Dating : What I Learned About Love from Will Smith

You can’t make another person happy.

This is not a topic you see me write about often. Nevertheless, when I stumbled upon Will Smith’s viral YouTube video about love, it made me think.

How do I define love?

I realized that not everybody is capable of love. But I’ll tell you more about that in a sec.

For now, let me share with you what I learned about love from Will Smith.

According to Will Smith, love is something we all crave — yet, like with all human-created concepts — we have no idea what it means.

More than that: what we usually call love is not loving at all.

We are used to thinking that love is all humans need to be happy. “He just needs a bit of love, and that’s all.”

But no matter how much you try, you can’t make another person happy.

Will Smith says, “You can make a person smile, you can make them feel good, but their happiness is, entirely, and utterly outside your control.”

It’s true. The only person who can make them happy is themselves. Love happens only when two genuinely happy — and emotionally healthy — people collide and build something bigger than themselves.

Most people view love as transactional, conditional even when they aren’t aware of it.

We care about relationships not because we altruistically care about the other person, but because we like how they make us feel.

This is called the “desire/pleasure paradigm” by eastern philosophers.

If you give me pleasure or what I desire, I love you. If not, I don’t love you anymore.

We’re all guilty of this on some level. We impose our desires on the person with whom we are in a relationship.

It’s a natural human instinct to be egotistical — even in such seemingly altruistic concepts like love.

Will Smith believes that if we think of love in this way…then it’s not love.

Luckily, he has an alternative.

Instead of viewing love as transactional, Will proposes that we think about love in the same way a gardener thinks about their flowers.

The gardener wants the flower to become what it wants to become. What it was designed for, not what the gardener wants it to be.

How many overbearing parents want their kids to be “special” to be proud of them? These parents impose their wants and needs on their kids without thinking about whether they want to achieve anything at all.

Yet, the gardener doesn’t care whether the flower becomes red, yellow, tall, small, or when (or if) it blooms.

The gardener accepts everything about his flower. He is patient. He waits and observes with care, attention, and wonder at what has become of the little seed the flower once was.

This is what Will Smith calls love.

This kind of unconditional love that Will Smith talks about has a lot to do with listening.

You can’t love unless you know how to listen.

Both actions — listening and loving — require you to do the same thing: take a step back, control your ego, and be patient.

Will believes that love can be spelled as L.U.V.:

• L for listening;
• U for understanding;
• And V for validation (not Vendetta).

In order to love, one has to be a good listener. He has to understand what the person is trying to say. And he has to validate his understanding through affirmative words.

This kind of deep, caring interaction creates an environment in which love can flourish.

At its core, love is help.

Will Smith deeply believes that we’re all flawed — we’re all going through some struggle — and we all need help to get through it.

This is why love exists in the first place. It’s an escape, an exit route for humans.

Love is about helping each other grow, become people we want to become, and support each other in the way we need to be supported.

This is also why Will Smith’s gardener metaphor depicts love so accurately.