Project Love (ePub)

Our collective yearning to love and to be loved has childhood roots that lie deep within the hearts of people of all ages, cultures, faiths, and backgrounds everywhere on our planet. Our deep human desire for love is a childhood phenomenon that follows us into adulthood and is our main drive for getting married and having a lifelong companion. We all have heard the saying, "e;If you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else,"e; yet we are not born knowing how to love ourselves or anyone else. Our capacity to love, as well as our impairments around love, grows out of the first interactions with our parents. Learning about love is just like learning a language: If we learn it in our homes when we are children, it becomes our native language that we use to express ourselves effortlessly. For most of us, love becomes a second language that we need to consciously learn as adults. Having come to the United States as a teenager from my native country of Iran, I know all too well that the later in our adult life we learn to speak a language, the harder it is to learn and the heavier our accent! I never expected to write a book about love because I have been struggling with it all my life. As much as I genuinely desired to love, I was miserably unhappy in my marriage. This book was born out of the dissolution of my marriage, which compelled me to explore the mysteries of love relationships. In a world that seems to have gone mad with mass shootings and public incivility, I share my life story to inspire hope that the foundation of love is built on the shoulders of loving parents. The essence of this book is to remind us all about the importance of love in all aspects of our lives, which is the foundation for a happy life that I plan to teach my children. Experiencing love may seem like a straightforward thing, but it is a skill that has to be acquired. School systems do not teach children about the most important topic in life, which is love. This must be learned in our homes. True love begins in our homes with our parents-if we were lucky-or with our children once we become aware of our enormous responsibility as parents. No parent can adequately articulate the experience of holding his or her child. The future of the world depends on parents' ability to teach their children how to become loving and respectful human beings, because all distressing habits of humankind are acquired after birth. There is nothing more powerful than the power of love to change the world by raising the next generation of our civilization who will not allow race to disconnect them, religion to separate them, or wealth to classify them. One mistake we can make is thinking that we, as parents, cannot make a difference.