Do we actually need to receive love from anyone but ourselves?

[Pernani]

It seems like the spiritual and self help community usually has this idea that to be happy you need nothing outside of what you can give yourself. I'm trying to challenge this idea but idk how im ever gonna reach a conclusion, experientially, without fooling myself. Basically what Im asking is: do we actually need to receive love from outside or is it possible for us to fulfill our desire for love independent of anyone outside of us? If anyone has struggled with this question b4 and has reached conclusion based on experience, please share with me your thoughts!

Here's some of my thoughts to see where I'm coming from:

• Is receiving love from another a need? Is having a loving healthy connection a need? Meaning :It's indispensable for our well being, how?
  • Allows us to love ourselves
  • Heals past wounds that create unworthiness and therefore we become complete, self loving, feeling safe
• It can be indispensable or it can be healing but non indispensable (there's another way to heal that aspect of ourselves and complete ourselves: self love?)
  • Is it possible to satisfy our need to feel loved through self love alone?
• Is it possible that the feelings we get from a loving healthy connection with a romantic partner, the feelings of love safety and warmth, is it possible for these feelings to actually STICK permanently within us if we get an X amount of them through the relationship. Or are they just momentary?
• What does my experience tell me?
  • Only had one relationship where it felt like I received that, maybe not enough reference experience
  • The feelings of love did not stick within me. Thinking that love was healing and that it was only supposed to be received from another, I became desperate, needy, hurt, and I suffered.
  • It seemed like I wasn't supposed to need love from another. Because that opened the door for an unhealthy attachment.

[Recursoinominado]

No, we don't, but it is nice.

[peanutspathtotruth]

I'm currently reading "Intimate Communion" form David Deida and it tackles this question from an interesting perspective, maybe it is helpful for you:
He divides what we understand as "love" into three categories: LOVE, ROMANCE, SEXUAL POLARITY
LOVE
Love is universal, it is our essence. You can love anything, everything, any and every person, "object", animal, the whole of it, yourself. It's your being. When that is what you talk about in your post, then I would say (from my own clear experience) that no, of course there is no need for an outside agency (in the relative sense) to give that to you. How could anyone give you what you are? They could only show you what you're not seeing.
ROMANCE
David defines romance as the feeling of falling in love with someone who you feel like you've known forever. It feels like this person will give you all you could ever want or need. He says that this is because we actually have known this person for a long time - it's a projection of one of our parents. And that's why, at some point when the magic dissolves, there is a switch: suddenly you feel the person is the exact opposite of what you took them to be. We look for what we didn't get in our childhood, and these relationships fail most of the time. So that is where dependency happens.
SEXUAL POLARITY
Happens when the feminine and masculine meet (in terms of energy). It doesn't necessitate romance or love, it's just a tension that wants to dance. This happens regardless of wanting to be in a relationship, it's a natural force. Most importantly, this polarity is the most important ingredient for a relationship. This is where you can take it deep, by creating and holding that polarity and developing it in a spiritual communion. But again - this has nothing to do with someone giving you love. The pinnacle of that polarity is for both partners to completely dissolve into love through the communion. It's a path, a tool. And there are other paths and tools as well. No need, just possibility.

Edited January 26, 2021 by peanutspathtotruth

[Gesundheit]

@Pernani

All love is imagined by you, and it's all self-love. You generate the love from within before you receive it from others. Others simply follow/fulfill their agendas through you, just like you do through them. There's no real love, really.

Think about it. You can have a relationship with someone where you can think they truly love you, only to find out later that they never actually loved you but have been using you the entire time for your money or something else. Notice that in that case there isn't an objective thing out there called love that you were receiving. It's simply all in your mind. And you, like a fool, believed it to be true. You actually felt that love, even though it was non-existent from the other person's pov. How is it possible to feel something that doesn't actually exist?

Conversely, you can have people that truly care about your well-being and actually love you, but, for some reasons, you don't feel their love. This is super obvious in parent-child relationships. Children are rarely able to see their parents' love, even though it's arguably the truest & purest love anyone could ever receive.

All of that is because love is a language that humans invented. And just like any other language, it is a survival mechanism. When you feel love for someone, what that actually means is that you don't know how to love yourself. And so, you use that someone to give you enough validation so that you can finally love yourself. The truth is that you can shortcut that thing and love yourself directly, but again, you are so disconnected from it and don't know how to do it. It takes time and effort to grow back your self-love abilities.

Of course, don't beat yourself up if you are feeling a little bit lost. It's the general trend that people don't know how to love themselves. And rarely anyone ever reaches the ultimate levels of self-love (total enlightenment). But have the courage to start loving yourself again.

And of course, none of that means that you can't or shouldn't have relationships anymore. You can, and actually should, because relationships give you necessary life experiences that provide important lessons. Just start by realizing the truth of the situation, and from that place you will begin to truly heal.

Deconstruct all the ideas that you have about love. Question them to death. Feel into the emotions, and inquire into them. The truth is what remains after all the falsehood is removed.

[Leo Gura]

10 hours ago, Pernani said:

It seems like the spiritual and self help community usually has this idea that to be happy you need nothing outside of what you can give yourself.

If you're already at an advanced level of consciousness and development, then you don't need it from the outside.

But if you're not at that level of consciousness -- which 99.999% of people are not -- then you need love from others because you don't know how to access it otherwise.

[Hardkill]

19 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

If you're already at an advanced level of consciousness and development, then you don't need it from the outside.

But if you're not at that level of consciousness -- which 99.999% of people are not -- then you need love from others because you don't know how to access it otherwise.

Ah, this totally makes sense because I was about to say that having a loving family or having a loving group of people you consider to be family is essential for everyone's psychology, even though mental health experts and therapists have always mentioned how necessary it is to not need validation, approval, or sexual/romantic love from others to complete you as a person.

[Leo Gura]

If you put a baby in a box and give it plenty of food and water, it will still die from lack of love. These experiments were done.

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

If you put a baby in a box and give it plenty of food and water, it will still die from lack of love. These experiments were done.

True.

[Pernani]

On 1/28/2021 at 3:34 AM, Leo Gura said:

If you put a baby in a box and give it plenty of food and water, it will still die from lack of love. These experiments were done.

Does this also apply to adult people? Maybe not physical death, but maybe death on the inside, psychologically speaking.

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, Pernani said:

Does this also apply to adult people? Maybe not physical death, but maybe death on the inside, psychologically speaking.

An adult will not die, just probably becomes bitter and toxic.

[MrBON]

Just look at how incels act and are. That is the typical example of how people are and act if they are denied love