What does love mean to you?

What love means to you? What was your experience of love growing up and how does that inform what we expect from our relationships as adults.

Now this could be thought about in several different ways – we could think about how love was modelled in your childhood environment. Whether your parents were together, separated or you were raised in a blended family, whether you home was a happy or if there was aggressive behaviour. Or maybe your parents were the epitome of love and you are spending your life trying to replicate that as best as you can.

Having a good understanding of what your experience of love was growing up is so important for several reasons but the main reason is that it gives us a really good idea of what we expect in our own personal relationships.

Sometimes what we think we expect and what our subconscious expects for us are two very different things. If we know love growing up and we are gifted that strong stable secure family background, then it’s somewhat easy to presume we can go into love as adults with strength and stability and resilience. But if we don’t have that growing up, then there are all sorts of ways that we can create difficult love situations for ourselves or even just think that we are not really worth having that true-love story.

So I wonder if you are able to think about your experiences of what love looked like for you growing up and consider if you see any parallels in your adult relationships now? Are you in a long-term stable relationship, or is it a long-term unstable relationship, or have all of your relationships been quite difficult? Do you feel like you are often abandoned in relationships?

It’s really good to have this insight because once you know what the difficult areas are, then you can start to address them and that is when you can start to make a real difference in your future