Successful Marriage~Love Thy Neighbor As Thy Self~From our Relationship Expert Marlon Lindsay

17. Mar, 2010

We are so excited to have the incredible Marlon Lindsay as our Relationship Expert. His extensive knowledge and words are so wise. We are honored to have him as part of our site. Here is an incredible article that Marlon put together just for our BRIDES and GROOMS here on the Bride and Groom.com.

Love Thy Neighbor As Thy Self

Love means treating people with reverence. If you are Christian think of how you would treat Jesus if you met him walking down the street. If you practice another religion, or don’t have a religious belief, who would you have reverence for? The term neighbor refers to anyone but you; in this case your spouse. Thyself, well, that’s old language for you.

The commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself, starts with the assumption or perhaps the admonition to love thyself. You are to be your first experience of love. Your experience of love and your understanding of its impact on you is your purest knowledge of how critical it is for our mental, physical and spiritual journey through this life. When you truly have this understanding you will naturally love others.

When we take on a life partner through marriage, we extend this love of self to love of others. That is, loving thy neighbor as you have been loving yourself. A healthy marriage consists of two people loving each other as they have loved themselves–unconditionally.

Unconditional is often misunderstood but generally means to love self and others without attachment to how we expect them to be. Instead, we accept them as they are, realizing that perfection is an illusion.

Our inability to accept each other as we are stems from our inability to love ourselves unconditionally—accepting the self as it is. We are always engaged in this unending quest to improve; shunning the miracle of our presence here on earth for an ideal state of being. There is nothing wrong with experiencing the fullness of life and “improvements” are a part of it. More nurturing terms for improvements are, growth, experience, and potentiality. These reflect our expansiveness as human beings and do not condemn us for our level of understanding.

Our most critical role as a person, a spouse, a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, etc. is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. Until we learn this, we can never love another completely. You cannot work harder at loving others, you can only work harder at loving yourself. Your love for others will manifest from your love for self.

A successful marriage depends on two people with a healthy love for themselves, unconditionally so that they my experience the fullness of this life with and through each other.

Marlon Lindsay is the author of Reminder to Self and the creator of Reminder to Self Insights, Full Potential Living, where he provides the tools that we all need to reach our fullest potential as a person. His insight to life and relationships reminds us to be better individuals. With his recent move to Utah we feel fortunate to have him involved on our site.

To see Marlon’s page on our site click HERE and to view his website click HERE! We hope his insight in love will help increase your relationships where ever they may be.