The cleric's quote is foretelling, as Buttercup does not end up marrying Prince Humperdinck, but her true love Westley. True love really did follow her forever.
Outside of the fairy tale world, everyone hopes for True Love. True Love does indeed follow each of us forever, for one person who truly loves us is our Father in Heaven. Romantic love should be leading true love and imitate True Love - the love that God has for His children and the perfect love that Christ has for each of us. In my search for understanding God's love, I identified 5 components necessary in the development of "true love"
1 - Meaningful Time
Loving something that you haven't experienced is impossible. Would Christ's apostles have loved waterskiing? I'm doubting even more than Thomas that they would have. Falling in love is easiest when the couple spend time together, and falling out of love is easiest when seperated. Spending time creates experiences, and experiences are what is most frequently shared between couples. Frequent exposure creates experiences that connects us to sports, clothing, music, food, and culture in general. Without spending time together, a couple can never develop the culture necessary to develop a successful relationship, let alone finding "true love."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70e1TfN34w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70e1TfN34w
One of the characteristics of true love is continued love despite the lack of investment on the other party. In The Princess Bride, Buttercup is brought to her senses after realizing that she should be true to Westley even though she think him dead. She should have continued to love him despite the obvious lack of time she had to continue developing her relationship. God will love us no matter what we do or who we are.
2- Communication
The scintillating mix of ideas and emotions separates humans from any other species. Emotions are especially important in relationship development because of the connotative nature of emotions.
The most destructive emotion in communication is contempt. The problem with contempt is the underlying emotion is a passive-agressive form of rejection. The person communicating feels better giving contemptuous statements because contempt almost always consists of two parts: the postive, followed by the negative. The positive appropriation of the sentence is a masking agent of the real meaning behind the communication: the negative problem.
The opposite of contempt is to communicate love through heartfelt validation, compliments, and praises. Even ordinary communication is respectful at the very least. The power behind communication is with the emotion, not with the actual words that are being said. Clear communication develops a relationship of trust which allows couples to not only solve problems quickly and effectively, but to avoid problems altogether.
Clear communication with God through prayer and the Holy Ghost is necessary to maintaining a connection with love with Him. Since God is omniscient, he can love us even if we do not communicate with Him. We need to keep the channel of communication of love open with him because it is through that means that we can recieve His love, and willingly reciprocate. A ever-pending danger is recieving love from another source and believing that we don't need God's love. There is nothing more we need in this life. Many repentant people become so converted because they feel the incredible strength of Christ's atoning love that they never want to let go.
3 - Sacrifice
Christ's atoning sacrifice is the ultimate expression of God's love. Not only does God have a perfect understanding by giving up His son, He has provided us with someone else who can empathize perfectly with us. Christ's sacrifice gives him perfect empathy.
Sacrifice communicates that we are willing to place the relationship above what was sacrificed. Sacrifice also increases our personal ability to love through strengthening our empathy for whomever we are sacrificing for.
The most frequent sacrifice is a humble attitude. Along with the ability to communicate well, a willingness to sacrifice personal desires for the other's fortifies existing bonds and creates a deep sense of commitment. Sacrifice for God is always rewarded with a nice return.
4 - Loyalty
Missing someone when they're not there is the essence of loyalty. It's a void of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual affection. Missing God at some point is a quintessential part of a testimony. Although he never leaves us, he withdraws His full protective Spirit at times to allow us to feel His absence and desire to return to Him. It's kind of like the saying "you don't know what you have until it's gone."
As Jeffrey R. Holland put it, "The crowning characteristic of love has always been loyalty."
5 - Complete Devotion
Some of you might be saying, "well duh." This is something a little more than loyalty. There are many reasons to be completely loyal. Most of the reasons involve love. Loyalty, however, doesn't encompass everything that complete devotion does. Loyalty implies a connection. Complete devotion is a connection of positive energy. A severance of that connection causes negative energy in the form of grief, pain, anguish, and an insurmountable suffering. There remains a possibility to be loyal to many people. Loyalty implies refraining from wrongdoing against another. If two people are separated, both can still remain loyal to the other. Peter remained loyal to Christ after His death.
When Christ asked Peter, "Do you love me?", He continued to explain to "Feed my sheep." The instruction wasn't to just remain loyal, but to be actively loyal. True love requires work. The work Christ required of Peter was an absolute devotion that would require his life - the life of work and the life of a martyr.
When Christ asked Peter, "Do you love me?", He continued to explain to "Feed my sheep." The instruction wasn't to just remain loyal, but to be actively loyal. True love requires work. The work Christ required of Peter was an absolute devotion that would require his life - the life of work and the life of a martyr.
During the Atonement, Christ felt that pain from the spiritual separation from His Father, along with the pain of separation that everyone would have felt. This sacrifice gave Christ a perfect empathy from a completely devoted love that He has with the Father. His complete devotion allows Him to be unified with the Father, and if we become completely devoted, we can achieve that unification as well. This devotion is called consecration, or as Elder Christofferson puts it, consecration is the surrendering of our time and choices to God's will. Reaching the point of consecration is the only demonstration of True Love. May we all make it to that point.
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