“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.  The one is the shadow of the other.”
~ Carl Gustav Jung

Love is an intense emotion expressed through a natural instinctive state of mind, which is derived from the heart, mind, and spirit.  As parents, we are the first impression and expression that our children will experience love.  It is through our love that children learn how to express and experience love. If we fail to express appropriate forms of affection, then we will most assuredly leave our children seeking out love. If we fail to express appropriate forms of affection, then our children will be left to seek love from other sources. This can lead to a lifetime of unfulfilled emotion, not only for our own children but also for subsequent generations.

Many religions speak of an expressive love.  While each religion, and the subsets within those religions hold to a similar concept of love; it is not uncommon that religious subsets differ on their unique perspective of love.  Most religious ideological perspectives revere the expression of love.  In the New International Version of the Christian Bible, it expresses love as being an unconditional state. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”  What are we speaking of if love never can fail according to the Christian text?

In the Muslim faith, love between a couple is highly regarded.  In the Quran, love is discussed as being a creation.  Chapter (30) sūrat l-rūm (The Romans), Muhammad Sarwar “His creating spouses for you out of yourselves so that you might take comfort in them and His creating love and mercy among you.”   Love is the unifying of the hearts, souls, and minds of others together.

The absence of love in many homes has become so commonplace, that when we hear of this absence, we are neither distressed nor bewildered by the lack of love in a home. The anomaly has become a loving family that shares affection in appropriate and healthy ways. So unusual is the healthy expression of love, that it has become mocked and an object of derision within most cultures. Rather than embrace and celebrate the love of a family, it is the punch line of jokes, or even worse, it is eyed with suspicion and mistrust. The lack of love is common place and accepted while healthy, loving expression is eyed with contempt.

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