".. He became a man in love again"

I saw this video and thought the overall message of it was something that we could all take a lesson from.



The key phrase in it, I believe, is, "By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again."

I have written before about how a way to get a certain behavior or become a certain kind of person is to act as if you already have that trait. Fake it til you make it.

I think, in a roundabout way, a similar message is shown here. As soon as he began to act as if he was in love (by taking his wife to shows, reading to her... all of the things that she loves), he found that he no longer had to act like he was in love - because he WAS in love again.

In the same way, if we pretend we are nice to strangers, kind, generous, patient (or any other virtue which we hope to possess), we will soon find out that we are no longer pretending, but we have become that person.

We are creatures of habit. Excellence, Aristole said, is a habit. If we struggle with patience, but then, in a sense, "pretend" that we are patient. we will become patient. We are what we repeatedly do.