An interesting read taken from the site:

http://www.aish.com/dating/wisdom/Creating_Space_for_Love.asp

In order to love, you need to withdraw yourself from the center and create a space for another in your life. Love starts only when you do that. In other words, if you are self-centered, you are not ready for love. If you are self-centered, you can’t make enough space to nurture another. And true love is not only creating that space within your life for another, but also giving him or her that space and respecting and maintaining that space. It is being a part of another life and removed from that life at the same time.

Viva la Difference

Once we’re able to withdraw ourselves from the center and create space for another, we must develop the keen sensitivity for just how uniquely different — just how other — our partners are. We tend to see what we have in common, and we tend to overlook the differences. When people say, “love is blind,” this is what they mean.

True love is seeing both the good and the bad.

But true love is not blind. True love is seeing — seeing the differences, the otherness, the good and the bad. True love is seeing and still loving. In Hebrew, the verb “to see” is directly related to the verb “to respect.” And that is what seeing with the eyes of true love means. True love requires that we see and accept and respect those we love for who they are, without projecting our dreams and fantasies upon them.

This is very hard, because we tend to want to fit those we love into our imaginary pictures of love. And if they don’t quite fit, we want to alter them to fit.

But if we succeed in seeing not just what we have in common with those we love, but what makes us different, and if we appreciate and honor those differences, then we can take the next step toward giving of ourselves to that person. And simultaneously we must enable our partners to do the same for us, which means allowing them to make a space in their lives for us, allowing them to acknowledge our otherness, allowing them to give of themselves to us.

Excerpted from Rabbi Aaron’s book, “

Endless Light