When you first say, “I love you” and mean it, you don’t yet know what love truly is. In fact, you can’t.

It’s as if you need to allow the nature of love to unfold over the course of some, if not many, years in order for the power of love to be clear, to be manifest. It’s as if, when you first uttered these precious words, you knew something without knowing the totality; you weren’t quite ready for the magnitude of the understanding, and so that fullness could not be revealed.

Love is like a life-task: you must empty out the sense of self (kenosis) in order to expand into a wider, vaster, and finally all-encompassing Self. Love is “the path” you follow to know what love is. It is also not the path but the fullness.

You really can’t understand the nature or enormity of love so long as you’re overly self-centered. It just won’t make sense. You can say that you love her, but you’re not yet ready to die to all for her, to surrender your entire sense of self. Your actions belie your words. Until they don’t.

When nothing else–not pleasure, not success, not duty–matters and so when only love matters, then you know what love is. Then the sense of self has been shown to be the Self. Then love was all we knew because now love is all we are.