Touching Back - A Surprisingly Important Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with touching back as a predictor of love success; and goes on to what not touching back does; sex love and touching back; some guidelines for touching back with love; more.

Touching Back As a Predictor of Love Success

Did you know that in a love relationship touching back is one of the best, single factors indicating a love relationship is satisfying and successful?

By ‘touching back’ we mean first receiving a loving touch then making a return action of loving touch.  This is important in all forms of love: friendship love, parent to child love, romantic love, etc.  It does not surprise most people to find out that more successful, satisfied, loving couples touch each other with love more than other not so successful and satisfied couples.

But a much better indicator of love success is reciprocal, return, touching actions.  At least that is what is reported in a recent edition of the magazine, Psychology Today, in a fairly comprehensive article on various aspects of the importance of touch.  However, there are some particulars concerning touching back after being touched which make touching back with love a little more involved than you might think.
Think of a person who loves you, softly caressing your cheek or of a person encircling their arms around you and giving you, what for you would be, the perfect hug.  Now think of a person who loves you reaching out to hold your hand or gently rubbing their fingers across your arm.
At this site, under the Subject Index heading “Touch”, consult the “50 Varieties of Love Touch” mini-love-lesson.

What Not Touching Back Does

Think of what you feel when you say hello to someone and they do not say hello back.  Think of what you feel if you stick your hand out to shake hands with someone and they don’t put their hand out to meet yours.  Many people feel a sense of rejection, or non-acceptance or having been judged very negatively.  In more subtle, subconscious ways it’s pretty much the same for many situations in which touching back could occur but it does not.

Not touching back when you have been touched lovingly can have a corrosive effect on your love relationships.  The indications are that the more you touch back and give reciprocal contact the more your love bonding together will occur.  And it appears the more you don’t touch back with love when physically touched with love the more likely it is that your love relationship may erode and come to an end.

One of the more powerful ways to send ‘a rejection message’ to someone who is trying to heal a wounded relationship is to angrily say to them “don’t touch me!”  And then of course there is ‘turning a cold shoulder’ which powerfully tells someone that you are not about to lovingly reconnect with them yet, if ever.

What Touching Back with Love Accomplishes

One understanding of love relationships goes like this: ‘for there to be a growing, real, healthy, love relationship love must be cycled’.  To do this you send out love messages that are taken in by another.  This by itself does not create an ongoing, love relationship.  For a ongoing and possibly lasting, love relationship, the person who takes in love must then send love back by love actions and messages which forms a first loop of a love cycle.  Then that process must continue and that cycling is what grows relationships stronger, bigger and better.

Tactile or touch love is one of the most essential ways for that to happen.  We now know that the neurochemical, oxytocin, which helps the process of living beings to feel emotionally bonded with each other, is created in the brain when tactile love is experienced, especially in the cyclically way just described.  Other healthy, positive brain chemistry changes, stimulated by loving touch, are also suspected to be occurring.  Being lovingly touched back is especially good for helping people not feel isolated but rather supported, safe and included.

One simple, but often surprisingly effective things I do in couples, parent/child and family therapy, is request people to experiment with loving touch and giving loving touch back.  I once had a couple do this little experiment of touching each other’s hands and touching back, focusing on doing it with love.  For over 10 years they had not touched each other in any friendly or positive way.  They hesitantly experimented with the ‘touching and touching back’ of each other’s hands.  They ended up weeping in each other’s arms, vowing to make up for all the time they had lost.

I have seen long estranged family members, parents and their adult children, and people in broken friendships get very similar results.  I’ve also seen people hold their arms wide open to receive another and that other refuse the offer, so the touching back experience did not occur and the relationship continued to dysfunction until we found other ways to improve it.

Touching Back and Loving Children

See this picture.  Two parents are talking with each other and each parent has their child standing next to them.  A very loud, big, powerful and angry sounding dog begins to bark in the background.  Both children grab their parents legs and squeeze up close.  One parent reaches down and pets their child’s head and caresses their shoulder reassuringly.  The other parent makes no reciprocal touch action in response to their child’s touch.  Which child is going to start crying?  Which child is more likely to soon be easily agitated, and then if not reassuringly touched, withdraw and possibly that night have a nightmare about big, mean, scary dogs?  The research on parent/child attachment pretty much shows the lovingly touched child will be more strong and secure, self-confident and more okay later in life.

There is an older school of thought that says ‘if you want to make your child independent and tough you don’t touch them, so they learn how to handle it on their own’.  Most of the results on this approach, that I am aware of, do not point to that being a healthful strategy. This school of thought was once so popular that the US government sent out pamphlets to new parents advising that they avoid giving touch to their children, which supposedly, was pampering and weakening their character.  They stopped this when real research showed opposite results to be occurring.

Touching Back Friends And Family

If a friend gives you a hug, or pats you on the back or makes some other form of physical contact with you which perhaps expresses friendship love, what do you do?  If other friends express their affection for one another physically do you feel embarrassed?  If a male and a female hug, or two females hug, or two males hug do you interpret it as sexual?  If people in public touch and touch back romantically, have you been programmed to identify it as ‘inappropriate’ or worse.  There is a suspicion that the people who lovingly touch each other and touch each other back cause the least trouble in the world.  There is some evidence to suggest that friends who do not touch each other with friendship love are less likely to form deep, lasting friendships.

Lots of people do not touch back their same-sex friends because they have a certain amount of homophobic fear.  This also occurs in some families.  A family-reconciliation counselor who works mostly with families that are having difficulties because one of the family members is homosexual gives this test.  She says, “Can you get to where you hug your homosexual family member just as easily and vigorously as you do any other family member?”  She then gets them to practice.  One thing to examine is this question, “What is the difference you make happen when a male and a female friend or family member touches you and you have a ‘touch them back’ opportunity?

Sex, Love and Touching Back

Some people seem to identify all touch with sex.  Some do not know how to differentiate love and sex, and when to show one and not the other.  If you get a loving touch that has no sexuality in it and then interpret it as having sexuality or being primarily sexual, the way you give a touch back may be relationally destructive and quite unwelcome.  If someone touches your shoulder, or elbow or perhaps your knee (all hard parts of your body) that touch is probably not sexual.  If they stroke your inner thigh it probably is sexual.  A kiss on your forehead usually is not at all the same thing as having someone else’s tongue in your mouth.  It is quite possible for loving touch to drift into including some sexuality.  What is important here is mutuality.  If both people who are lovingly touching each other mutually become sexually reciprocal, it may be pretty much okay.

Misreading the signs of reciprocity is where many people make mistakes.  It is important to remember, love is far more important than sex.  When sexual touching back occurs in response to what is primarily a love touch the love relationship can be harmed.  Therefore, usually it is very useful to go rather slowly into that which might become sexual.  Making sexuality overwhelm the expressions of love or push it aside can be problematic to a ‘just beginning’ or to an ‘ongoing’ love relationship.  Here’s a good thing to examine in yourself.  Study which of your actions are more likely to convey love as primary and which may convey sex to be of primary importance to you.  Also examine the question ‘do you interpret other’s touch actions as sexual when primarily they may be trying to convey love?

If two people are lovingly holding and caressing each other and it becomes more sexual, that can be a very good thing.  Here too, mutuality is important.  If one person is laying quite still while being lovingly and sexually touched, their actions may be interpreted as being too much like “a cold fish”.  Mutual touching back action is the cure for that.  As one client said, “One of the most wonderful things my husband and I do is curl up in each other’s arms and mutually hold and fondle each other’s genitals after having had sex.  Sometimes we go to sleep that way and it is incredibly intimate and special.”

There are people who just want to be touched and do not think about touching back sexually or with love.  There also are other people who are uncomfortable receiving touchback experiences.  They make it very hard for the cycle we’ve previously talked about to occur.  Generally the more two people are simultaneously lovingly and/or sexually touching, caressing, petting, stroking, etc. each other the better.  However, taking turns, where the giving and receiving and then giving of the touch back cycle can be fully concentrated upon and absorbed, also is a good option for many couples.

Some Guidelines For Touching Back with Love

∙    At first ‘Touchback’ in ways similar to how you were touched.  The same amount of pressure, energy, speed, the amount of area and the type of area touched on you will provide a guide for the first touching back.  Then if you receive additional touchback, in turn, you may wish to expand your own touching back.  If someone puts a hand on your leg while you’re riding in the car you might want to place your hand on their leg (as long as it doesn’t interfere with driving).  If someone reaches to hold your hand, give a similar hold back with a little squeeze, about like they squeezed your hand, as your hands came together.  Your touchback does not have to be a copy of theirs but if at first it is similar, the experience is more likely to go well.

∙    Talk over ways you like to be touched and ask about ways the other person likes to be touched back.  The more people who love each other ‘get really clear’ about how they want to be touched and how they like to give touch the better their touching relationship is likely to go.  The only way to get truly clear is with clear message sending and receiving.  Some people go for years getting hugs too tight or too soft, or too low or too high, or in some other way not just right for them just because they never clearly ask for what they truly want.

∙    Always be willing to experiment with new and different ways of touching back.  For instance, have you tried the ‘two hands on one’ return handshake, or the ‘love nudge’ at the movies, the ‘playing footsy’ under the table, the ‘pick them up and twirled around’ when they hug you response, or the ‘hold their face gently in your hands and kiss their eyelids’ return love action?

∙    Notice every time you are touched.  Some people do not, and without awareness there is little chance that they will, give a loving touch in return.  While you practice noticing, be careful about misinterpreting the touch you are receiving.  Is it conveying friendship love, sexuality, is it somehow controlling or otherwise negative, is it sympathetic, empathetic, sweet, saccharine, possessive, etc.?  There are many possibilities.  Your interpretation gives guidance to how you will give a return touch and whether or not it will be one of love.

Well, dear reader, at least for a while, are you going to give some thought to your love expressional, touching back actions?  Are you going to develop your touching back love skill more?

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
In regard to loving touch back actions, growing up what was modeled for you in your family and are you currently guided by that?

Related posts:

1. Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four
2. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
5. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill 

Love is Kind!

Mini-Love-Lesson  #238

Synopsis: Kindness as the most important, single factor in love relating; understanding kindness more completely; the how-to’s of communicating love’s kindness; six not usually recognized ways of kindness; the wide-ranging relational and health benefits of kindness; tough kindness and more.

The Most Important Single Factor

Kindness, felt and showed, is the most important, single factor in keeping a love relationship healthy and working.  This is the conclusion of multiple researchers in the area of love relationships.  A number of other factors also are extremely important but no other single factor quite compares to the significance of kindness.  This is especially true in adult-to-adult marriage type, love relationships.  Kindness also is of very high importance in parent-child love, family love, friendship love, healthy self-love, pet love and altruistic love.

The research that shows kindness as the single most important factor appears in studies of over 10,000 subjects in 33 countries.  To learn more, check out The Science of Happily Ever After by Dr. Ty Tashiro and the publications of the Gottman Institute.

In my own work with couples facing real love versus false love issues, kindness proved to be the most significant determinant for identifying authentic love from 12 forms of pseudo-love (see our book Real Love Versus False Love).

The Kindness Conclusion

If you want a love relationship to thrive, heal, grow, last, become empowered, be fulfilling or do any other good thing, do this.  Earnestly study, learn, practice, improve, model, enjoy and manifest loving kindness in every love relationship frequently.  Also consider teaching, promoting, advancing and spreading the knowledge about love’s kindness wherever you can.

Positive Relationship studies and research into healthy, real love show that love’s kindness can be learned, grown and improved starting at about 18 months of age and progressing throughout life.  Check out kindness reports and findings at the Positive Psychopedia website.

Kindness Is…

Being kind is having and showing a desire to help bring happiness, ease pain, make life more pleasant, help good feelings happen and improve emotional states and the well-being of those targeted for kindness treatment, which can include yourself.  Kindness includes being considerate, sympathetic, empathetic, friendly, generous, helpful, warm-hearted, compassionate, gracious, genial, tender and caring.

Behaviorally, kindness has to do with taking benevolent action.  This can include acts of assistance, positive surprise, service, rescue, sharing, risk, providing enjoyment and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.

Love’s Kindness Is…

Loving kindness is all of the above starting from heartfelt feelings of real lovingness for the target of one’s love (see “Definitions of Love”).  Absence of love’s kindness is acting out of only obligation, duty, guilt, propriety, etc.

Communicating Love-Filled Kindness

In face-to-face, personal interactions, kindness often is best expressionally (nonverbally) communicated by kind tones of voice (gentle, soft, caring but also with laughter sharing joy, etc.), kind facial expressions (smiles, looks of concern, etc.), kind gestural expressions (open arms, thumbs up, etc.) kind postural expression (leaning forward, bending toward, etc.) combined with tactile kindness (gentle hand touch, holding, tender hugs, etc.).  Active and empathetic good listening behaviors frequently are essential combined with affirmational words indicating care, love connectedness and copasetic feelings (see “Touching With and For Love – a Super Important Love Skill”, “Behaviors That Give Love -- The Basic Core Four”, "Listening with Love”).

Giving advice, presenting instruction, analyzing, offering solutions, etc. may show kindness and care if timed well but otherwise may interfere with the expression of loving kindness (see “Pro Love and Anti-Love Talking”).

Sometimes Unrecognized Behavioral Sets of Love’s Kindness

Arguably, loving kindness is neither well focused on or broadly comprehended, let alone comprehensively taught in many parts of the world.  Therefore, recognizing and identifying larger aspects for conveying love’s kindness is difficult for many.  Here are six to consider.

1. It is an act of loving kindness in a relationship to do non-burdening behaviors such as cleaning up after oneself, taking care of a shared environment and any other act which a loved one would be burdened with.

2. It is an act of loving kindness in a relationship to be inclusive by sharing one’s authentic or personal self including physical and emotional feelings, more private thoughts, decision-making processes and idiosyncratic behaviors.

3. It is an act of loving kindness in a relationship to show tolerance for the less pleasant aspects of another and avoid blaming, demeaning, criticizing, etc. those behaviors while being able to lovingly and democratically talk about them.

4. It is an act of loving kindness in a relationship to do actions of assistance, service, helpfulness etc. especially when done with an upbeat spirit and in times of high stress.

5. It is an act of hard to do loving kindness in a relationship to show openness and positive reception of contrary thoughts and expressions of feelings during conflicts and disagreements.

6. It is an act of powerful loving kindness in a relationship to show strong, positive affirmational and celebratory feelings about the achievements, victories and/or good fortune of a loved one -- more than but not excluding kindness shown for suffering.

Relational Benefits of Love Given Via Kindness

Words and actions demonstrating kindness, mutually given and received, in a love relationship of any type create and strengthen a sense of well-joined-togetherness as well, or better than, all other types of behavior so far studied.  Kindness, well showed, counters and helps heal the destructive effects of anti-love-toxic behaviors such as indifference, cruelty, abusive criticism, etc (see “Destroyers of Love – The 7 Big “D’s” Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships”).  Increasing Loving Kindness from adults to children has been shown to achieve significant improvements in academic performance and general cooperativeness along with improvements in digestion and inflammatory disease recovery.

Greater Loving Kindness in couple’s relationships has been correlated with improved mutual responsiveness, sensitivity, affection, positive regard, rapport, goodwill, cooperation, demonstrations of affection, sexuality, happiness, parenting and a host of other positives that make for healthy, happy couples.

Health Benefits of Loving Kindness

Kindness in love relationships has been shown to activate parts of the brain that process increases in positive mood, sense of connectedness, life satisfaction, optimism, serenity, sense of well-being and improvements in cardiovascular health.  For both the giver and the receiver, demonstrations of loving kindness have been related to better general physical health, decreased clogging of arteries and a whopping 44% decrease in premature death.

Regularly showing acts of kindness to others, especially in love relationships but also altruistically to strangers and mild acquaintances, is strongly associated with a vast number of indicators of good physical and mental health characteristics.  Programs for daily acts of kindness in an addiction’s treatment regimen significantly lowered relapse rates for example.

People measured as high in kindness, generosity and empathy demonstrate more activity in the posterior superior temporal cortex of the brain, which has been related to consideration and understanding others’ viewpoints, actions and positions, thus producing more successful interpersonal relating.

To learn more about all this, I recommend reading Why Kindness Is Good for You by Dr. David R. Hamilton and Survival of the Nicest by Dr. Stefan Klein.

Tough Kindness

Some people think that kindness shows weakness.  St. Paul’s second characteristic of real love, “Love is Kind” (which in Paul’s Greek is “cheresteuetai he agape”) is thought to contain the translation concept that love is continuously and steadfastly kind to those who are irritatingly difficult to be kind to.  In other words, Paul indicates it takes strength and toughness to do the sort of kindness he is describing.  Paul is right.  Sometimes it is a tougher but a greater kindness to say “no” than to say “yes”, to kindly deny a request than to grant it, etc.  That takes the strength and power of love-filled kindness, as does steadfast love, (no weakness or wimpiness found here).

One More Tiny Thing

If you happen to talk this “Love is Kind” lesson over with someone, and we hope you do, please consider mentioning this site and our free subscription service where anyone can automatically get our regular, wide ranging, mini-love-lessons for FREE.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question:  Who are you going to target for an act of kindness today and what are you going to do to perform that act?  How about tomorrow?  How about most days?

Love Is Patient

Mini-Love-Lesson #237

Synopsis: Loving Patience, what it is, its psychology, many benefits, disadvantages, the dynamics of impatience and ways to develop greater Loving Patience are very helpfully presented here starting with an ancient Indian teaching tale truth.

An Ancient and Crucial Truth!

To journey together in love, we have to walk at the slowest person’s pace.  That is what the Dakota medicine woman’s campfire tale taught one night before we guest scouts retired to our tepees when I was an impulsive youth.  This ancient, tribal wisdom is just as true today as it was then.  It echoes Paul’s first of 16 tenets on love – Love Is Patient.

In Paul’s ancient, biblical Greek it is “He agape makrothumia” which includes the concept that love is repeatedly forbearing of others and their frustrating ways.  Versions of this truth can be found throughout the teachings of various world religions and more positive philosophies.  “Impatience shows no love, “If patience is absent, real love may be absent too” and “With patience, love withers not” are examples of sundry, sage’s precepts I have encountered.

What Is Loving Patience?

Patience is the ability to calmly wait while enduring ongoing, negative stimuli.
Loving Patience is the ability to calmly wait while remaining loving (good-natured, kind, helpful, tolerant, accepting, non-judgmental, etc.) in the face of the slow, tedious, frustrating, annoying, aggravating, disappointing and/or unloving behaviors of others, or even of one’s self.

The Psychology of Patience

I think the best thing psychologists have discovered about patience is that it is obtainable by those who attempt to acquire it.  It also is teachable to trainable pets and children who have reached certain stages of development.  This mostly is accomplished by using positive rewards and reinforcements for incrementally increased waiting.

Studies suggests patience comes in three forms.  The first is Interpersonal Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with others who are unhappy, upset, angry or in other ways exhibiting negative and unwanted behavior.  The second can be called Severe Situational Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with life’s more arduous and ongoing hardships, setbacks and difficult situations.  The third can be termed Annoyance Patience.  This has to do with the ability to take-in-stride life’s more minor annoyances, irritations, delays, diversions, distractions, worries, hurts, hampering events, nuisances, harassments, vexations, etc..

To learn more about all this and the psychology of patience, I recommend checking out the Association for Psychological Science (APS) reports on patience studies.

All three types of patience have to do with what is sometimes called owning one’s power and not giving it away, being proactive more than reactive, and remaining inner and self-directed instead of other and outer directed.  Those, in turn, have a great deal to do with healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions”).

The Many Benefits of Loving Patience

Practicing Loving Patience is an immense help to the health, well-being, improvement and fulfillment of love relationships of every type.  Perhaps that is why Paul put it first in his list of real love’s characteristics.

In a love relationship, practicing patience can build empathy and that, in turn, decreases interpersonal hassles while communicating acceptance and non-judgmentalism of a loved one or one’s self.  Patience often leads to long-range understanding and a fuller comprehension of what to do about disharmony.  Plus, it aids in the development of general positivity.  Patience, well demonstrated, helps block other’s misinterpreting you as angry or upset at them when you actually are being only concentrated, serious, worried, concerned, etc.

Showing loving patience helps others identify you as a person not to fear, avoid, manipulate or keep secrets from.  Therefore, Loving Patience assists people to be authentic and more fully self disclosing in a love relationship.

Demonstrating impatience can greatly harm and even ruin what would otherwise be loving and bonding, interpersonal, good experiences.  Repeated demonstrations of impatience may increasingly turn people against you, exclude you, or subconsciously passive/aggressively attack you.

Showing love through patience when someone is not functioning as you would wish may take longer and reach fulfillment later than you expected.  However that assists in developing higher and greater, mutual, team functioning and achievement along with increased emotional closeness, plus the likelihood of return patience when you need it.

Loving Patience is often wonderful for avoiding intolerant and destructive sudden reactions, incomplete understandings, wrong conclusions, mistaken impressions and impulsive anti-loving habit behaviors.  In every type of love relationship, Loving Patience is much more likely to lead to more constructive, accurate, comprehensive and harmonious interactions than is impatience.

For all concerned, having Loving Patience is far more healthy than impatience and its accompanying stress illness dangers.  Patient people usually live healthier, longer and happier than impatient people.  Most of all, they tend to have much better and longer, lasting, love relationships.  To learn more about love and health, check out Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

The Dynamics of Impatience

In interpersonal impatience, one person wants one or more other people to change to operating at their own rate and/or in their manner of behaving.  It is, therefore, an imposition of one’s own standards on another.  Acting impatient often sends a message of “do things my way, not yours”.  It also can be a communication of “you’re operating in a way that is inferior to mine” and “my ways are more important than yours”.  Relationally, it frequently is disharmonious and can have a strong emotional divisive effect.  None of this is loving, democratic or as pragmatic as simply lovingly requesting someone to change something more to your liking, such as “hurry up a bit please”, “I’d like you to try doing something in an alternate way if that’s okay with you”.

Impatience often has a short-term gain and long-term loss, interpersonal dynamic.  If being impatient gets other people to do what you want more immediately, that is the short-term gain.  If it makes them resent you and act against you when they can, that is the greater and longer-term loss.

The Disadvantages of Patience

Like all things human, even Loving Patience is not perfect.  Having patience at the wrong time or for too long may lead to missed opportunities, too slow a reaction to a crisis and being misidentified as uncaring, indecisive and unassertive.  Worst of all, you may, through patience, accidentally reward and, therefore, reinforce some bad behavior.  Patient people also can be more targeted for deception and manipulation by the sociopathic.

How to Develop Greater Loving Patience

Learning to calm yourself while waiting longer and longer is the essence of practicing and developing patience.  Learning to make patience loving, requires loving thinking and loving self-talk while you practice the behavior of positive waiting.  Positive waiting requires breathing slowly and deeply, purposefully relaxing tense muscles as you also focus on being loving to yourself and whoever else is involved (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”).

If worry or fear has triggered impatience, reassuring self-talk and distraction actions usually are helpful.  Becoming more mindful and self-aware of what you let trigger your impatience also can be quite useful.  Purposefully spotting when, where and why you are impatient and choosing those times to practice more Loving Patience is often hard but necessary.

Talking all this over with those you love (children included) to see if they will reveal their deeper feelings when you are both patient and impatient with them usually helps tremendously.  Remembering that two of the 12 major ways to demonstrate love are supported by developing patience.  Those two are Toleration Love and Self-Disclosure Love.  For more on this, check out Chapter 5 (How Do We Grow Intimate Love) in Recovering Love by yours truly.

One More Thing

Talking all this over with others can help you and them implant the knowledge and develop it further.  When you do that, we would like it if you would mentioned this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If we don’t lovingly ask our loved ones to be more patient with us when we desire that, how can we expect them to ever lovingly respond?

Intimacy Creation - A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers intimacy ignorance; the two major kinds of intimacy; sexual intimacy; emotional intimacy; the cultural complications of intimacy; and then gives you a dozen ways to work toward creating and enhancing emotional intimacy in your own, personal life.

Intimacy Ignorance

Can you say “My most intimate experiences are among the very best experiences of my life!”?  Can you say “The intimacy I share with those I love most provides me with my most valued, special feelings!”?  Can you say “Intimacy with a loved one has been a supreme and sublime, love experience like no other!!”?  Can you say “I know very well how to go about creating intimacy and intimacy experiences with those I love!”?

“She told me we just were not intimate enough, often enough.  At first I thought she meant sex but that turned out to be quite wrong.  So what does she mean?  How in the world do I go about whatever this intimacy thing is?”

Often I hear this sort of question when I’m doing relationship counseling or coaching with men.  However, there are related statements I get from females. Their statements often are something like “Isn’t he just supposed to know how to be intimate if he loves me?  If he hasn’t learned how to be intimate by now doesn’t that mean something’s wrong with him and our relationship can’t work?  If I have to tell him how to be intimate won’t that spoil it? ”

Sometimes I get a female’s statement like this: “I don’t know how to tell him what I mean by intimacy.  He is willing to learn but I only know it when I feel it, but I can’t explain how to get there.  Of course, there are females who make statements more like the males and males who make statements more like the females, so it’s not strictly a gender thing.

Another kind of statement I sometimes get in counseling concerning intimacy goes like this: “Our sex just isn’t very intimate.” Or sometimes, “ When we feel really intimate with each other it just never turns into anything sexual, and I want it to be sexual at least sometimes but we don’t know how to make that happen.”.

Two Kinds of Intimacy

I like to suggest that the first thing to get clear about is that there are two main types of intimacy – emotional and sexual.  They go well together but also they can be confused with one another.  When this confusion occurs people frequently end up having difficult problems with each other.  It also is quite important to understand that people can have sex without emotional intimacy just as easily as they can have emotional intimacy without sex.

Sexual Intimacy

Sexual intimacy can be said to occur when people closely and personally experience each other’s activated and shared sexuality.  This can occur via sight, sound, touch, scent, taste and kinetics.  It also can occur via shared sexual thoughts and feelings, well shown and expressed physically and emotionally.

Sexual Intimacy often involves disclosing one’s sexual self to another, accompanied by close and extensive body exploration, and the sharing and showing of erotic responses to erotic stimuli.  Sexual Intimacy may or may not involve sexual intercourse and orgasm but it often does.  Some people do not seem to be able to do sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy, while others do so rather easily.

Still others mix and separate the two, at will, depending on who is involved and their own, individual, love situation.  Sometimes the words intimacy or sexual intimacy are used to merely mean sexual intercourse or that some other form of sexual action has occurred.  This, I suggest, is a misuse and more misleading way of using these words.

Emotional Intimacy

Emotional intimacy for most people is a little harder to identify and define.  Emotional intimacy can be said to occur when someone feels an emotional, close, personal contact and connection with another.  This usually is accompanied with feelings of warm, private affection and positive regard, and not infrequently with very strong, personal love of one type or another.

Emotional intimacy can be marked by a depth and breadth of knowledge of another, and a sense of emotional interweaving with the inner core or essential nature of another’s innermost, true self.  It is most likely to occur when strong emotions are felt and shared.  It can come with close, physical, mental, social and emotional association.

Occasionally it brings on a sense of two or more beings, at least temporarily, having a fusion of their core spirits and real personalities.  Emotional intimacy frequently leads to increased love bonding, sometimes accompanied by a sense of awe and of being spiritually understood and connected.  Recent evidence suggests that when emotional intimacy occurs there are strong, healthful and perhaps fairly rare neurochemical processes occurring in the limbic system of the brain.

Cultural Complications

In the larger, Western world, growing, mega-culture it seems like not a lot of people learn what emotional intimacy is, let alone how to create it.  Even fewer appear to learn how to maintain and grow intimacy in ongoing relationships.  In our more ‘macho’ societies emotional intimacy often is regarded by males as feminine and, thereafter, disregarded, ignored and avoided.

It’s interesting that in some societal spheres things seen as feminine are put on an ‘idealized pedestal’ in principle but devalued and psychologically trashed in actuality.  Then there are those people who fake intimacy as just a way to gain something on their hidden agenda list like money, sex, marriage, etc.

After attainment of the hidden motive, the intimacy actions disappear.  This seems to occur particularly often in cultures and societal groups oriented primarily to commercialism, consumerism, power, status attainment, etc. rather than love, cooperation, mutuality and having a deeper quality of life.

However, all over the world there are people longing and striving for intimate love connections, intimate romance, emotionally intimate sex, and relationships filled with intimate emotional intercourse.  All over the world there is the question “How do you go about being emotionally intimate?”.  It would seem most people have very few, clear answers.  The good news is you can learn how to enhance and grow your intimacy-making skills and, thereby, strengthen and improve your love relationships.

A Dozen Ways to Work Toward Creating and Enhancing Emotional Intimacy

1.    Get Close  As you relate to someone slowly get physically closer and closer to them if the relating seems to be going well.  The closer you get physically the more likely you are to be able to be emotionally intimate.  When close make lots of eye contact.

2.    Talk Quietly  Intimate, personal talk is low-voiced, quiet talk, at least at first.  Shouting with shared exuberance may come later but until it does almost whispering does best.

3.    Talk Emotions  Learn and use the many terms for emotions.  Identify emotional feelings, ask about emotional feelings, share emotional feelings, and never leave emotional feelings out.

4.    Listen Well  Always be able to repeat back, nearly verbatim, what a loved one or an important other says to you.  Always be able to label, describe, or ask about the emotions involved in what you heard.

5.    Touch Carefully  First, softly touch the hard parts like shoulders, elbows, wrists, etc.  And later softer parts. At first, hug gently but then firmly and strongly.

6.    Reveal Private Feelings  Going ‘psychologically naked’, more and more, is essential for intimacy development.  Revealing the emotions you have and sometimes the physical feelings, along with behaviors and thoughts, history, hopes, etc. is required.

7.    Respect and Accept Revelations and Sharings  Usually with kindness and without shock judgment or criticism receive what others intimately share and reveal.

8.    Expressionally Communicate Lots  Facial expression, tonal expression, gestural expression, and postural expression often are more important than verbal expressions.

9.    Show Care  Have real care for what another is experiencing and show it, be it happiness, or agony, or the most mundane of things.

10.    Adventure Together Emotionally  Create and seek out experiences you can jointly experience together that are likely to engender emotions be they strong, delicate, tender, inspiring, surprising, reassuring, intense, serene, ecstatic, moving or anything else.

11.    Take and Make Time  Make and take the time it takes to have emotional intimacy and don’t rush it.

12.    Empathize Frequently  Emotional intimacy takes joining with another by empathetically and sometimes passionately sharing their pains, and pleasures and also their mediocre times.  Avoid becoming emotionally distant, distracted, absent or frequently attitudinally against those you would love and be emotionally intimate with.

Hopefully these 12 points will help you grow your intimacy-making love skills. Of course, there’s lots more to learn so probably you will need to venture into this topic more.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you fantasize and then analyze what would be a wonderfully, emotionally, intimate experience for you and your most beloved?

Related posts:

1. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
2. Touching Back – A Surprisingly Important Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
5. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill 

Do You Start and Part with Love?

How do you do ‘Hi’s’ and ‘Bye’s’ with those you love?   To keep a love relationship healthy it is best if every (yes every) ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ experience includes at least a brief love connecting and sharing experience.  Every “Hello, I’m home” event is best done with a hug, a pat, a caress, a nuzzle or a kiss.  Going past each other to whatever you want to get to next without any expression of connecting love can be detrimental to your love relationships.  Likewise, every “So long” is better done with similar brief expressions of love.

In some relationships the lack of such love when parting can lead to hours of vague anxiety, worrying “is anything wrong”.  Starting off time together with a little demonstration of love means that the following time is more likely to go well.  Ending a time together with expressed and received love actions makes your next encounter more likely to be a bit sooner, a bit better and a bit more wanted.  People who start and part with love are seen as having better attitudes, better cooperation likelihood, less stress and a host of other small but significant benefits.

Many couples and many families I see in counseling for reasons of deteriorating relationships have not been greeting each other or saying goodbye to each other with any love at all.  Sometimes there is no greeting or saying goodbye what so ever.  Often when I get them to experiment with a little ‘start and part’ love action improvement begins.  This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to start toward the repair, or enhancement, of a love relationship.  Notice that this is the way most pet dogs (who were put in the world to teach us love according to an old Indian legend) do it.  Actually many apparently love- connected mammals greet and part with what looks like shows of affection.  So maybe love starting and parting is natural.

It is not only failing love relationships that often lack this love expression ‘start and part’ behavior. ‘Blah’ and ‘in a rut’ stagnant, and semi-functional relationships frequently exhibit this lack of love ‘start and part’ way of doing things.  So, I would like to suggest you check out how well your love shows in ‘start and part’ situations.  Might you do well to greet your spouse, children, friends, and maybe even yourself with an improved, more love demonstrative ‘start and part’ set of actions?  Would you like to dedicate yourself to starting every encounter with a brief but sincere show of love?

Be sure to do that before you try to take care of anything else each time you encounter a loved one even if you have been away from them only for a brief amount of time.  When coming together after work, going to the store , visiting with others, etc. making some action to lovingly touch, saying words of love followed by asking “How are you feeling” delivered with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions are usual ways to create a pleasant and caring environment.

Coming in from outside while saying a term of endearment like “Hello, Sweetheart”, giving a good morning kiss upon waking, smiling at first sight of one another, and adding a caress or pat are also quite helpful.  Departing with similar sentiments and behaviors works in much the same way.  If you already do these sort of things ask yourself how can you improve?  If you don’t already do this sort of ‘start and part’ love might you want to dedicate yourself to making a plan to do so, and enacting it?

If when coming together you usually begin with some sort of practical ‘what’s to be done’ talk, or ‘what has been done’ inquiry a sense of low grade aggravation is likely to grow.  If the last thing said on departure is something like “Remember to mail the letter, pickup the cleaning, do your homework”, etc. that person’s return to you is less likely to be happy.

If the last thing said is a message of love the reverse is true.  Get the practical messages said but end with an expression of love.  If the first thing said upon coming together is “Did you remember to pay the bills, do your assignment, call so-and-so”, etc. a small dose of subconscious emotional abrasion may occur.  That abrasion experience could later lead to growing difficulty, or at least to fairly strong disappointment.  If instead a happy “Hello, darling, it’s so good to be with you”, or something like that, starts a new encounter with each other it is much more likely to go smoothly.  Usually it only takes 20 seconds or less to start or part lovingly.  The return on your loving effort can yield hours of happier time together.  Of course you can take longer than 20 seconds and do it even better if you want to.

If you are the recipient of loving ‘start and part’ behaviors do you soak them up, reciprocate in kind, and cycle the love being offered?  Ignoring, or quickly moving away from such tokens of love deprives yourself and your loved one from the healthy, positive effects of these small important actions.  Unfortunately, in our fast paced, often goal oriented and impersonal daily lives there is an insufficiency of loving behaviors, so savoring those love actions that do come your way can enrich your life.

A good love relationship takes good love teamwork.  Good teamwork love takes good sending and good receiving.  Being a good receiver and an equal participant when a loved one initiates a ‘start or part’ love action helps the process of good teamwork love quite a lot.  So, if a love ‘start or part’ action comes your way take it in and send some back.

People sometimes say to me things like, “Dr. Cookerly, doesn’t starting and parting with love get to be an empty habit or meaningless activity”?  It can if you let it but it doesn’t have to.  Be creative!  Also all around the world friendly, affectionate greeting and parting rituals make life work better.  It’s healthy for those in all loving relationships to develop their own, informal love rituals.  If you get a sense that your rituals are beginning to feel empty or meaningless that might be a message from your inner wisdom-filled subconscious to do them better.

So, here’s a simple challenge.  Make an experimental ‘start and part’ with more behaviors of love action plan, and carry it out.  Then see if you and those you care about like the results.

As always – grow in love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love

Trust and Mistrust in Love

Synopsis: The case of the nude photos and what’s best to learn from it; a terrible, fascinating truth about romantic-love trust; and a self-strengthening approach to building great, dependable, love trust; more.

The Case of the Nude Photos

“I’m in shock and don’t know which way to turn.  I just discovered nude photos of my teenage daughter on a phone I didn’t know my husband had.

 “Horrible scenarios are running through my head.  Are my husband and daughter involved in incest?  I can’t bear to think about it.  Should I call the police, see a lawyer, file for divorce?  Can I have both of them committed to a psych ward?  Is my husband a sex addict, or is my daughter?  Is everything I believed about my marriage a lie?  Am I one of those parents who doesn’t know what’s really going on with their kids?   I don’t trust anybody or anything any more.  Am I going crazy?  Is nothing the way I thought it was?  Is there anything or anyone I can trust?  Will I ever trust anybody again?”

As you can see Helen was having a huge ‘trust crisis’.  Up to the discovery of a strange iPhone in her husband’s briefcase, life had seemed pretty much normal and OK.  Her adolescent daughter had been a little rebellious but nothing serious seemed to be going on, until now.  Lately her husband had been kind of distant emotionally but also lately his business work-load had been extra heavy.  She, herself, had been stressed with projects demanding overtime at her office but about that there was ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.  Since her horrified discovery life was all panic and gut-wrenching disaster.  Her whole family seemed to be descending into nightmarish chaos – or so it seemed.

Helen said she couldn’t face all this alone so with some help she quickly was able to arrange for her husband and daughter to meet with her and a talented therapist intern of mine that evening in an emergency family counseling session.  She came in looking pale and shaking and her husband and daughter entered looking quite worried.  With fear and trepidation Helen confronted them with the sequence of events that had lead her to the discovery of the nude photos.  She got excellent support, clarification, interpretation, and help with sufficiency and accuracy from my intern.

Slowly the truth emerged and something resembling normalcy began to return.  It was revealed that Kendra, Helen’s teenage daughter, had been taking sexy, nude photos of herself and had been sending them to her boyfriend and her closest girlfriends, who were doing the same thing, like so many other kids at her school.  She explained it was quite a fad.  Bill, Helen’s husband, caught Kendra doing this and confiscated her phone.  He said he didn’t want to tell Helen about this until Helen’s big project at work was over.

Furthermore, Kendra had gotten him to promise that he and she would handle it because they thought Helen tended to over-react.  Kendra admitted she’d sort of manipulated her father into that promise.  Kendra also said she wouldn’t be doing any of this again, especially because her best girlfriend had gotten into really big trouble over this and was being sent away somewhere and she didn’t want that to happen to her.

After a lot of anguished bewilderment, confusion, anger mixed with relief and disappointment this family began to show each other love.  Soon they were able to agree that they should and could be a lot more self-disclosing to one another.  Helen agreed to work on not being so prone to panic, and Bill and Kendra agreed not to keep secrets from Helen.  They all agreed they would aspire to greater, loving communication of their important truths to each other, no matter what it was about, and they set out to do just that.  They made a ‘no big secrets contact’ with each other and that seemed to help a lot.  They further agreed that trust was built on ‘truth mixed with love’ and they made that their family goal.

What do you suppose you would do if you made a discovery similar to Helen’s?  Would your trust in your loved ones be shaken?  Would you lose trust in your own judgment?  Would you do as well as they did in patching things up and recovering from this episode?

Let me suggest the best thing to learn from this example is when experiencing strong mistrust do not jump to conclusions.  Quick conclusions are your enemy.  I can’t tell you how many love relationship problems I have helped people get through that were started by, or made much worse by, people drawing premature, erroneous conclusions.  Related to this is a second, huge, common, trust issue problem.  It’s the problem of keeping secrets.  So many mistrust calamities could have been avoided had the people involved been able to get their truth out in the open and discuss it, even if it hurt.  In successful, love relationships it takes sharing truth and that builds trust.  Hiding, avoiding, denial, distortions and mis-representations of the truth, more often than not, work against ‘trust building’ even when they are done for well-meaning reasons.

Trust Issues and Their Surprising Complications

Trust and mistrust issues are among the biggest problems in love relationships.  Do I trust you to be faithful?  Do I trust myself to remain faithful?  Can I love you and not trust you?  If I forgive you does it mean I have to trust you?  Do I trust myself to keep being loving no matter what?  Do I trust myself to have enough ‘attraction power’ to hold you or should I secretly spy and pry into your life to make sure you’re not betraying me?  Do I trust you not to turn into my mother, or my father?  Do I trust us enough to make a go of it?  Do I trust that our love can be strong enough to hold us together and survive what the world throws at us?   Do I trust in trusting?  Yes, there are great many trust issues that many people give no thought to until they have occasion to experience very upsetting mistrust.

It’s not only with lovers and spouses that we have trust issues.  Shall I trust my kids do what I have taught them?  Should I trust myself to be a good parent?  Can I trust that my family will support me in a crisis?  Will my avowed, true friends be there for me when I need them?  Will I come through for them when they call on me in crisis?  With every love relationship there can be heavy-duty trust challenges.  So, let’s ask this question.  How does healthy, real love guide us in facing all these trust issues?

Understanding Trust Itself

To answer the above questions let’s first look at a few ways trust is understood to work. Here’s a concept about how trust operates considered to be a little radical.  It goes like this:
All smart trust is really self-trust.  There’s no such thing as trusting other people.  There’s only trusting yourself to handle what others may send your way.  If you do not unconsciously, sufficiently trust your own ability to handle what someone else may bring to your life then you consciously will not trust them.  All trust and mistrust is projected self-trust or the lack there of.  The highly self-trusting find it easier to forgive and try again, while those who have low self-trust don’t.  It’s hard for them to forgive because they secretly know they can’t handle what might be done to them, or so goes this understanding of trust dynamics.  There is some research to support this kind of thinking.

Those who come to re-trust a person after betrayal tend to trust their own ability to handle things well even if they are betrayed again. The more ego-weak a person is the less they trust in others.  This apparently is true of many people, but not all.  Those who have a high self-trust tend to either easily choose to trust or not trust, but they seldom spend much time in uneasy, anxious mistrust of others.  There also is some research which suggests that the most highly mistrusting people are not to be trusted.  The naïve and innocent also give trust too easily.  And the frequently traumatized, abused and misused tend to place little trust in anyone.

Another viewpoint on trust goes like this.  All trust is a gamble and should be seen as such.  In love when we trust someone we are gambling on the person we love and on the love in the relationship.  Intelligent people know that some of these love-gambles will pay off and some will not.  Some people gamble on love and win enormously and some lose enormously.  In gambling the saying goes “if you can’t afford to lose, don’t bet”.  However, in love and other great life experiences the truth is "you can’t afford not to gamble".  Consider the old wisdom teaching “it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”.  For most people that’s probably true.

Consider this concept.  The adventures of love bring people their biggest and most meaningful life experiences, even when they don’t win at love.  Some think nothing defines or develops a person so much as their love relationships.  However, those love relationships take great gambles of trust, or they are far too limited.  Whether it be love of a spouse, a child, a family, a people, a nation, a cause or a deity, to win big takes gambling on trust big.

There are important problems and exceptions to the above thinking.  Quite sadly there are far too many people who make the gamble of love with someone who will literally destroy them one way or another.  So many murders and terrible abuse tragedies are stories of love gone wrong.  So many people who die of a substance addiction were started on that addiction path by way of a poor or false-love relationship.  So many suicides, heart attacks, strokes and other sudden health failures occur after the loss of a love.

All too frequently the trust-gamble of love poorly chosen results in tragedy.  The good news is that people who learn about love and its workings make much better gambles of trust.  They, therefore, win at love more often and far bigger.  Another good news factor is that the vast majority of people win more than they lose when they gamble on love.

Romantic love, or mate or spouse love probably is the most problematic when it comes to trust issues.  Pet love and grandparent’s love of grandchildren probably are the types of love with the fewest, trust foul-ups and the most, trust related, good results.  Still every kind of love relationship can have trust problems.  Therefore, every love relationship deserves some thinking and probably talking about trust issues.

Mistrust In Love

One view of mistrust holds that the more untrustworthy you are the more you will not trust the people you love and who you hope love you.  If you are highly prone to deception you will suspect others are likewise deceptive.  Suspicion and mistrust can ruin an otherwise good love relationship.  Here’s what Marcia said, “You tapped my phone, secretly went through my things, had me followed, read my diary when I ask you not to, and now you’re asking me to trust you.  Not a chance!  I thought we had a good thing going.  Now I see how sneaky you are.  If you can’t trust me I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.  We are through, and that’s final!”  Love often demands that we gamble ‘trust in another’ and if instead we rely too much on mistrust, and the behaviors that mistrust leads to, a love relationship can become poisoned.

Romantic Love and Trust

In romantic love there is a terrible, fascinating truth.  The more we don’t trust our own worth, value, love-ability and attraction power the more we can become insecure.  The more we are insecure the more we subconsciously believe someone better than ourselves will come along and be more desirable than we are.  That "more desirable person" will steal our loved-one away from us and we will be abandoned, alone and unloved.  Therefore, we must mistrust and guard against our loved-one looking at other attractive people, talking to them, being around them without our supervision, looking at images of attractive sexy others, etc. and generally we must keep our loved-ones ‘on a short leash’ to keep them to ourselves.

That indicates we might feel like our loved-ones are our property like a dog, or a slave, who is going to run away.  With this kind of thinking any suspicious involvement with another must be punished severely and the leash shortened.  Usually the final result of the ‘short leash approach’ is to drive our loved ones away and possibly into the arms of someone better than us.  Mistrust frequently is, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Self-Strengthening Approach to Building Love Trust

The best way to build trust is to become ‘psychologically big and strong’ enough to handle being very truthful in a loving way.  To be big in healthy self-love so as to be able to own up to one’s mistakes and problematic behavior is a highly desirable part of the trust-building process.  It also is important to become big and strong enough psychologically, and especially emotionally, so as not to be destroyed or irreparably harmed when a loved one disappoints, betrays or otherwise dishonestly deals with you.

Furthermore, it is quite important to grow big enough to maturely and magnanimously handle the truth when it comes your way, no matter how much it hurts, bothers or scares you.  Trust is built on truth-telling, truth-hearing, truth-sharing and generally dealing from strength.  Mistrust is built on weakness, deception, inability to accept and compassionately, lovingly deal with truth.  So, build your psychological strengths, especially those having to do with love and you will be able to handle your trust challenges far better.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Are you as love trustworthy as you want the people you love to be?

Gratitude As a Love Skill

Synopsis: Are you a “thanking” person, good at the love skill of gratitude?; how to develop gratitude awareness; how gratitude improves your physical, mental and relationship health; how to grow your gratitude love skill, and healthy, real love via gratitude.

Are You a ‘Thanking’ Person?

A month after our most loving and appreciative guests left we were still finding little Post-it notes secreted away in different hiding places telling us about different things our guests were grateful for during their stay with us.  Each note came as a tangible, little, friendship-love surprise gently touching our hearts.  It endeared them to us even more than they already were.

This is an example of highly love-skilled people who found a special way to express their gratitude.  True thankfulness grows out of gratitude.  Gratitude, let me suggest, is a highly worthy sub-classification of love behaviors related to the larger major category of ‘affirmational love’.  To have gratitude one must have awareness of what one can be grateful about.  This takes a mind-set focused on the good things coming one’s way.  Then one must have at least a minimum amount of healthy self-love and confidence to risk showing appreciation.

It is amazing how many people fear that if they show their gratitude it will be unwanted, or they fear they will do an inadequate job of showing gratitude.  Some fear their way of showing gratitude will be regarded as silly or somehow inferior and, therefore, they stop themselves from the full expression of their gratitude.  Some people think that their show of gratitude must be done in some large and impressive way and if that can’t be accomplished they don’t show it at all.  Notice in the above example of the Post-it notes the people doing this could have thought such notes might be annoying or regarded as cheap or insignificant.  I suppose people poor at ‘receptional love’ indeed might be so inclined.  I hope you’re not among them, but if you are remember help is available here and at other love-focused places.

Gratitude Awareness

Let me suggest you have more to be grateful for than you will ever be able to be aware of, let alone give thanks for.  To start with, you were born as a great, amazing bundle of miracles.  Even a rock is miraculous but you are so incredibly more than a rock.  Be grateful!  When you were born you were loved enough to keep you alive.  Many are not and they die of marasmus and other ‘failure to thrive’ diseases of infancy.  Be grateful!  Then you began the incredible, miraculous process of maturing and discovering the incredibly miraculous world you were born into.  Some who are born cannot do that, so be grateful!  You were at least minimally loved, laughed with, played with, and taught something of the world.  Be grateful!  You also were able to learn on your own and that learning ability was a gift some do not have.  Be grateful!

Then there were the people of your life, some of whom were not so great.  Others, however, probably influenced and guided you better than you are aware of.  If they had not you never would have learned to read what you are reading now, nor would you be able to think about it as well as you can, and probably you wouldn’t be able to grow from what you’re thinking as well as you can.  Be grateful!

Gratitude Improves Your Health

Recent research shows that those people who actively feel and show gratitude improve their physical health in a number of ways as they do so.  Mental health also is advanced by loving gratitude which triggers neurochemical improvements in our brains.  Longevity also has been linked to gratitude and, as might be expected, those who are good at gratitude are measured as having significantly better interpersonal relationships.  Those who are poor at gratitude are measured as less physically, mentally, emotionally and relationally healthy and they live shorter lives on average.

Undervalued Gratitude

There are dangers to not feeling, showing and receiving expressions of gratitude.  Some people shrug off showing gratitude as a waste of time and an unnecessary action.  There are those who are embarrassed when gratitude or thanks is shown to them.  Sometimes that’s because they don’t quite know how to receive it or reply but that can be learned.  Then there are the people who have been trained to quickly dismiss expressions of gratitude so as not to seem egotistical.  This may discount the gratitude-giver which might harm the relationship with that person.

There are those who don’t show gratitude for egocentric reasons, believing themselves to be somehow superior rather than just different from others.  Some overly power-oriented people think showing gratitude demonstrates weakness.  That can lead to fear and away from love.  Then there are those who are suspicious of gratitude, thinking it is merely a manipulation setting them up for some sort of misuse.  All of these people who undervalue gratitude miss out on the health benefits mentioned above and on the very real joy that results from truly being grateful.

One of the more interesting findings in gratitude research has to do with people becoming thankful for something, and then showing that gratitude which then appeared to open the door to solving a life problem they were having.  Research also has shown people good at gratitude get through hard times easier than others.

Did you know that Gratitude Groups are being experimented with in some prisons, nursing homes and certain schools.  Groups discussing what they have gratitude for and how they will demonstrate that gratitude are producing a variety of surprising, positive results.  Gratitude exercises in couple’s love education classes and workshops are resulting in couples more deeply bonding with each other.  Guided gratitude facilitation in family love education retreats and seminars show similar results for whole families.

How to Grow Your Gratitude

Of the people who have influenced your life who are you most grateful for?  For each decade you have lived can you think of some people you can genuinely say you were quite fortunate to have had in your life?  Of the people who are in your life now who most merits you showing gratitude to.  Are there people in your past who have passed away to whom you wish you had shown more gratitude?  Who are the people you would most enjoy showing gratitude to?  Who are the people who would be most surprised by you showing gratitude to them?  Perhaps you will want to spend some time thinking about these questions and you may want to make some lists.

Suppose you were to give some of the people you just thought of a call, or send them a note, or visit them expressing your gratitude for what they have meant in your life.  Then again you might do it in an anonymous way.  It is good to feel gratitude and that does you healthful good but expressing it may be even better.  The more you focus on and feel gratitude and then express it the more you are likely to grow your gratitude-giving competence as one of your love skills.

Love Via Gratitude

How soon can you genuinely thank somebody for something?  The sooner the better.  How soon will you pay attention to something someone has done for you, or that benefits someone you care about, and lovingly tell them of your gratitude?  As you encounter people today and tomorrow will you make yourself aware of at least some small thing they do that you can appreciate.  Will you then be at least a little grateful.  Some think our world leads us to notice the things we don’t like more than the things we can like.  Many people’s families or a sub-society they grew up in taught them mostly about griping, complaining, whining and being ungrateful.  This anti-gratitude way of going about one’s life approach now is seen to be surprisingly stressful and to shorten life.  Train yourself in appreciation-awareness and to feel and give gratitude as part of ‘affirmational love’ giving and your life will be a happier, healthier place to live in.

Large numbers of people just don’t have much of an awareness of gratitude and the good it does.  Especially our love relationships can be benefitted by people who feel and frequently show genuine gratitude for the love acts of others.  So today and tomorrow and the next day too, I want to dare you to be grateful for something you would not have otherwise been grateful for and then show your gratitude in one fashion or another.

Gratitude can be shown with a pat on the back, a hug, a smile, just a few words of thanks, a note, a gift, doing a favor for, public bragging on another person and in a host of other ways.  I want to challenge you to challenge yourself to make yourself good at the love skill called gratitude.  Hopefully this little love lesson will assist you in that endeavor.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question The concepts of healthy self-love suggest that you give gratitude to yourself for having helped yourself live as well as you have.  So, are you doing that?

Related posts:

1. Gratitude – As a Love Skill
2. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Respect – As a Love Skill 

Throuple Love, a Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?

Mini-Love-Lesson #213

Synopsis: What throuple love is; its legality, offspring, sexuality; who desires it; and the question “Is it a real love?” are all briefly presented and explained here.

How Throuple Love Happened to Alice, Betty and Charlie

It all started sometime after Alice’s policeman husband was tragically killed in the line of duty.  Her best friend, Betty, and Betty’s husband, Charlie, began looking in on Alice and her two young daughters then taking them places like shopping, the movies and the park along with their own children.  Later they all watched TV and did other ordinary stuff together.  It was obvious to all of them that they were growing quite close, including the children.  One day Betty said, “Suppose we all move in together, after all, it would save money and we have become like one big family”.  That led to a lot of talk and spending experimental weekends together which went quite well.

One day Alice said she had a problem with the suggested all live together idea.  She confessed she was both romantically and sexually attracted to Charlie and, truth be told, sometimes also a bit attracted to Betty too.  She went further saying she felt sometimes like she was falling in love with both of them.  Betty surprised herself as well as the others by saying she loved Alice and didn’t think she would really mind sharing her husband with Alice, sort of like they had seen on a TV show about Mormon sister-wives.  Charlie then related he had love feelings for both Betty and Alice, truth be told, he revealed he had sexually fantasized about having threesome sex with both of them.

Cautiously one weekend with all the kids away at the grandparent’s homes, they started a very loving, three-way, sexual relationship.  At first they laughed together at their awkwardness, then got really amazed with how turned-on and passionate they all got with one another.  All three were quite certain they would want to do it again and they did.

One thing that just evolved was all three of them enjoying spending more time before and after sex, non-sexually cuddling and caressing one another.  It was after one such very loving three-way experience that Charlie, kind of awkwardly proclaimed, “I think we three are creating a marriage with each other.”  Alice and Betty soon agreed.  After some parent guidance and blended family counseling which included all the children to make sure that they carried this off in the best way possible, they bought a big house and moved in together.  That was years ago and except for some problems with outside family members their love-filled, very psychologically real, three-person marriage/union has gone quite well.

Another surprise came when they discovered lots of people around the world were doing pretty much the same thing and there was a name for it, along with websites, support groups, an app and a whole bunch of other stuff.   The name for it, similar to the word couple, is “Throuple”.

What Is Throuple Love?

To understand throuple love, just think of the term couple love and add a person.  Throuple love is a love-mate or spouse-type love for two people simultaneously instead of just one.  A throuple love relationship is where spouse-type love goes back and forth rather equally between three people as they have and live in a committed, love-based, three person, psychological marriage.  Sexuality is a part of that but not the center of it, as likewise it is in a healthy, love-centered marriage.

Throuples are to be differentiated from threesomes who usually are more temporary and more about sexuality than love.  They also are different from couples who have a third person, friends with benefits type relationship, although probably that is closer and might turn into a throuple relationship at some point.  Technically a throuple could be considered a form of polygamy or polyandry but those terms more often reference a one gender dominance situation.  Throuple usually is a classification within the subcategories of plural marriage, group marriage, polyamor relationships and alternative lifestyles, all of which are encompassed by the larger category of marriage-type relationships ( see “Poly Love” and “Multiple Sex Partners and Love”).

Some people also use a term like throupling to refer to actions and states of mind involving or going toward throuple love and relating.  Throupling, throuple love and throuple marriages can occur between one man and two women, one woman and two men, three women, three men, one or more bisexuals and one or two others of either gender, one or more transsexuals with one or two others and may include other gender oriented categories (see “Other Genders Love” and “Does Sexual Preference Influence Love?”).

What About Throuple’s Legality?

The first legal recognition of a throuple union occurred in the country of Columbia in 2017.  Three men were granted family law, legal union status with the same rights as couples.  When challenged, their legal union was upheld by that nation’s constitutional court.  Worldwide, supportive compliments came from other throuple relationships around the globe as well as from various libertarians, liberal religious groups, alternative lifestyle supporters and relational freedom advocates.  Condemnation, death threats, hate messages and other legal challenge attempts came from a wide variety of other conservative, traditionalist, reactionary and regressive groups apparently mostly in South America but also in some parts of Africa.

In most parts of the world, throuples just are not dealt with legally or, at worst, are arrested and imprisoned with some even endangered by the death penalty.  In countries rated as more democratic, throuples tend to be accepted and some legal support is able to be obtained through contract law and broadening family law.  In countries rated as more non-democratic or anti-democratic, severe problems can be encountered.  In various places, the safety of those in a throuple relationship where laws against polygamy, homosexuality and other forms of alternate lifestyles exist are a concern, as they are in lands heavily influenced by various conservative religious laws.

What about Children of Throuples?

Throuples make the argument that three parents can be, and often are, much better than two or one parent households.  What little research evidence there is suggests this may be true.  One of the possible reasons this may be valid is that when a child needs comfort, information, support or any parental help, there may be more loving adults available.  Certain testimony from those who have grown up in three parent, throuple type, homes seems to be quite positive about it so far.  Contrary comments from throuple offspring, to date, are uncommon.

Definitive, long-range studies have yet to be completed.  Harmful and destructive throuple influences on children have been postulated by some, but not proven or objectively confirmed as having any real frequency of occurrence.  The preponderance of available, though meager, evidence to date, suggests throuple love correlates well with good, healthy, parental love and subsequently children who turn out quite well as they mature.

What about Throuples and Sex?

King-size beds apparently are rather popular with throuples.  One reason is because three people being sexual with each other simultaneously is not so easily done in smaller beds designed for couples.  As commonly proclaimed, throupling is not primarily about sex but rather about love, or at least the attempt at modern, egalitarian, three-way love.  Three lovers cuddling together as they go to sleep with love in their hearts for one another is more the prototype image than three people climaxing together (see “Sexual Love Laces”).

Some throuples take turns or do one at a time sex, some occasionally bring in a fourth person, usually a dear friend and a few go about things in the open marriage sort of way but, so far, the evidence suggests not many.  Throuples usually seem to emphasize they are going about their relationship in very democratic ways including what they do sexually.  Democratic equality and mutuality, along with a willingness to experiment with what each other wants, seems to be the standard.

Who Wants Throuple Love?

Quite a few bisexuals seem to see a throuple love relationship as a real boon to their natural desires and proclivities.  One bisexual said, “I no longer have to cheat, have affairs and feel guilty now that I’m in throuple love”.  Bi’s have related that in a three-way love and sex relationship they no longer have to deny or try to suppress half of their true selves.  Some married lesbian and gay men also have related that the throuple way has allowed them to stay married and continue as full-time parents, so it is way better for the children.

Throupling homosexuals being sexual is more with a same gender partner but it can occur in the threesome way.  Some report becoming a bit more bi themselves and getting turned on by seeing their two other throuple partners enjoying each other.

It is surprising to many that a fair number of older, retired people seem to have formed throuple-type, love relationships.  Cases of widows and widowers becoming friends and then developing multiple person, marriage-type love for one another and finally living in a three-person marriage arrangement might possibly become somewhat common.

Transgender and mixed gender people of various types also see throuple love as a form of living married that is well-suited to their particular needs and wants.  One trans person said it was wonderful not to have to get a divorce like happens to so many married transgender people when they make the transition.  “I started in our throuple as a biological male with a male and a female spouse.  For a time, I was sort of a half-and-half but was just as loved by my other two.  Then I got to my real self as a full female and was still pretty much loved just the same way I was when we started.  Even better, all three of us pretty much are just same except my female clothes take up more room now”.

There are those who grew up in happy, big families who find the throuple way of doing love relating to feel like being home again.  Others admit to being bigamist at heart and there are still others who enjoy having a sort of brother or sister spouse.  A very small number are known to have grown up in throuple household and just see it as what they are used to and like.  Others who have had bad experiences with two-person marriage are willing to try a throuple love approach.

In short, a growing number of people all around the world either want a throuple relationship or are willing to give it a try to see if it works for them.  It is too early to tell but some analysts suspect throuple love is going to keep growing and eventually perhaps become common.

Is Throuple Love Real Love?

You can’t really love two people at once, can you?  At least one person’s love for one of the others will be fake love, won’t it?  And if you love one better than the other, won’t that break up the throuple?  Doing this throuple love thing isn’t natural, is it?  All sorts of questions arise and those in throuple love relationships give some pretty interesting answers.  To the question about loving two people comes the reply “lots of people love two children, two parents, two siblings, two friends etc. so why not two romantic or marriage type partners?  To the second question comes to the reply “throuples have less fake love and false love problems than do couples because they have to examine everything more carefully, and three minds work better than just two or one”.

The third question about loving one better than the other gets the answer “people may unequally love two children, two siblings, two parents, etc. differently at different times and it all works out fine, so why not two lovers?  To the issue of what’s natural comes the social psychologist’s and cultural anthropologist’s answers showing millions of people living and having lived in multiple person marriages and done so quite sufficiently and successfully.  Monogamy actually may be in the minority throughout cultures and over long time periods.  That certainly is true in the animal world.

If you measure real love by the behaviors and operations that exhibit it, and by the operations that differentiate it from false love, or by what the limbic system in the brain does neurochemically and neural electrically with love, or by the social biological correlates of those who strongly report feeling love after years of love relating, then we have no reason to think that throuple love could not be just as real as couple love.  However, it will take a lot more good, solid research to support or contradict this much more fully than is currently evident.

Could throuple love be right for you, or members of your family, friends, etc.?  Again, emphasis on love.

One More Little Thing

Who might you want to talk all this over with, and maybe tell them about this site and its FREE 200+ mini-love-lessons?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If you knew a throuple, would you invite them to dinner at your home and, yea or nay, what does that tell you?

Related posts:

1. Transcendental Love: Mysteries and Wonders for Your Future?
2. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
3. What about “Bi” Love?
4. All or Nothing Love – The New Way of Marriage
5. Poly Love