What is love? Where does love reside? How do you attract love into your life?

In this article, which is the third of a seven-part series on The Seven Myths of Love & Happiness™, for Sixty and Me readers, we will answer these questions as we explore the Myth of Love.

Love is experienced through a wide variety of perceptions and experiences. Due to the polarity of what love represents for each person, it is not easy to find common ground on how to gauge the nature of true love.

It is not surprising, then, that for most people love is an unpredictable energy that oscillates between various states of pain and pleasure.

This is where the Myth of Love comes in.

What Is the Myth of Love?

The Myth of Love is a melting pot of all of humanity’s unique and shared experiences with love. It is akin to a mirror that reflects back to us the contradictive and common stories about love we believe are true.

For many people love is fickle. One moment it is alive and vibrant in your life, and the next it is cold and aloof.

Others desire love but repel it, because to them it represents intense suffering. This is usually the result of love having been disrupted by trauma and experience of great loss.

There are those who deeply believe in true love’s universal nature. They are not dissuaded by other people’s opinions or even their own difficult experiences with love.

You Want Love, But Do You Trust It?

With such disparity in perceptions and experiences with love, it is not surprising our generation of women over 60 crave love but are wary of being hurt by it.

To reconcile the gap between wanting love and not fully trusting it, start by acknowledging that true love is your natural, default state of existence.

You are an inherently loving being at your core. This means you are irresistibly drawn to give and receive love.

The next step is to accept your unconditional worthiness to give and receive love.

In a world full of outside distractions, many of which are rooted in outdated stories about love, how do you flip the script on these narratives of seeking love outside of yourself and shift your focus inward?

How Love Is Packaged and Sold

Because love is a universal desire, the Myth of Love has been widely manipulated and utilized for promoting stories, products, and services for generations.

Your expectations of love in your outer reality are directly influenced by these stories. For they are not only told and sold to you from other people, but you also create versions of them for yourself.

The basic premise of these stories is that if you do not follow the rules of life, as they were instilled in you as a child, and later reinforced as an adult, you won’t find the love you desire or you run the risk of losing it if you already found it.

The antidote to the Myth of Love, and the key ingredient to telling a new, more empowering story about love, is to first be aware of how these stories influence you. Second, love yourself unconditionally.

Therefore, the Myth of Love gains or loses its value and power based on how you choose to perceive your worthiness for true love.

You Are Worthy of True Love

If you believe you are unworthy of love, you may call on various experiences in your life to justify you are not beautiful enough, young enough or wealthy enough to attract loving people or loving experiences.

Unworthiness, however, does not just show up as a romantic issue. It also finds its way into all areas of life, especially in social settings and at work.

In our previous article we delved into the Myth of Self-Worth and how it keeps you from developing a healthy, loving relationship with your authentic self by redirecting your focus on seeking for validation and worthiness from outside sources.

When you stand back from all the noise in the outside world and go beyond how true love is packaged and sold differently to each generation, you begin to recognize something eye-opening and heart-expansive.

True love, in its purest essence, is in all of us. It is everywhere and in all expressions of life. Innately accessible to everyone, true love is not bound to any one person’s perspective of it. It is unchangeable, for true love just is.

The following empowering affirmations will help you begin the process of overwriting the Myth of Love:

• I am loved.
• I am powerful.
• I am confident.
• I am authentic.
• I believe in myself.
• I love all of me all the time.
• I trust my inner, authentic voice.
• I am always connected to true love.
• Everything always works out for me.

To help you further integrate what you have learned, in my video for this article, I will guide you through an inspiring journal prompt and action item.

What does love mean to you? Have you been burned by love? Where do you find your true source of love?