Happy with love

Recently we had an activity with children where they had to think about ‘love’. They had to share what love meant to them. After a lot of discussions, arguments, explanations, introspections, tears and outbursts, they came up with a few points:

Before you read any further:

This is not an article written by one person. One person was just kind enough to collate all the thoughts, points, shared by kids (5-12 years) on different days in different batches. It’s mostly written verbatim.

1.    Love is about care: When we love someone, we care for them. We look after their needs, their feelings. Like we give them a glass of water when they look tired.

2.    Love is to feel safe: We feel safe with our loved ones. We feel they can protect us from all dangers. In fact, we don’t even get to know about a danger many times, because they avert it before it harms us.

3.    Love is to trust: We can trust the person we love. We trust that they will do all that is good for us, that they will never harm us. Like we drink the glass of milk given to us without any worry. We may hate milk, but we don’t mistrust the mother who is giving it. If there is no trust, there is no love.

4.    We give in love: We become a giver when we love. We like to give. Love means not holding ourselves back from giving. We do expect our loved ones to love us back. But not getting does not lead to not giving. Not getting may just make us feel sad. When we expect give and take all the time, it’s called trading, not love.

5.    Love is to respect: When we love someone we respect their choices, likes, dislikes. We may disagree with what they want, but we don’t scoff at them for that. We respect their personalities and we don’t want them to become a clone of us.

6.    Love is to support: We support our loved ones when they need us, whether they say it or not. Even if they are in trouble because of their silly mistake for which we had warned/cautioned them enough earlier, we support them in their crisis and help them through it. We don’t say, “I told you so! Now do what you want”

7.    There is honesty in love: We may lie a little to hide our surprise gifts, but we don’t manipulate our dear ones. We don’t hide important stuff. We don’t become brutally honest and hurt their feelings either. So if our loved one is not looking very nice in the new dress, we don’t ‘honestly’ call them ugly. Neither do we call them gorgeous and let them buy that dress. We need to decide such things on the spot. But we try to be honest all the time.

8.    Love makes us kinder: People in love are kind. Not all the time though. May be they are kind to their loved ones. But they are definitely not kind to those who hurt their loved ones. Like a mumma tigress fiercely protects her cubs from predators. She is kind to her cubs but not to the predators. But yes, when we love, we feel kind and gentle.

9.    Love helps us understand: It brings empathy. It’s different from sympathy and way different from apathy. You feel what your loved ones feel. You understand why they feel in a certain way.

10.Love brings joy: Love means being happy with each other. It means we want to spend time with each other. That’s why we make birthday cards, mother’s day cards & father’s day cards. That’s why we hug, kiss and say “I love you” many times. Big kids stop doing all this. But they should do it too. it’s not embarrassing.

(A note from the person who collated the data: Kids have a fair understanding of love. They are a lot more sensible and sensitive than we think they are. I think we can learn a lot about love from them)