There are three sides to love. Firstly, a loving person gives, wants to give. But in order to give, in order to give completely without hurting the recipient, you need to be able to give. How often it happens that we do not give out of love, real, selfless, generous love, because when we give, a sense of our significance, our greatness grows in us. It seems to us that giving is one of the ways to assert yourself, to show yourself and others your significance. Such love is connected with the most pernicious and insidious sin — pride and vanity. But it is very painful to receive from a person on these conditions.
Love can only give when it forgets about itself, when a person gives, as one of the German writers said, like a bird sings, out of his abundance: not because a gift is required, but because giving is a song of the soul, it is a joy in which you can forget yourself for the joy of another person. Such love, which knows how to give, is much more rare than we imagine.


On the other hand, in love one must be able to receive; but sometimes it is much more difficult to receive than to give. We all know how painful it can be to receive something, to experience the benevolence of a person whom we either do not love or do not respect; it is humiliating, insulting. (This is the devil of pride sitting inside us getting excited and angry again.) We see this in children: when someone they don't love, someone in whose love they don't believe, gives them a gift, they want to trample on the gift, because it offends the very depths of their soul. And in order to be able to give and be able to receive, it is necessary that the love of the giver be self-forgetful, and the recipient loved the giver and believed unconditionally in his love.


A person begins to love another because suddenly, unexpectedly for himself, he sees something (very valuable) in him that he has never seen before. It happens that young people, girls belong to some society, live, work together, side by side, take part in public life. And suddenly, someone who has not been noticed by anyone until now becomes the center of interest for one of this circle.
At some point, one person saw the other not only with his eyes, but with some kind of penetration of the heart and mind. And this person, who was just one of many, suddenly becomes the only one. A person then appears with a new beauty, a new depth, a new significance. Such a vision can last for years, it can last a lifetime. But sometimes, after some time, this vision fades, as happens when the sun moves away from the window and suddenly the radiance of this window fades. And at this moment faith enters, as a certainty that what was once seen, and now has become invisible, is reliable, undoubtedly. This is the faith we all live by, more or less.