Have you ever “fallen in love”? Have you ever just “known” that THIS was the right person for you – your soul mate, your twin flame, the one you were destined to be with in bliss forever? Did you see them across a crowded room and approach them with the confidence that your dreams would now be fulfilled? How well did it work out? If you’re like most people, it was at least a bit of a disaster, if not an enormous amount of trauma/drama, bewilderment, anger and even despair. Did you then judge yourself as a failure? What if you weren’t a failure, but had merely bought into one of the biggest lies of this reality?

We’re taught by television, books, magazines and even our family and friends that we should aspire to find the love of our life, and that we won’t be complete without love.

However, when you take a good look at what love is and isn’t, as opposed to what we’ve been told it is, it’s easy to see how and why love doesn’t fulfill our expectations.

To begin with, love has a different meaning for everyone. Imagine that you and your new partner are professing your love for one another. For one person, that might mean that they will now have the sexual partner they have dreamed about, with wild sex every night, where as for the other person, it could mean that they have found the paternal father figure that has always been missing in their lives. Do you see the problem here? There’s a good chance that the sexual relationship will become very quickly become a battle ground, with each partner feeling that the other isn’t living up to their “commitment” to love. And, when our partners don’t fulfill our definition of love, we often blame them as in “I thought you said you loved me!” What a mess!

That brings us to another difficulty with “love”. Love is always conditional. I love you because… fill in the blank. And then there’s the: “If you love me you will do this for me”. What we call love is always based on judgment, and often creates a kind of prison. We hear about unconditional love, but how often have you seen that? People say that they love unconditionally, but the minute their partner behaves in a way that they have judged to be unacceptable, the “unconditional” love quickly turns to anger or hate.

Faced with not fulfilling our partners expectations of love, many people begin to bend, fold, staple and mutilate themselves in order to fulfill their partner’s expectations. People become “not them” to avoid losing the love of their partner. That creates a crazy situation where neither person is being the person the other “fell in love with” in the first place! On top of that, “love” tends to create exclusion rather than inclusion. A couple gets together and all of a sudden they seem “joined at the hip”, there is no room for anyone else in their lives. Eventually this contracted world begins to fall apart, with each person either wondering what went wrong and/or blaming their partner for the collapse of the relationship.

Given the insanity of how “love” generally turns out, you might ask why anyone would bother searching for it. Yet most people try repeatedly to find their true love, despite disaster after disaster.

Besides all of the ways “love” is made significant and important by this reality, there is another factor that keeps many people in hot pursuit. That is the lie that each of us is somehow incomplete, and that only another person can make us whole. What if you were complete exactly as you are now? What if you didn’t need another to fulfill you? While this goes against what most of us are taught, it’s actually the truth. The difficulty is that most people are never encouraged to be the amazing infinite beings that they are. When you become aware of the gift to the world that you actually are, there’s no need to look for another to make us whole. And when you step out of the need for “love” you become much less controllable or manipulable by others.

Access Consciousness identifies “love” as one of the distractor implants. Distractor implants are there to distract us from being who we truly are and from being aware of what is. Each distractor implant tends to bring up other distractor implants and “love” is no exception. Have you noticed how often “love” is connected to blame, shame, regret, guilt, anger, rage, fury and hate? Those are all distractor implants too! Have you ever found yourself mired in distractor implants all in the name of love?

Fortunately, there is a very different possibility beyond “love”, and that is gratitude.

Gratitude has no opposite and is not conditional. It expands your life rather than contracting it. It never requires you to go into fantasy or any of the distractor implants. There are not multiple meanings of gratitude there to trip you up and make sure your relationship begins to disintegrate, and gratitude will nourish you and your relationship rather than toxify it.

Gratitude is completely inclusive. You can be grateful for a beautiful sunrise, and you can be grateful for the awareness that someone is lying to you, you can be grateful for your partner, with all the good, the bad, and the ugly!

Another quality that distinguishes gratitude from love, is that gratitude is never based on judgment. Gratitude just is: it’s a space, a presence, an energy.

Think of a time when you were truly grateful for someone or something. Notice how expansive that energy is, and how it adds to your life rather than detracts form it. Gratitude has a sense of ease to it, while “love” often has a kind of angst attached to it.

What if you had gratitude for your partner? What if you let go of chasing the fantasy of romantic love and allowed yourself to be totally present with who your partner is in this 10 seconds. What if you had gratitude for yourself, and were willing to perceive, know, be and receive who you are? Might that lead to a totally different kind of relationship?

Are you willing to create a relationship that filled with joy, possibilities and is ever changing and expanding? Are you willing to give up “love” for gratitude? If so, you are on your way!