FROM NOUN LOVE TO VERB LOVE
By Bill Cottringer
"Love is the gentle touching of two naked souls without the noisy clamor of their external equipment—that lovely, magical, and serendipitous place where mind, heart and body all finally agree with the undeniably delicious oneness."
Ah, but I must confess, I have been a romantic student of love for more years than I want to remember, even as a little boy. I have still not found 
my true love pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but something tells me I am getting closer and closer by the moment and that it is not very far away.
Here is what I know about love in hopes of finally getting myself there and maybe a few readers as well. Maybe this is my mission—to expose these insights clearly enough for myself and others to make sense out of love, enough to set more of it free to take us all to a better place as intended by our creator.
Love is certainly one of the biggest mysteries of life. I once did a research project and uncovered over 25 different varieties of love. And obviously, if you ask 100 different people to define love, you will probably get 100 different definitions and 100 more different interpretations of those different definitions. Mass confusion about a very simple thing! It is amazing how a four-letter word can generate so much misunderstanding and disagreement. One way out of the conundrum is to just make a single distinction with the word love—dividing it into the noun love and the verb love. Let's look at that distinction.
Love as a noun is a strange state of being commonly called "being in love." It is much more than just a powerful feeling, it is a state that consumes the two people and readies them for a major transformation in their lives. The noun love comes from God, who ironically gives it to us as the ultimate verb love—the grace of unconditional love and complete acceptance for who we are. We have to receive this mysterious gift ourselves before we can acknowledge its existence and feel it with another person. I have come to believe that human relationships are the main arena for exchanging both the noun and verb forms of love.
Or, as my spiritualist friends would say, "Love is the main positive creative force in the universe that causes all things to grow into their best being, no matter how brief or long their performance here is. Thorn birds have but a single moment of beauty; butterflies have one that turns into many, and the sky's beauty is never-ending."
Noun love research has consistently identified certain core "symptoms" with this state of being as follows:
--Mutuality of powerfully positive feelings which may not be equally acknowledged at the same time or which may cause one person to want to approach and the other to retreat.
--A strange sense of unified attraction coming from everywhere—physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually and vocationally.
--Consuming pre-occupation with positive possibilities without concern for negative differences or practical obstacles.
--An overwhelming desire to want to let go, trust and give into the love experience and the other person despite fears of vulnerability, which unfortunately can preclude the noun love from ever becoming the verb love.
--The safe opportunity to be able to be completely honest and open in communication without fear of judgment or misunderstanding.
Taking the noun love to the verb love is probably the most difficult challenge we humans can try to accomplish. Rarely do the mind, heart, soul and body ever agree except at the serendipitous moment of the beginning of noun love. From there we can quickly and easily slip back into our flawed and broken humanness in trying to control an uncontrollable experience. But it is from this moment on that the two people in love must carefully and gracefully nurture the noun love to become the verb love, or take their potential into reality—by kindly and gently encouraging each other to become his or her very best self by each accepting their whole selves first.
Some verb love wisdom—unconditional love and acceptance—from the trenches:
--Focus mainly on yourself—allowing yourself to grow in likeability and lovability and allowing the other person to do the same, without giving into the temptation of wanting to try and control the progress of those things. In other words, live and let live lovingly.
--Grow the two most difficult human qualities that resist growth—patience and tolerance—no matter what your mind or hear tells you, because that is what your soul needs you to experience. This is love verb in its best action.
--Pay more attention to similarities, commonalities and compatibilities and dismiss potentially annoying differences, or at least the controlling effect they have on you.
--Control the controllables and let go of the rest! The most influence you have is to learn to control your reactions to life experiences and to gradually express your best self in a positive way that helps you grow into your best being and enables other people to do that too.
--Accept the reality that you may have to experience many failures and a lot of yours and others' worst self, which can involve a lot of bruises, broken bones and bleeding; but keep up hope and faith because the best is always yet to come.
Getting into love verb is what we are all here to do and is the only thing that can really bring us authentic happiness, genuine success, and real peace. The next time noun love appears, listen carefully and be ready to go on a journey of a lifetime!
"Love is the only creative anecdote for life's main negative force which destroys—fear." –The Author.
William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA and is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow Secrets. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net
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