To be loved is to be seen.
What does this actually mean though?
Recently I’ve encountered the phrase “to be loved is to be seen” on social media several times and I feel people mostly misunderstand this phrase.
People take it at face value but due to their uneducated views of love, they totally misconstrued the idea.
To understand this phrase, we must ask ourselves 2 questions.
Firstly, what is love?
And secondly, what does it mean to be seen?
To answer the first question, love is simply something that is shown to another to show your great appreciation and acknowledgement for their mere existence and contribution to your life and the greater world itself.
It is not something that you go looking for, it is something you simply attract by radiating it to other people.
To receive love you must first give love.
A person who doesn’t love cannot be loved.
Love is a unifying force which entangles individuals into the pursuit of understanding one another, growing as people and finding meaning through connection.
It is something one transfers to another, it is not something that is deserved but rather attained through loving others and oneself first.
Secondly, to be seen is not simply to be noticed or even to be thought about.
No, to be seen is to be understood, to receive deep attention which allows for another to truly recognise the other’s internal character.
To be seen means to be accepted, to be emotionally, spiritually and physically understood.
To be seen requires a lack of judgement, a lack of ego and a genuine passion to learn and study the perspective of the partner.
Often people who believed they are “loved” are often unaware of what true love is.
I once believed love is something everyone has a right to have, my own arrogance blinded me.
Now I understand that if I wish to be loved, if I wish to be seen, I must love others and truly make efforts to understand them.
- Warren Gosling