I often wonder about love, especially the idea of loving sincerely, and with simplicity, which is, to me, true love.

We only seem to talk about love in public a sappy, even trite way, but love is hard, hard to find, hard to do, hard to know.

For me, the first step towards finding love was to overcome the fear of not being loved. I had to learn to not say I felt love when I didn’t,  and to not believe I was loved when I wasn’t.

I had to understand what it was about me that was unlovable – quite a lot – and to strip myself of my many and greatest illusions about myself. This was a difficult job, and I ended up realizing that I was loveable after all, mostly because I opened myself up to someone who truly loved me.

This was a new experience for me in life, I did not love myself, so it was impossible for me to even imagine that someone else might love me. And I was told early on that if I didn’t love myself, no one else could love me.

There is only so much room in the heart, and if I didn’t clear out the garbage, I would never be available to anyone.

A famous philosopher wrote once that love can only be attained and found by a lifetime search for humility, and I came to believe there was something to that.  And I got a master’s degree in humility up on my mountain.

Only when I truly fell apart and neared the end of a loveless life did I find love and feel love for the first time in my life.

Do you really have to be older to be humble, or is it simply true that life teaches us to be humble if you live long enough to be humbled?

Life stripped me of my false exterior and delusional self like the cheap suit that it was.

I ended up coming face to face with my true self, in all of its elemental poverty, but also in its simple dignity. When I discovered that I was worth little or nothing by myself, I believed that I might be loved by someone else.

I stripped down to the core of me.

Once I realized this, then love found me. It was just down the road. This whole question of love for me was essentially a question of love and fear. I was afraid that I could never be loved.

Fear is the common denominator in so much of my life.

The selfish and small and angry man loves little and fears rightly that he may never be loved, and can never be simple or sincere. Nothing he says about love can be believed.

But the man who is not afraid to admit and own the worst parts of himself can begin to be sincere. And sincerity is the foundation of love, at least to me.

Somewhere along the line, I realized I could never love or be loved until I really mean what I say.