“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”

— Lao Tzu

Some spend an exuberant amount of time chasing it in a desperate attempt to fill the painful gaping hole within. Others resist it when it shows up in their lives, furiously fighting it off as it tries to chase them down. Some are simply just it; humans who are fully expressed in the heart-love dwelling in their essence.

I’m talking about your soul uniqueness — the real you and the gift only you alone can bring to the world and those lives you touch along the way

Deep love.

The idea of deep love may sound like something out of a romantic movie, particularly if you have struggled to maintain a strong emotional connection in your relationships. You might even wonder if it exists at all, and then circle back to conclude that that kind of love belongs in fictional worlds and heart-tugging flicks like The Notebook.

Sigh. Given half the chance, I think just about every woman who saw that movie would have chosen to be Allie for a day. The way Noah loved her was utterly breathtaking, soul stirring, and as rare as a wild Tasmanian Tiger.

That is … extinct.

Granted, deep love is not easy to come by. And even if you’re fortunate enough to find a Tasmanian-like gem, it isn’t always easy to hold onto, either. That’s because deep love is really about soul love and soul love is, well … deep. Like an intense experience which activates in the heart and soul to then radiate through every cell in your body. Like an awakening of sorts.

Sound deeply crazy? That’s because it is.

We’re talking about love. Duh. We all want to give and receive love, though deep love jives to a different beat than the ordinary. Remember how Noah and Allie couldn’t forget their connection even after years of separation? How the flame still burned deeply in each of them despite the odds being stacked against them?

That’s deep love.

It might be a movie, but we too can discover and experience that kind of love in our lives. We just have to be open to it.

This is what Cambridge Community has to say about it: “Love is deep and profound. Love is not physical attraction: yes, you could be physically attracted to someone, but love goes beyond that. Love is not money, fame or fortune, or sex: love goes beyond that.”

Deep love is an experience.

It can be difficult to pinpoint a solid definition of deep love because it’s not going to look exactly the same for each couple. For instance, love existed in my first marriage. Though a part of me was aware that the love between us only scratched the surface of true love. I knew in my heart there existed a deeper kind of love, and that it eluded me within that relationship.

Deep love is actually the foundation of a relationship built on ecstatic authenticity, extreme intimacy and ecstasy. It is a special type of bond shared between two people with a special connection.

Intimacy expert Joanna Shakti gives a great explanation when she says: “It means that you embrace, express, and embody — all of who you are. It’s self-love at its finest. It means that you are who you are — warts and all, perfections and imperfections, strengths and weaknesses… and you willingly let another see you in all of that.”

By the time my second husband arrived on the scene, I knew that I was ready to invite deeper love into my life. I needed more from a partner. I craved to seen, accepted and understood by a mate; I needed deeper love and connection — emotional closeness.

In an article published by MBG Relationships, Josie Rosario nails the feeling: “Just like children, adults need to feel a secure attachment to another adult … that means it’s important for us to know that someone will be consistently available, especially in time of physical or emotional needs.”

It was everything that was lacking in my first marriage and everything that I knew I needed in order to thrive with a life partner.

More from Shakti:

“With soul love, you express the fullness and completeness of your soul’s unique expression in your human body, in this lifetime.”

Deep soul love makes romance come alive.

When you think about it, to know someone is in love with you is to know their soul. It is to know without a shadow of a doubt that they love you without always needing to hear the words â€œI love you.”

Here are a few more signs of deep love:

You cannot fake deep love because it demands high-level authenticity. Being emotionally intimate and honest with a partner means that you can talk to them about your innermost thoughts and trust them with your deepest secrets.

Emotional honesty in a connection is a feeling of alignment and intimacy between two people that goes beyond surface-level conversations, physical attraction, or even intellectual similarities. Instead, it feels as if you’re connecting on a deeper soul level — and most importantly, you feel secure connecting that deeply.

Healthy relationships aren’t built on lies and when you love someone deeply, you won’t want to break their trust. You’ll want to treasure it.

In the initial “love bubble” stage, everything your partner says and does is perfection; then we float back down to earth with the stark reminder of their humanity.

In other words — their flaws.

Deep love will love them regardless, if not more, for their beautiful imperfections and at times, annoying nuances.

My husband sometimes makes the comparison between me during our earlier years together to the woman I am today. He is right that I have changed. I might even drive him a little nutty with my ways and our differing opinions, though he doesn’t love me any less for it. In fact, his love for me has deepened.

Deep love matures and strengthens over time, and will always love you just the way you are.

Charity, graciousness and tenderness accompanies the patterns of deep love. When your beloved hurts, you hurt too. When their spirits soar, yours will take to the skies and follow suit. That is because deep love is pure in its intention and fierce in its support. It has no hidden agendas, self-interested or self-invested angles.

It is an easy flow of naturally wanting what is best for your mate. Their happiness is important to you. Even when it directly opposes your own wants and desires.

Deep love doesn’t cling, spy or distrust.

Example: From the very beginning, my husband always said that it would tear him apart if I ever chose to leave him, but that he would never stop me if that’s what I wanted to do. The reason? Because he is aware enough to understand that love doesn’t mean ownership and that we no right to control someone else’s life — married or not.

We all have own unique paths to follow, regardless of who we love or have loved. It’s a mindset that I have always admired about him.

Deep love does not claim or dictate conditions. It just is.

The most magical part of a truly special connection has to be in the ability to “just be” together. You don’t care what you’re doing with the other person just so long as you’re spending time with them.

On the flip side, you honor each other’s need for personal space and don’t feel threatened or jealous when the other person isn’t always within reach or available to catch an episode of Big Brother.

Loving someone deeply isn’t about demanding all of their time. It’s more about recognizing that its beneficial to give each other the time you both need to decompress and organize thoughts and feelings away from the world.

I crave my alone time. Solitude plays a crucial part in my life. Without it, I’d lose my mind for sure. It’s during my time of solitude that I can process and sort through stuff like relationships, mounting obstacles and/or issues, or unexpected interactions with others to gain peace of mind.

My extroverted partner respects that about me, and thankfully doesn’t feel the need to be in my pocket every other minute or keep an eagle on me and what I am doing at all times. As was the case with my first extremely possessive husband.

Deep love is togetherness and freedom all at the same time. It is the merging of souls and the omnipresent marriage between two people who love each other enough to be free in the expression of love — together and separately.

When truly honored, deep love will never fail. And, like Noah and Allie, it will stand the test of time. Always.

This is the story of how I lost myself and broke a heart. He didn’t deserve it. He loved me in armfuls. He loved me so hard and so fully that he took that love and continued to dump it onto me. Load by load. Until finally, I couldn’t move at all.

We met in college. We met after I had felt my heart ripped out of my chest by the boy I thought would be in my life forever. We met at my own apartment where our friends giggled off to the side, proud of their efforts to hook us up. He didn’t talk to me. He sat on the couch, curled into his ball-cap and his body that was too tall and took up too much space in our little living room.

It took alcohol to open him up. We found ourselves on the same side of a beer pong table. Then we found ourselves talking late into the night. Then we found ourselves in my bed, just sleeping, but still wrapped together in the hope for the future we both pictured.

He didn’t deserve it. He said “yes” to dating me despite the long-distance we were headed for. He bought a plane ticket and he downloaded Skype and we made it work. He wrote love letters. He found a pedestal for me to stand on and he pointed at me to all of his friends and family while saying, “There she is.”

There I was. I was the girl on the pedestal.

I was the girl buried under all the love. The shadow-side of all this smothering love was jealousy. Those same guy friends we shared would text me and he would pout and turn away from me.

“It’s a group text,” I would tell him. The truth. “They aren’t even talking to me.”

It didn’t matter. He threatened to dismantle the pedestal. He threatened to take back the love. The jealousy rose and rose and I was buried and buried until one night it all blew up.

We were at a gala. We wore our best suits and long dresses and we had the makeup and the photo shoots and everything was fine, just fine. I was shoving down all the stifling. I was handling it. Until I reached for the liquor.

I reached for the liquor and the feelings spilled over. I reached for the liquor and I found myself outside in the lobby on the event center with my tongue down the throat of an old fling. I reached for the liquor and I became the bulldozer that flattened the fuck out of that pedestal.

He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve to walk out into that lobby and see his girlfriend — his future, his hopes and dreams, his everything — pressed up against the wall by the exact guy he’d been worried about all along. He was right. He knew he was right. He had known it all along.

There are a cause and effect here. Who’s to blame? Me, ultimately. I am the one who cheated. I am the one who gets to wear the Scarlet A. But it was not me. The person with her mouth on that guy’s mouth was not a person that I knew. It was not something I ever fathomed doing.

I could have made a better choice. I could have ended the relationship months earlier. I could have searched in my soul and realized that this was wrong. That I deserved to be trusted. That I was a person who knew how to love someone well. I did not have to prove that I was not. I could have stepped off the pedestal, rather than abolish it.

But equally true is the idea that his lack of trust pushed me past the point of myself.

Did he cause me to cheat? Absolutely not. But would I even have had the idea to cheat were it not for the endless hours of conversation on the subject? I do not believe so.

We both failed. I failed the most. I fed into the trust issues that had already been lurking underneath the surface. I granted him the baggage that he was already leaning toward. I broke him.

He’s married now. He found the girl that would fit the image of the life he had picked out for himself. I got to move on and pursue my dreams. I got to be a writer. I got to travel the world. I got freedom, and he got his new pedestal.

Honoring what we know in our core will always lead us to the right decision. If I had acknowledged that the relationship was not working earlier on, we would both be better for it. I try to do this more now. I try to listen to that still, small voice that leads me to the right path. It’s the best I can do.

WRITTEN BY Gigi Love