What is true love?

True love is samatva - equality for all beings starting from an ant to a human being. The same life force or brahman flows in every being manifested in the material world. So when your friend or a relative is suffering, and if u notice it – its actually u who is in trouble. Similarly the favor or help that you do to others is - not to others in reality, its something which u are doing for yourself while u spend time living in a materially encaged body.

The feeling of love that starts getting strengthened between lovers, all the respect and adoration eventually resulting in many more things and eventually ending up in contempt, quarrel and hatred is not true love. Life teaches an experience, which has to be, understood the hard way at times if you are less careful. Similarly the feeling of love that appears to be true between parent and kid, friends, brother and sister, grandparents, grandchildren, boss and subordinate, employee and employer – all of them are anointed with some level of personal interest or gain. This is as told by chanakya the sad reality of the world. There is always some kind of self-interest in any kind of relationship – this is true because everyone loves himself or herself first.

Two lovers love each other madly in the beginning, Person A makes person B feel good, because of which Person B loves Person A and vice-versa. As long as this mutual give and take continues, people in the world say that they are in love with each other. Once the mutual give and take stops, there is no more love, but only pain which levels out the amount of happiness that appeared to be so true at one point of time.


An excerpt, which identifies between conditional and unconditional love:-

The person you married was at one time (we assume) your best friend, your lover and your confidant. How can such professed love change almost overnight? The answer may not be easy to accept. That "love" was to a large degree based the other person meeting personal needs and expectations.

You may ask, "What's wrong with that?"

Would you be willing to have the following put in your wedding vows: "I will stay married to you only as long as you continue to meet my needs and expectations, don't change, and as long as you don't disappoint or hurt me in any way."

Although this is far from what we see in wedding vows, to some degree these expectations may actually govern our marriages.

This is conditional love, although "love" is probably not a valid term.

Unconditional love is quite simply "love without conditions." The degree to which we don't achieve unconditional love is the degree to which we encounter problems in relationships, not to mention the problems that we will face if this relationship ends.