand down this street blissfully into the landscape of enduring connection.
Can you do that?
