Over 300 FREE mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries worldwide!

Showing posts with label behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label behavior. Show all posts

Respect - As a Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with a discussion of the necessity of respect in love relationships; and then talks about the nature of respect in love, respect within couple’s love; what is to be respected; and ends with the benefits of respectfulness.


Necessity of Respect in Love

In adult-to-adult love, a sense of respect for whomever you love is thought to be essential if that love is to survive and thrive.

There is much evidence to suggest that when respect is lost the love or the love relationship itself will be in danger of being lost. There may be some vestiges of love that remain but without respect adult-to-adult love is not likely to grow, or motivate the connecting and enriching aspects of love. There seem to be several forms of false love in which respect may be absent (see the entries on False Love). Healthy, real love, however, is seen to generate a sense of respect and, likewise, respect is seen to generate a greater possibility of love occurring and growing in adult-to-adult relationships.

The Nature of Respect in Love

In a love relationship when we respect someone we hold them in honor, look up to them, see their attributes and qualities, have a high opinion of them and highly prize them, tend to treat them as very special and with a kind of deference, we are proud of them, speak well of them, take their wishes into account, tend to be more thankful and appreciative of their ways of being themselves and we also give importance to what they value as important.

Couple’s Love And Respect

“I think I started falling out of love with him when he kept asking me to tell lies for him. They would be the kind of untruths that made him seem to be more than he really was. You know the type, where he insists I say he caught a bigger fish than everybody else when actually he didn’t catch any fish at all. Then he wanted me to lie in ways that cheated others out of their rightful share of things. That’s when I started losing respect for him. I tried to talk to him about it but he just got mad at me and gave himself the excuse that these kinds of lies were what everyone told. Well, they weren’t lies I told. That kind of deceit just made him seem, well, smaller in my eyes. After trying to present the positives of truth-telling and getting back only negative responses, I just didn’t want to be with him anymore.” I have heard similar stories, time and time again, in the type of counseling that helps people overhaul their approach to finding, starting or trying to improve their love relationships.

“It was not so much the fact that she kept getting horribly, sloppy drunk. It was the fact she wouldn’t do anything about it like go to AA, or find a counselor, or something, anything. As she fell deeper into alcohol she seemed to get more and more hypercritically religious. Maybe she thought that was going to fix it, but it didn’t. Slowly I just wasn’t attracted to her anymore. If she didn’t respect herself enough to own up to her drinking problem then pity was about all I could feel for her”. There are many ways that people lose respect for someone they are in a love relationship with. Sometimes it has to do with abuse or neglect. Sometimes it has to do with self-abuse and self-neglect. But in every case where respect is lost the love relationship suffers.

What’s to Be Respected

In healthy, real love what is respected usually has to do with a sort of ‘character strengths factor’. This is an internal thing like courage or kindness in one’s approach to others and to life itself. Things like integrity and steadfastness, being trustworthy and honorable, deeply caring and being passionate about a cause can rank high in garnering respect. Loyalty and a sense of honor along with an adherence to one’s own ethics also count for a lot. Talents, competencies and abilities can amass considerable respect also. However, external type factors like wealth acquirement, possession of status symbols and the defeat of others in various forms of conflict tend not to work when it comes to the respect that goes with deep and lasting love.

External factors like those may attract more envy, jealousy and hostility than respect. Having a passionate appreciation of beauty, nature, life, the rights of others, spirituality, benevolence, health and well being are what get strong respect with quality lovers. Being able to love well, love much and be lovable may be the most important factors when it comes to respect.

Respectfulness And Its Relational Benefits

Once you have a sense of respect for someone you love, it is important to add being able to demonstrate and convey that respect. Showing that you respect a person’s qualities and ways of being themselves helps to reward them for those qualities, which may cause them to increase and grow those qualities and other qualities too. Showing your respect also usually has a bonding influence which draws you closer together emotionally. Communicating to someone you love about what you respect in them also tends to help them focus on what they respect in you and others.

Hopefully this little discussion of ‘respect as a love skill’ will help you hone your own ability to sense respect and show it to those you love. There is a lot more you can learn about respect and love. To do some of that, check out the entries “Catharsis Empathy As a Love Skill” and discussions about “Affirmational Love”.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question
Think of someone you love and what you respect about them. Now will you tell them or send them a written message that conveys that respect today?


Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins by addressing highly important questions concerning each of the three love action states people operate in; then goes on to describe those three love action states and their outcomes so you can evaluate yourself and others in regard to each; and ends with a discussion of quality and quantity issues related to the three states.


Three Love Action States – and Super Important Questions

How much of your life has to do with acting from love, demonstrating love and receiving love? How much of your life essentially is non-love oriented? Are there parts of your life which might be described as containing anti-love actions?

Let’s go into this a bit further by asking some related questions. If much or little of your life has to do with love (see love definition entries) what does that make your life into? If much of your life might be called non-love involved what does that do to your life? If there are important episodes in your life in which your actions are anti-love what does that turn your life into? How does all this effect those you love, or those you hope to love, and those you hope to be loved by? Do those who are important to you perceive you to be largely anti-loving, or non-loving, or quite loving and lovable?

Descriptions of the Three Love Action States

If you are, or often are seen as indifferent, uninvolved, unconcerned, apathetic about others, impersonal, perfunctory, inattentive, passive, negligent, robotic, unimpressionable, aloof, impenetrable, distracted, or unemotional – you may be living too non-love oriented.

If you are or are perceived as being deceitful, verbally or physically abusive, aggressive as opposed to assertive, offensively defensive, demeaning, degrading, deprecating, greedy, emotionally cold and rejecting, betraying, cheating, purposefully destructive, hostile, brutal, anti-caring and uncaring, hateful, negatively prejudicial, vengeful, mean-spirited, judgmental, combative, punitive, controlling and authoritarian, dogmatic and overly self-centered and selfish to the detriment of others – you may be having an anti-love impact in the way you go about at least certain aspects of your life.

On the other hand, if you are or are seen as caring, kind, compassionate, generous, friendly, personally warm, endearing, benevolent, congenial, fair and democratic, positive about and toward others, friendly, cordial, welcoming and inclusive, thankful, rejoice-full, affectionate, beneficent, of goodwill, empathetic, appropriately protective, appreciative, understanding, powerfully passionate about life in many of its aspects and about the rights and well-being of others, philanthropic, altruistic, patient, magnanimous, considerate, thoughtful, giving, merciful, as well as loving and lovable – you are likely to be going about love in your life rather well.

Outcomes Of the Three States

People who are too often anti-loving are seen as tending to destroy their love relationships. They also tend to seen as being harmful to those they would have a love relationship with.

People who too often are non-loving are seen as having their relationships slowly erode away and they are thought to often experience abandonment. They also can be seen as instrumental in the love malnourishment and love starvation of those they would have a love relationship with.

People who are sufficiently to abundantly, healthfully loving are seen as getting the happiest, healthiest and generally the most successful life and relationship results.

Quality and Quantity Issues

One way to evaluate a love relationship, be it with a lover, spouse, child, friend or family member, is to think about the quality and quantity of love experienced in the relationship. How much time is spent in actions that convey quality love? Also how much can be called non-loving and how much can be called anti-loving? Are the anti-love actions more impactful than the loving actions? Are the non-love actions more important, powerful and dramatic than the loving? These are important questions that few people seem to know to use in understanding their love relationships, including the love relationship they have with themselves. Thinking with these questions may lead to considerable improvement in how healthy love is accomplished in your life. Conversing with loved ones about these questions also may lead to “love team” improvements.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question
Who will give you honest, accurate feedback on how you come across as to being loving, non-loving or anti-loving?


Love Goals and How They Can Help You and Yours

Mini-Love-Lesson  #192
Free Over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: The Love Goals approach, which reportedly is helping many couples, is introduced and explained, along with answers to its critics, examples of how it is used and a step-by-step prescription for putting it into your bag of love tools for improving your love relationships.


What They Are Saying about Love Goals

“Learning about setting and achieving love goals made our marriage twice as good as it was before and it wasn’t all that bad to begin with” said Mike, a ten-year married aeronautical engineer.  ”Susan, a 16 year married with three children, public health nurse told us, “Our family life and our romantic life both went to a whole new level when we started using the Love Goals approach.  It’s such a great way to teach children how to love but it’s teaching us adults a lot too.  ”Esther and Roberto both told us that using the Love Goals method was instrumental in saving their marriage, and Sophia and Jacob spoke of how having love goals got them through a very hard time.  Larry and Terry related how using love goals got them into really knowing how to succeed at doing their love and not just feeling it.

So, how would you like your love relationships to get you and yours similar, improvement results even if what you have now is really very good?  If so, be curious and read on.

What Are Love Goals

Love goals are specific love giving, conveying, sending and demonstrating behaviors that people decide to make happen so that their love relationships will be more filled with healthy, real love.  Stronger love, happier love, higher, broader and deeper love, bigger love, healthier love and more lasting love are all part of what love goals aim to achieve.  Individuals, couples, families, etc. can use them to make love happen better, bigger and more often.

Love goals can be as simple as deciding to say thank you more often and more sincerely than you usually do when talking to a loved one.  Making a goal of giving a better good morning hug to a beloved with a loving look and loving words every day for a month would be another good example of a specific love goal.

Love goals also can be a lot more comprehensive.  An example are the couples who work with Paul’s New Testament, First Corinthians list of what love is and is not (love is patient, kind, not rude, etc.) and jointly create specific goal behaviors to put into their life.  Here is a sample.  “I will make a love goal to tell myself to act with loving patience and smile lovingly at you [spouse/mate name] whenever I think you are making us run late.  I will do this instead of getting mad and critical which I now see ruins some of our time together for a while and just makes us even more late”.  Those couples work their way through all of Paul’s 16 points making specific behavioral goals to implement each of the points.  They report big improvements from doing so.

Mutual Love Goals and the Wonders They Can Work

In The Science of Happily Ever After, Dr. Ty Tashiro reports that couples who mutually make an inviolate rule to spend short periods of time together giving each other a “love fix” with words and touch every day no matter what else is happening, do far better at handling the rest of life and are physically, emotionally and relationally happier.  Dr. Carla Naumburg, author of Parenting in the Present Moment, tells of research that shows having dedicated, behavior goals of brief, daily, child involvement (and in that time making love connecting actions occur too), it results in producing healthier, happier children and better parent-child relationships.  Parents doing the same thing with each other also produce better parenting and better couple relationships.

When couples freely and jointly act to achieve mutual goals aimed at making their interactive behaviors more love-demonstrative, their relationships can be expected to move up several levels no matter where those relationships start from.  That is the conclusion of people working with the Love Goals approach.

Going from Abstract to Concrete Love Goals

Most people start with abstract ideas for love goals like being more appreciative, a better listener, more affectionate, etc.  That is good for a start but it is not going to help if you stop with that kind of broad concept that can be behaviorally enacted in too many, unspecified, different ways.  Those abstract, broad ideas have to get converted into specific, or concrete, exact behaviors before they can become exactly enacted actions.  Otherwise, they usually are just nice ideas that do not become goals that actually get achieved.

If your goal is to be more affectionate and feel closer together, you both might have to decide something like: curl up in each other’s arms, on the couch, cuddling with each other, saying only words of love, for 15 minutes, allowing no distractions or interruptions, between 7:00 and 7:30 PM Monday, Wednesday & Friday, every week for eight weeks before you evaluate the results of your love goal actions.  If this is mutually decided and agreed upon, that is an example of a well stated love goal that actually might get accomplished.  You also will need a way to calendarize, tally and track your love goal actions.  While you are at it, make it fun and enjoy it!

That is an example of what it takes to make a behavioral goal that is sufficiently clear enough to be mutually understood.  By the way, it also is good to add an alternative date and time if a cuddle time gets missed.  Then if you add an additional reward for accomplishing your goals, it is even better.
Without those kinds of specifics, most couples and families find their efforts just fade away and their love goals are not reached even though they were sincere about setting them.

In families, kids especially need these kinds of specifics in order to keep their parents on track for goal attainment which is something they are prone to do when they get really involved in love goal work.  That also is something a lot of kids are prone to do too in our experience.

Answering Love Goals Criticisms

“Why do we have to do all that?”  “Don’t we know we love each other and isn’t that enough?” “Isn’t love just done automatically?” “Doesn’t making it such an organized thing take all the fun and magic out.?” “Who has time for all that?”– These are among the criticisms leveled against the love goals approach.

The answer for all those questions goes like this.  Love works like a healthy, nourishing food.  Just think of all the purposeful, planned and organized disciplined effort that goes into getting good, healthy food from what mother nature provides all the way to fueling your own health and well-being.  It is the same for love.  Love takes behaviors to grow it, deliver it, skillfully prepare it and the actions of partaking of it.  Both food and love do not just automatically keep showing up in your life.  Somebody has to DO a lot of stuff to make that happen.  The better you can skillfully DO the actions involved, the better both food and love are.  The less you do, the more the quality and the quantity are likely to suffer.  A young client of mine once said, “I’ve learned it’s like when I don’t do enough about love, love doesn’t do enough about me”.

A Love Goals Prescription

Here is our prescription for putting love goals into your life and using them well.
Start by reading our site’s “The Definition of Love”.  Then read the mini-love-lessons that have to do with the major behaviors found to convey love “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” .  After that, preferably jointly, decide on which of the eight categories of direct love behaviors you both might want to start with.  Then choose a single, exact set of actions to take that likely would improve the way you and your love partner show each other love.  Remember to decide where, when, how often and for how long (at least a week and preferably several months) you will work as a team to practice putting that love action into your life.  Be sure not to avoid having an end date for your goals so that they do not just fade away and so that you have a chosen time to evaluate your progress.  It is then you decide to keep going or not, or what changes to make in your goals.

Here is another way to go about using love goals for growing and improving a love relationship.  Together pick any area of your relationship that you both would like to see get bigger, better, stronger, or occur more.  Or you can, pick a more specific something that you just happen to want to be different than it is.  Then make your choice as to what exact actions you will take to go toward your love goal as described above.

You can look at things you might like to see happen less or not at all.  However, then you will need to choose what exact actions you will use to put something else in its place.  Without replacement actions, it is very hard to stop whatever has been happening and which may have become a habit.  Even then, it may be a back-and-forth battle between old habit behavior and desired new replacement love goal actions.

You can do all these things individually, even secretly, but usually it works better when your love goals involve a team effort.  Of course, having individual even secret love goals is not at all a bad thing.  After all, this is about being more loving – and that’s a very good thing.

Lots of couples, families and friends use regular love goal meetings to help themselves keep benefiting from the love goals approach.  Others keep coming back to it every so often more irregularly.  Either way, see what you might want to do with purposefully putting love goals into your awareness and into your life.

Help spread love knowledge – tell someone about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question: How exactly might you want to, or need to, become more loving and thereby become more lovable?

You might also want to read:The Definition of Love”, “A More Ample Definition of Love”, “Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Four”, “How to Make Love Improvements Permanent” & “Learning about Love Together”. Also for the best description of the eight classes of behavior that directly show love, see Chapter 5 How Do We Grow Intimate Love, Chapter 6 How Do We Make Love Really Show & Chapter 7 What Connects Your Love with Mine in my book Recovering Love.

Conflict, Power and Love Success

Mini-Love-Lesson   #190
FREE over 200 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: How successful loving couples powerfully succeed at handling disagreements, differences, opposing views and conflicts in three surprisingly different patterns is the focus of this mini-love-lesson.


The Best Use of Power When in Conflict

Sooner or later, every love relationship has conflict.  Some relationships are destroyed by it, some survive but are damaged, others repair fully and are even better than before while still other love relationships thrive on conflict right from the start.  What makes the differences?

Sooner or later, every love relationship has power issues whether they know it or not.  That is because it takes power to get anything done.  In love relationships, especially those called couples, families and comradeships, enormous amounts of hard to do things get done.  In the doing, conflicts arise and harmonious, effective teamwork power often is not easily achieved but when it is, everything is better and everybody usually is benefited.

Sooner or later, every couple has love issues because the giving, getting, growing and cycling of love effects and is effected by every couple’s way of handling conflicts and power issues.  It is the successful ways loving couples use power to handle conflict and differences with each other that concerns us here.

The Surprising 3 Most Love Successful Ways

Couples research into what works along with clinical analysis, has discovered three main ways or patterns of successfully dealing with power issues and conflict.  They are rather different from what the experts have previously thought and taught.  The titles, descriptions and details vary from study to study and presentation to presentation.  Here these three couple patterns of successfully dealing with conflicts and power issues are introduced and synthesized, summarized and given the following descriptive names.

The first one I call the Avoid and Finesse pattern, the second is the Volatile and Confronting pattern and the third is the Validating and Affirmational pattern.  Each of these patterns has its own benefits and advantages as well as its own drawbacks and dangers.  All three patterns involve couples who have been evaluated as healthfully having real love for each other.  They also have been measured as relationally positive in various ways such as being generally happy, stable and constructively functional.

1. Avoid and Finesse  When difficulties arise the successful couples using this approach work hard at avoiding directly confronting and conflicting with each other over the issues involved in the difficulty.  They tend to bring up that which is positive about their relationship and about each other more often.  They only very indirectly address the areas of possible contention, if at all.

At first they seem to, sort of, non-verbally agree to live with whatever is the source of this dissonance or disagreement perhaps to see if time alone will help solve the problem.  However, with close observation over time they can be seen to be gently, with finesse, handling the difficulty individually and then as a couple.   It is interesting that this can be done completely nonverbally by some couples using this system.  Eventually any lasting areas of possible dissonance and discord are verbally dealt with gently, in little bit segments, often starting with the easiest parts first.

Avoiding and finessing couples tend to be quite patient, kind, very seldom rude and genuinely nice to each other.  They highly value being in harmony with each other which is far more important to them than being right, defeating or winning over the other one.

It is not that the areas of continuing disagreement are forever unattended to.  Rather they are slowly and much more indirectly, subtly and carefully handled.  Compromise and synthesis-evolving-solutions are grown rather than openly confronted and decided.  In this system there is much less strong, negative, emotional expression.  There also sometimes is more strongly expressed positive emotion leading up to, during and after dealing with areas of oppositional disagreement and dissonance.

These couples usually are very comfortable with each other and see no reason to change this Avoid & Finesse style of dealing with conflicting opinions and opposing points of view.  If one person does get negative, the other frequently empathetically listens longer and then just counterbalances the negativity by being more lovingly positive.  That usually brings the other one back to a more love-positive way of interacting.  Sometimes the more okay-feeling spouse or love mate will directly but kindly ask their beloved to start returning to a more positive state and that clear, direct request usually is accepted.

Fairly good, healthy self-love seems to underlie this process for both people in the couple’s relationship.  In areas involving personal weakness, poor functioning and low competence leading to difficulties these couples tend to be very mutually supportive and cooperative with very little blaming or demeaning.  Gentle challenging for desired improvements does occur.

One big drawback and danger to the Avoid and Finesse style has to do with dealing with difficulties demanding quick resolution.  Another has to do with intractable problems that cannot be improved on without conscious, direct, interactive discussion.  Also some unsolved or unimproved conflict areas result in individuals repressing or suppressing negative feelings for a time, which then is followed by cathartic explosion.  At such times, these couples may distance themselves overlong from each other but usually then come back together, make up and go on.  There is also the danger that some couples get stuck in just avoiding and never get to the finessing improvements and resolution part.  This can be deeply destructive if it leads to a growing lack of self-disclosure loving and the closeness that brings.

Sometimes such couples, for various other reasons, go to family or couple’s counseling and meet with a therapist who thinks direct confrontation is the only way to go.  That might result in more harm than good being done.

2. Volatile and Confronting  Successful couples prone to using this style of dealing with difficulties and disagreements quickly become intensely, persuasively and assertively emotional.  They appear to enjoy arguing, teasing and provoking each other as they each combatively argue for their own case.
However, angry sounds, looks and gestures frequently are accompanied by occasional shared laughter, clever remarks, witty comebacks and even compliments when a point is well made.  Vigorous and heated debate is treated rather like a game and sometimes leads into passionate, aggressive style sex.  To outsiders including counselors and therapists, this style can look like purposeful, harmful fighting and destructive dysfunction.

It is important to note that couples using the Volatile & Confronting style, though arguing passionately, usually are doing three very positive things.

First, they are avoiding being seriously demeaning, personally insulting or trying to tear down each other.

Second, both are doing a good job of what is sometimes called owning their own okayness.  Therefore, they are not letting a sense of personal okayness be robbed from them by anything the other one says or does.  Thus, by way of strong, healthy self-love they both remain independent and free to clash vigorously.

Individually, both count on the other to remain emotionally okay during this fight style interaction.  If anyone’s feelings do get hurt by taking something the other one said too personally, they usually quickly convert to reparative, comforting interactions.  Later they go back to vigorous, confrontive sparring rather more carefully than at first.

Third, Volatile & Confronting couples tend to occasionally punctuate even the most volatile of their arguments with love-positive messages.  Not infrequently, this is done with brief, loving smiles, gestures, touches or words of love, respect and high valuing of each other.

Surprisingly, this often results in a final synthesis of opposing views and arrival at a solution to the difficulties better than either one of them could have individually devised.  Harmony between them usually then quickly follows.

Counselors not familiar with this kind of love-successful-interaction sometimes label such couples as high risk and dysfunctional.  In truth, they usually are among the most stable, happy and generally successful of couples.  They also tend to be among the more highly romantic, sexual, playful and lively of couples.

Drawbacks include sometimes having difficulty achieving serenity, patience, tenderness and understanding people who take offense easily.  They also can be misidentified as intolerant, combative and difficult.  They also may get in trouble handling relationship rivals or threats too aggressively.

    3. Validating & Affirmational  Successful couples who deal with relational dissonance issues in the Validating & Affirming style tend to be much calmer and more easy going while handling disagreements openly and directly with each other.  They fairly frequently are prone to intersperse oppositional statements with affirmational messages delivered with positive, upbeat tones and happy, loving looks.  They are more prone to active-loving-listening to each other longer and asking interested questions for further knowledge and clarification.  They tend to do this at some length before undertaking the teamwork of attempting solution building.  It is obvious that they usually treat each other quite kindly and with mutual respect.

This style leads to them being happily comfortable with each other as they face differences and difficultly.  Praises and compliments, with an openness to each other’s ideas, helps them to be very co-functional and positive as they mutually process oppositional points of view.  Occasionally they can become rather argumentative but, even there, they are reciprocating positive looks, gestures, facial expressions , voice tones, etc..  They definitely have a democratic approach but if they do fight they make up easier and quicker with more forgiveness than do many other couples.

Couples using the Validating & Affirming system are very consensus prone.  They have an approach characterized by unless we both win, we both lose and our love relationship loses.  Seldom, if ever, is there a one of us has to win and the other loses orientation.

Good-natured humor and increasingly growing to accept each other’s influence characterizes their relational growth over time.  Like the other successful, happy and lasting couples, expressions of love-positive words and actions occur more frequently than anything that could be called anti-love or love-negative, even when conflicting with each other.

Of all styles, couples using the Validating & Affirming approach are the best at conjoint (team) functioning.  Counter-intuitively, the tendency of this joint way of operating is seen as highly contributory to both partner’s individuality and personal actualization.  Also this system seems to make such couples quite proud of each other and their union.

Couples who tend to be Validating & Affirming are the happiest and healthiest of our three kinds of successful couples but there is one big danger.  If one of them gets unusually unhappy or negative about something, the other member of the couple may also automatically get unhappy rather than remaining more emotionally-up and able to help.

That especially can occur with a lack of understanding or self-disclosure about what is wrong.  In turn, that may give rise to the growth of various suspicions and magnified fears.  This, in turn, can lead to considerable misunderstanding and discordant miscommunication along with pronounced anxiety.  Serious escalation of difficulty may result and become quite destructive.

This is a situation which Volatile and Confronting couples tend to handle quicker and best, and one which Avoiding & Finessing couples usually dodge.

Becoming  Power Usage  and Conflict Resolving Successful

With the help of arriving at a good conflict handling system, individuals and couples can change, improve, repair if needed and can go on to bigger, better, healthy real love.  This includes couples working at learning to much more successfully deal with conflicts, disagreements and discord in their relationship.  This, of course, takes well-informed conjoint (team) effort.  With such effort, couples can become conjointly, harmoniously and wonderfully powerful and, thus, successful in the ways described above.  That is the challenge facing you and all of us.

The Big Problem of Mismatches

When, in a couple’s relationship, one partner uses one of these three styles and the other uses another style, big relational problems can result.  It is like one of them is playing football, and the other basketball and both can’t understand why the other one doesn’t play right.  Both are likely to try getting the other to do it their way, but not know how to achieve that goal.  Couples counseling with love-knowledgeable counselors and therapists can help.

I recommend checking out therapists credentialed by their countries’ marriage and family therapy professional accreditation organizations, and especially those trained in the well researched Arts and Science of Love (ASL) approach created by Doctors John and Julie Gottman, and those trained in the Emotions Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) of Dr. Sue Johnson.  Information to do so can be found online via standard search engines.  The above, as well as others and my own considerable clinical experience, have contributed to the research and clinical views informing this mini-love-lesson.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question  Which of the three styles of dealing with opposing views and conflicts in a couple’s relationship (or other close relationship) may fit you best?


Love Active Enough?


Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson first proclaims love takes action; then goes on to discuss some common things that are mistakenly relied upon in people’s mindsets concerning love to take the place of action; much more.


Love Takes Action!

Are you love active enough?  Lots of people are not and that can lessen, spoil and even ruin a love relationship and a lot of life.

Some say healthy, real love works both like a very nurturing food and a healing medicine.  However, love has to be actively given for it to do any good. Therefore, giving love takes actions.  If love is not actively given, shown, demonstrated, delivered through actions, the people you love may become love hungry, love malnourished and love starved.  If someone you love is in need of love’s healing effects that person may not cure, recover or recuperate from whatever ails them nearly as well or as quickly as they might with a lot of love actions coming their way.

Relying on Just Knowing

“I know he (or she) loves me but they don’t show it much or hardly at all”.  In counseling that sort of statement is something I have heard time and time again.  Knowing someone loves you is good but it is like being aware food is in the pantry but not getting to eat it.  Yet many people have been brought up on the idea that knowing someone, like a spouse or parent or mate, loves you should be enough.  That does help a little but it doesn’t lead to living a love-abundant life or even a love-sufficient existence.  Just knowing, without healthy real love being actively given and received, won’t meet anyone’s minimum daily requirement for optimized functioning.

Relying on Love’s Magic

“I guess I just thought love took care of itself, and that it was sort of like magic and once you were in love you didn’t have to do all that much about it.  Then I got served with divorce papers.  What a horrible shock that was.”  This was the lament of a person working hard to figure  out how to get their spouse back and repair their neglected marriage. Quite a few people sort of subconsciously think love will sort of magically take care of itself and the people in the love relationship.  That is like a farmer thinking the crops will water, fertilize and harvest themselves.

Relying on Your Spouse/Mate

“Women should take care of everything that has to do with love along with the children, the house and the social calendar.  We men have to take care of making a living, the yard, house repairs, cars and making sure everyone is protected and safe.  That’s the way my daddy taught me.  I guess life used to work that way but it doesn’t anymore.  So, what is it I have to learn about this love thing?”  This somewhat reluctant insight was voiced by an older gentleman admittedly more enamored of the past than the present.  But he did love his wife so he was willing to learn the new ways his wife was insisting on.  And actually in time he got quite good at it, and was as good about his new love action skills as his wife was.

Relying on Custom

“He forgot my birthday again.  He never holds my chair for me, or opens the door for me and he has yet to get me flowers.  I thought if he really loved me he was supposed to do those things.  Now I’m hearing I have to ask for these things if they don’t happen.  If he really loves me isn’t he just supposed to know to do these things and then do them?  If I have to ask doesn’t that spoil it?”  Well probably this gal’s guy did not learn the same things she learned about how love was to be shown.

In fact he may not have learned anything about actively showing love.  Therefore, communication that is quite clear and specific is likely to be needed.  Yes, she will have to lovingly ask for what she wants and probably will have to do a good job of it repeatedly.  She also probably will have to look at how he does show his love and learn to recognize it, applauded it and appreciate it.

Relying on Sex

“She seems to think that because we have great sex that’s enough but I want more.  I want us to share our dreams, our hopes, our fears and everything else important.  I want us to talk and enjoy going places together just as a couple.  I want us to share the rest of life and there’s so much more to it than great sex.”  This was the complaint of a fellow who had previously pretty much relied on sex to take care of all his love needs.  He had found a woman with the same mindset but now he wanted more.  Their relationship had shrunk and become increasingly unsatisfactory.  With couple’s enrichment work this couple did fine, as do many couples who discover their relationship has been too love inactive.

Ways to Become More Fully Love Active

Examine the areas of behavior listed below in which people can be ‘love active’.  See if you think you are sufficiently love active in each of them.  If not, you can choose particular actions to add to your behaviors so that you show your love more fully.  You might also wish to talk to those you love about which areas they would like you to improve in, and ask for suggestions as to the particular behaviors they might like to see you begin to do.  Of course, you might want to give them similar information and suggestions.

Areas of Behavior in Which People Can Be Love Active

Basic Love Action Areas
1.Tactile (physical touch) love actions
(including affectionate touch, comforting touch, romantic touch and sexual touch)

2. Expressional love actions (nonverbal expressions)
(including facial expression, tonal expression, gesture and postural change)

3. Verbal love actions
(including spoken, written and electronic messaging)

4. Gifting actions
(including tangible object giving, experience giving, favors, errands, providing services, etc.)

Median Composite Love Action Areas
5. Affirmational love actions
(including compliments, praises, thanks, valuing, supporting, honoring, etc.)

6. Self-disclosure love actions
(including sharing and showing emotions, thoughts, actions, hopes, fears, dreams, confessions, secrets and personal intimate and idiosyncratic ways of being, plus sharing one’s physical self)

7. Tolerational love actions
(including being patient, accepting, understanding, enduring, giving clemency, leniency, and benevolence, and being flexible, nonjudgmental, etc.)

8. Receptional love actions
(including showing and stating appreciativeness, sincere thankfulness, etc. and fully absorbing love shown to you)

Advanced Love Action Areas
9. Protectional love actions
(including protectiveness, watchfulness, safeguarding, defending, preserving, care taking, protective guidance giving, guardianship, escorting, security providing, shielding, health assistance, etc.)

10. Nurturing love actions
(including any and all actions which assist a person’s healthful growth and development, actualization of potential and healthful strengthening)

11. Bonding love actions
(including any and all acts which bring about a sense of connectedness, closeness, loyalty, intimate affiliation, etc.)

12. Metaphysical love actions
(including joint or intercessory prayer and/or mutuality in meditation, worship, liturgical practices, joint experiencing of the oceanic, transcendental and awe-inspiring)

As you can see love actions are divided into three major classifications or areas and 12 subcategories or types of love action.  Within each are hundreds of possible individual love actions.  One thing you might do is think of a specific action you might do in each of the 12 types of love action listed above.  You also might talk to someone you love about what they might want done in each of the above 12 categories.  For healthy self-love action you might consider self loving actions having to do with each of the love action areas and categories above.

Hopefully this will help you become sufficiently and perhaps even abundantly ‘love active’, if you are not already.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly



Love Success Question
What will happen in your life if you are not sufficiently love active?

Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions

Synopsis: Self-love dynamics and importance; the five functions via healthy self-love; living with and without functioning healthy self-love; a healthy self-love self exam.


Consider this understanding of how ‘healthy self-love’ and the ‘five major functions of all forms of love’ work, how it has great importance and how it is something you will do well to know about.

Dynamics and Importance

Healthy, real love serves us and drives us by way of love’s five major functions.  This is true of all types of love including healthy self-love.

Knowing the five major functions of healthy, real love and how to apply them in healthy self-love development can greatly assist a person in growing their healthy self-love.  That can amazingly and significantly assists people in succeeding at all other types of love relationships.

How well couple’s love, family love, friendship love and a great many other kinds of love flourish or perish often depends on sufficient healthy self-love.  The greater one’s healthy self-love the less one tends to operate from fear, insecurity, jealousy, anger, deception and a host of other positions that tend to destroy love relationships.  Greater healthy self-love also results in the development of greater self-confidence, self-reliance, self-esteem, self-understanding, self-directed living, self-trust, self-assurance and self-sufficiency.  All those strongly tend to lead to greater success in all areas of life.  Therefore, I vigorously recommend developing a really good understanding of the major functions of love and what they accomplish when applied to healthy, self-love growth and improvement.

Self-Love and the Five Major Functions of Healthy Real Love

1.  Connection
    It is by love that we are best connected to one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we are best connected with our self.

2.  Nurturing
    It is by love that we best nurture the growth and well-being of each other.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best nurture the growth and well-being of our self.

3.  Protection
    It is by love that we protect and safeguard our loved ones.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we protect and safeguard our self.

4.  Healing
    It is by love that we strive to heal our loved ones when they become afflicted.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best strive to heal our self.

5.  Reward
    It is by love that we best take joy in one another and reward one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best take joy in and reward our self.
So, in these ways let us adhere to the ancient admonition – love others as you love yourself.

Rewards, Survival and Well-Being

Joy (part of the fifth function listed above) rewards and reinforces the actions that stem from the previous four functions.

Each of the functions of love works for our survival, well-being and improvement.  Therefore, our healthy self-love works for our individual survival, well-being and improvement.  This in turn works to keep us going and, therefore, can greatly aid us in acting on behalf of the survival, well-being and improvement of those we love.

Loveless Malfunction

Without love and the functions it provides we malfunction.  When we malfunction we deprive both our self and those we love of the benefits that flow from our love.  Think about each of the five functions not occurring.  When we are not well-connected with our self we tend to live in inner disharmony and often work against our self.  When we do not nurture our self we grow overly dependent on others and may psychosocially starve.  When we are not sufficiently self-protective we live increasingly in danger of being harmed.

When we do not sufficiently act to heal our self when afflicted psychologically and physically we promote our own dysfunction and demise.  When we do not sufficiently take in, digest and revel in the rewarding joys of love we do not reinforce the actions that stem from the first four functions of love and, thus, they go unrewarded.  Unrewarded behavior tends to diminish and disappear.  From the diminishment and cessation of love actions everyone may then suffer.

Greater Self-Love : Better Everything

The better one’s healthy self-love the better the five functions of love tend to operate keeping the self strong, healthy and, therefore, more able to love others.  The better one’s healthy self-love the better one can operate when other sources of love are not available.  The better one’s healthy self-love the more one is likely to attract strong, healthy love from strong, healthy others.  It is true that dependent, needy, weak people also may be attracted hoping that your love and strength will aid (save, rescue, fix and/or ‘adopt’) them.  So, out of love for others one may be healthfully assistive to the weak and needy but only if out of healthy self-love one avoids becoming depleted or enmeshed in a weakness-enabling dynamic.

Self-evaluation

Now, you might want to evaluate yourself.  Here are some questions to help.  Are you becoming appreciatively more knowledgeable of yourself and your many miraculous workings and, therefore, more healthfully inner-connected?  Are you good at nurturing yourself and, therefore, helping your further growth and development?  Are you sufficiently self-protective and safeguarding of your well-being?

When you are sick, or wounded or in any other way afflicted physically or emotionally do you act sufficiently for your own self-healing?  Are you joyous about yourself and the bundle of miracles that you are and, therefore, are self-rewarding enough?  Are you helping those you love and care about grow to where they can answer the above questions in the affirmative for themselves?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question
When you were growing up how much were you perhaps taught to regard self-love as a bad thing to be avoided and if you were so taught does that teaching make you a weaker person today?  For help with this see the entry “Loving Others “as” You Love Yourself ???”.


Love Does Not Insist on Its Own Way

Mini-Love-Lesson #243


Synopsis: A right to insistence or not; what about different translations; the real meaning of insist on its own way; and the relational psychology of insistence with systemic examples all work to broaden and deepen an understanding of Paul’s seventh item for describing love.


Note: This is the seventh in our series on a New Testament answer to the question What Is Love with additional understandings from relational psychology.


Does Love Give You the Right to Insist?

Some people believe that loving someone gives you the right to insist on a lot of things, make a lot of demands, give orders and mandate rules.  Some believe this is only true for husbands and fathers and other venerable elders.  Paul apparently saw it differently.  By this translation, Paul seems to be telling us love is not a motivator for insisting and demanding behaviors.  That seems especially true when what we are insisting on gives us some type of gain or control over someone we supposedly love.

But wait.  We have some translation problems.  The version or translation of the Scriptures you consult may read differently.

Translation Issues

Paul used the biblical Greek “ou zetei ta eautes” to convey the message describing this important element of love.  It has been translated a number of other ways.  Some examples are: love does not force itself on others, love is not self-seeking, love is not selfish, love does not seek its own advantage, love seeks not its own, love does not demand its own way, love does not seek to aggrandize itself.  There are quite a few other translations, each of which puts a slightly different spin on what Paul was trying to tell us.  Some scholars have suggested a fuller meaning is love does not seek for its own profit and pleasure or edification as a goal in itself.  Love does not strive for one’s own advantage over others is another possibility.

Here we are relying on the widely influential Revised Standard Version and the English Standard Version translations partly because of the enormous amount of scholarship that went into trying to accurately interpreting what Paul meant.

What Does “Insist on Its Own Way” Really Mean?

The understanding here seems to mean love does not motivate us to demand, order, mandate or dictate how those we love should think, act or feel.  The implication seems to be that our loved ones are to be treated democratically and with equanimity.  Therefore, love pushes us to take into account our loved one’s views, feelings, situations, needs and idiosyncrasies.  This necessitates developing good listening skills, seeing through others’ eyes and not being blind or unresponsive to the desires, emotions or ongoing changes occurring in or for our loved ones.  When differences or conflicts occur, working to compromise, or better yet, synthesize differences and working to have an “I win, you win nobody loses” outcome focus is what love requires.

This understanding of love also means not trying to control, predetermine, manipulate or force one’s own desired outcomes but, preferably with love, relying on requesting, trading and negotiating rather than insisting.

Insistence is related to having to be right, anxiety, insecurity, domination and sometimes dependence on sameness.  None of which are thought to be very loving.

The Relational Psychology of Insisting

Frequently insisting and demanding your own way comes across as intrusive, controlling, autocratic, stressful, selfish and unloving.  When it is seen this way, it usually causes the recipient to emotionally move away from the one doing the insisting and thereafter they tend to avoid that person.  Emotional closeness definitely can be prevented or destroyed by too much demanding and insisting.

There are a number of different interaction patterns to insisting things of a loved one.  Some people comply with what is insisted upon while secretly and increasingly becoming more and more resentful.  One result of that is to get even with retaliatory, passive/aggressive sabotage of the one doing the insisting.  Another thing that happens has to do with the suppression/explosion dynamic.  If too much insisting and demanding comes at a person for too long and they keep complying with the demands over and over suppressing their negative feelings about it, they may one day explode in anger and rage.  That has been known to lead to sudden violence and/or surprise abandonment.  Especially if alcohol and certain drugs are involved this can be quite dangerous.

One of the worst of all patterns involves an implosion syndrome.  This is one where one person is repeatedly insisting and demanding and the other surrendering and being compliant until one day they surrender to what another insists on, one too many times, and have a mental or physical breakdown.  Sometimes they even die seemingly to escape a no longer tolerable relationship situation.  It is amazing how many people suffering some form of serious, chronic illness suddenly start getting well after, one way or another, they lose their problematic spouse or they disconnect from their high stress family.

It is important to know that giving-in to demands and insistence rewards the one doing the demanding and insisting, because it works.  This, in turn, increases the likelihood of an increase in insistence behavior.  Some people mistakenly believe that their surrendering to what is insisted upon eventually will get them treated better and their life will get easier, plus they finely will be better loved.  Seldom does that happen.  Anything that works is more likely, not less likely, to be increasingly repeated.

It is very sexually exciting for some people to be in the submissive, surrendering role while their love mate is coming across as strong, domineering, demanding and insisting of much, both inside and outside the realm of the erotic.  So long as this is a game the couple plays where both agree to play with adequate safety features, and it does not develop into a total lifestyle, a couple can be healthy and okay.  However, sometimes things go too far or go on too long.  This is when an alteration from the dominance/submission pattern of behavior needs to occur without any loss of love in the relationship.  That usually takes some careful, loving work.

Another dynamic of the love relationship that has too much insisting going on is the open warfare pattern.  In this, the participants get to battle openly for who will get their way.  This battling can look really awful but actually often is healthier than more covert interaction patterns of behavior.  That probably is because it is more open and cathartic.

Some, mostly quite insecure people, enjoy being ordered around and having a lot of things demanded of them.  It offers reassuring proof to them that they and their compliance is wanted and valued.  The problem often is that the one doing the insisting seems to usually start devaluing the compliant one.  Their surrendering ways become identified as weakness.  This weakness eventually is disrespected and seen as unchallenging and boring.  The other thing that happens in this pattern is that the compliant one grows stronger and gets tired of always complying.  Breakups ensue.

All in all, being an insisting and demanding person in a love relationship usually does not work out well.  Neither does being too much of a submissive, compliant, surrendering person work out well.  That seems to be largely because, as the French Courts of Love ruled in the 1100s, love is best done by equals and not in relationships where one is dominated and the other domineering which they saw as was required to occur in marriage (of that time), and as it is best done in love relationships in our time.

One More Thing.

Lots of people seem to get a lot out of talking-over things religious and scriptural.  Likewise, relational psychology can be pretty intriguing and fascinating for many.  So, you might use what you have just read for such a discussion.  If you do, please mention this site and all that it offers.  Thanks

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

Quotable Question: Is it true that the more overtly strong a person tries to appear the weaker they must covertly be?

Love is Not Rude

Mini-Love-Lesson  #242


Synopsis: Our Renaissance of rudeness, secretly rude positive?; rudeness by intensity and variety; important or not, research into rudeness; rudeness against health and love; translation issues; a big Buddhist helper; and how it all effects your love life are all delved into here.


Note: This is the sixth in our series on a New Testament reply to the question What Is Love? (see “Love Is Patient”,  “Love Is Kind”,  “Love Is Not Jealous”,  “Love Is Not Boastful/Pretentious”, and  “Love Is Not Arrogant” ) Look for number seven in this series next month.

Our Renaissance of Rudeness And Your Love Life

Social analysts describe us as currently living in a spreading Renaissance of Rudeness slowly invading the personal lives of more and more people, especially those living in the urban centers of the world.  Some theorize it is a counter to previous formality, phony politeness and political correctness trends.  There is also a suspected tendency for more and more people to act emotionally hypersensitive as a way for acquiring a sense of permission to rudely guilt trip blaming others for their own bad feelings.

Other analysts point to data indicating low self-confidence and weak ego strength problems which seem to be growing at epidemic rates.  With that rudeness, also growing is an easy way to pretend to have social strength.  Others believe the Rudeness Renaissance is just a passing fad, destructive though it may be.

Whatever the reason, the research shows rudeness to be destructive to love and love relationships, detrimental to stress resistance and stress illness recovery, harmful to cooperative functioning at home and at work, to creative problem solving, and to the neurochemistry of happiness.  All this proves true for not only the participants but for onlookers and bystanders of rudeness events..  Children especially are suspected of being particularly susceptible.  It would seem the love relationships of everyone who experiences or perpetrates moderate to severe actions of rudeness suffers more than they gain, if they gain anything.

Are You Secretly Rude Positive?

Do you or some people you know secretly enjoy rudeness?  Some people find rudeness sexy, funny, they may see it as being confident, independent, unfettered, rebellious, nonconformist and socially powerful?  Others think rudeness is realness and everything else is phony.  Then there are those who are very attracted to the people who frequently exhibit especially shocking or clever rudeness.

Rude-crude sex especially is in demand in certain circles as is rough-tough love which may subconsciously project strength, intensity and even safeguarding potential to some.  Those raised in overly formal or polite, but restrictive, homes may find a sense of relaxed freedom mixing with the more rude and crude.  There are those who feel a pressure of unfamiliarity around the more polite and civil acting but are at ease with the less couth.

The problem is rudeness tends to eventually wear thin and become destructive to love relationships even where rudeness is seen as desirable.

What Is and Is Not Rude?

Rudeness can mean anything that belittles another person.  Purposeful rudeness is a form of social aggression where another person’s value is attacked and discounted or treated as being of inferior significance.  More potent rudeness can mean showing contempt, scorn, disregard, disdain and indifference.  Strong rudeness also can be demeaning, degrading, humiliating, embarrassing, shaming, discrediting, debasing, devaluing, cheapening, insulting and condescending.

Rudeness also can mean acting or speaking in ways that those who see or hear it judge it to be selfish, disgraceful, indecent, dishonorable, boorish, unkind, undemocratic, interruptive, impolite, discomforting and definitely non-loving.  Milder rudeness may be merely discourteous, ill mannered, uncivil, churlish,, harsh, gruff, blunt, tactless, ungracious, curt or course.  Done repeatedly these milder forms also can be quite destructive, especially to ongoing love relationships.

It is important to note that unintentional rudeness, accidental rudeness, mis-perceived and misinterpreted rudeness, as well as clashing cultural standards of rudeness also exists.

What is not rude, of course, is being polite, courteous, mannerly, respectful, gracious, tactful, cordial, affable, civil and amiable.  At a deeper level, any treatment of a person which conveys that they are of value and that they have importance and significance works in opposition to rudeness and is an asset to love relationships.

Is Rudeness Really All That Important?

There are those that wonder, of all the many more heinous behaviors, why would Paul single out or be inspired to select the relatively mild behavior of rudeness to comment on in his delineation of what love is and what love is not.  One answer is that in Paul’s world, rudeness may have been a really big deal, so much so that rudeness might even get you killed.  In that way and time, it may have been much like ghetto gang cultures where showing disrespect to the wrong people might also get you killed.

Another answer is that Paul’s Greek word “aschemonei” which gets translated as rude, meant a whole lot more than what we usually mean by the word rude today.  More fitting for current interpretations might be things like love is not abusive, vile, nasty, foul, vicious or wicked.  A third answer is that Paul may have understood that rudeness is much more insidiously destructive and antithetical to love than is generally recognized today.  (Note that some biblical translators do not interpret that Paul meant to mean rude, as we understand it today but rather something more like “love does not act disgracefully, indecently dishonorably, abusively”, etc.)

This more significant understanding of rudeness is backed up by modern research.  Did you know that some research shows you have a 94% likelihood of experiencing a counter getting even aggression response after treating someone rudely, if they feel they can retaliate safely?  Did you also know that if you are generally perceived as being a rude person, you have an 88% chance of being treated with exclusionary, distancing and sabotaging behaviors in interaction networks, including families and work settings?  Children and spouses tend to grow more emotionally distant and more likely tend to break off relationships with those more commonly rude than with those viewed as more polite.  However, rudeness is often forgiven when a person is perceived as experiencing a cascade of losses, disappointments, frustrations and/or defeats.

How Love Against Rudeness Can Work

Buddhists and Hindus call it “ Muditi” and learn it as being one of the four major mindsets of real love.  Muditi has to do with giving others love by presenting them with yourself as a happy, positive person to be with.  This can mean being your genuine best self by having authentic joy, a positive countenance, pleasant thoughtfulness and, of course, not being at all rude.  If something more serious is occurring, being kind and compassionate takes over but otherwise presenting your Muditi love is your everyday love-gift to others.  This Muditi way can be obtained by purposeful practice but never by being phony.

Research shows this is a very good, healthy self-love way to go about much of life, as well as being quite healthy for those around you.  Having a general loving, positive, happy, appreciative, enjoyable countenance reduces stress hormone development, improves immunity mechanism functioning, improves relational cooperation and harmony and contributes to a whole lot of other healthy habit-making behaviors.  Muditi is much more than politeness or civility.  It is a way to actually love others as you love yourself in ordinary day-to-day living.  As such, Muditi is a greater opposite to being rude, as well as to being indifferent and just functioning robotically.  By the way, some of my theolog friends comment that the Muditi approach is quite compatible with Christianity.

Functioning from a Muditi mindset when encountering rudeness also can be quite disarming and game changing in otherwise difficult situations.  For more about Muditi, and there is a lot more to it, you might want to look up Buddha’s Four Minds of Love and read Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hahn.

One More Little Thing

Who might you enjoy talking with about this mini-love-lessons on rudeness and love? If you do that, it would be a polite kindness to us if you mentioned this site and all that it offers.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: How aware do you think you are of times and of actions that others, especially loved ones, might think you are being rude and what might you want to do about that?

Love Is Not Jealous

Mini-Love-Lesson #240

Synopsis: Succinctly covered are jealousy’s effects on love relationships, jealousy’s psychology, brain research, evolution and possible de-evolution, religious interpretation controversy and compromise, insecurity based discoveries, and 9 ways love and jealousy clash and conflict.


Jealousy In Love Relationships

Jealousy is one of the most hurtful and harmful of all things effecting love relationships.  Jealousy plays a big part in a great many incidents of anti-loving mistreatment, serious fights, breakups, divorces, love-destructive acts of cruelty, deception, manipulation, revenge attempts, and breakdowns resulting in psychiatric hospitalizations.  Then there is all the time spent in relational dysfunction, agony, stress and other miseries.  Even worse, jealousy frequently is heavily involved in cases of stress illness, physical abuse, crippling violence, severe psychological abuse and even lover and spouse murders and/or suicides (see “Healthy Real Love –or- Toxic False Love”).

 On the other hand, jealousy has its proponents. There are those who tout a little bit of jealousy as a good thing for relationships, a proof of love being real, a necessary, natural component of love which warns us to protect our love relationships, and sometimes a superb lead-in to passionate sex.  Those advocates may see only overly intense and insane jealousy as destructive.  Also, they may tend to disagree with the biblical teaching that love is not jealous.

In opposition to the okayness of jealousy (even a little bit) are a host of mental health, relational and social science professionals and researchers, recently joined by some brain science researchers, who see or suspect all jealousy as being dangerous and destructive.  Then there are the religionists who read Paul’s New Testament tenant “Love is not jealous” and believe it because it is part of sacred Scripture.

What Is Jealousy?

Relational Jealousy has been defined variously as feeling and/or acting upset, unhappy, covetous, possessive, grasping, wishing to control, restrict, monopolize, owning the exclusive affection of another and being strongly aversive to other’s rivalry for that affection while also blocking any possible relationship interfering influence or connection with others.

Psychologically What Is Jealousy?

Jealousy is psychologically increasingly understood to be insecurity-based.  It can be seen as a special sort of replacement fear.  That means a fear of being replaced by someone else for attaining and maintaining the attention, status of importance and needed love of a desired other.  It often is thought to involve an underlying fear of abandonment, rejection and isolation from a primary source of love.

Even more deeply underlying jealousy often is thought to be a secret fear that one is not attractive enough, worthy enough or, most importantly, lovable enough to obtain or hold the continuing love of a major desired love source.  This is seen as representing a serious and more basic lack of essential and needed self-love.

It appears that people who lack sufficient self-love, probably because they were under-loved or mal-appropriately-loved in childhood, cannot easily trust they will continue to be loved sufficiently as they mature.  Thus, jealousy arises as their protective mechanism.  Most unfortunately, this can produce a self-fulfilling prophecy of losing at love.  The healthfully self-loving know that they are lovable and are much more confident love will keep coming their way.  This also frequently produces a happy, healthy, self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is an open question whether or not jealousy helps most people be more constructively protective in their love relationships, or is jealousy more destructively divisive to those relationships?

Jealousy and envy often mistakenly are confused with each other.  In envy you want something somebody else has or something like it, in which case it is okay for them to keep theirs.  In jealousy you don’t want somebody else to have something, or someone, you want or might want exclusively.

Fortunately with the right self-work, better lovability and love relating can be learned, developed and succeeded at.

For more about scientific research into the psychology of jealousy, I suggest you webcheck PsychCentral or for more comprehensive reports, Frontiers in Psychology.

The WHY of Jealousy, And Is It De-evolving?

Jealousy is thought to have evolved as a way brood-mates and their sires could protect and combat against rivals and replacement, thus, better ensuring the survival of their offspring and genetic line.

Jealousy just possibly could be de-evolving in humans because its reason for being may be disappearing.  At least, that is the thinking of some who study this.  Jealousy seems to be falling more and more into disfavor as increasingly it is identified with emotional illness and relational dysfunction.  There also are some beginning signs jealousy eventually could be replaced by its opposite emotion compersion (see “Compersion: A Newly Identified Emotion of Love?”).

The Old & Resurgent, Religious Controversy Over Jealousy

Once upon a time in Christendom, it was widely taught that love was not jealous because the Bible said so.  But then romantic, or lover-love came along in the early Middle Ages and love was seen as jealous, actually very jealous.  In fact, the royalty ran Courts of Love (yes, they existed) and they ruled that, in fact, love was quite jealous and the stronger the love the greater the jealousy.
The conflict between these two teachings was resolved by what some identified as a weasel’s compromise.  It was decided that spiritual love (agape) was not jealous but since secular love was profane and contaminated by sex it was indeed jealous.

That, at least, is how it was summarized to me by a learned theolog.  To this day, in many arenas of Christendom this twofold explanation remains the answer given to those questioning the contradictory, compromise teaching that love (sacred) is not jealous but romantic (secular) love is jealous.  Writing in ancient biblical Greek, St. Paul is thought to have written love is not “ou zeloi”.  That is now understood as powerfully meaning love is “not jealous” and perhaps implying that in a continuous or ongoing way.  Of course, other scholars have interpreted it somewhat differently.

Love Is Not Jealous – Insecurity Is!

Recently relational, psychological and brain research concerning love has come up with results that back the idea that all real and healthy love does not involve or contain a jealousy component.  For one thing, love is found to be mostly processed deep in the brain’s more ancient limbic system and jealousy in the less deep (newer) frontal lobes ventrial striatum, cingulate cortex and lateral septum.  Also, the neurochemistry of both seems to be rather different.

Mounting relational and psychological research points to jealousy coming from insecurity dynamics as described above and not from any real love process (see “Does Jealousy Prove Love?”).

Using theological terms, perhaps all real love is more of an agape type love than has been previously identified.  Certainly family love, parent-child love, deep friendship love and altruistic love seem to qualify as at least largely similar to what is understood to be spiritual or agape love, so why not the love of lovers and spouses?

Love and Jealousy in Cultures and Societies

In some cultures, subcultures, societies and special societal spheres, jealousy has virtually not been found to exist or to be only minuscule.  Cross-cultural studies also show great differences exist in the prevalence and intensity of jealousy in different societies around the world.  Some data suggests more male dominant societies have more jealousy than female dominant or more egalitarian cultures, which may have the least jealousy.  Research also finds jealousy to be seen as an increasingly negative and anti-love factor in love relationships.  It also seems an increasing number of modern world people are working to reduce or eliminate jealousy from harming their love relationships and inner mental health functioning.

How Love and Jealousy Clash and Conflict

A fair amount of relational research is pointing to the ways that jealousy and love are antithetical and, in essence, enemies of one another.  Here is what are thought to be some of those ways.

1. Healthy real love seems primarily to motivate constructive actions; jealousy mostly motivates destructive and useless actions.

2. Love inspires trust; jealousy mistrust.

3. Love involves honest self-disclosure and openness; jealousy more commonly involves suspicion, secrecy, deception, spying, and phony manipulations.

4. Love can sometimes generate compersion feelings; jealousy can’t.

5. Healthy, real love tends to promote democratic, egalitarian fairness in relating; jealousy uses overt, autocratic control, or covert restriction, repression and suppression techniques.

6. Love is much more about forgiveness, second chances and let’s try again dynamics; jealousy is more about punishment, revenge and getting even.

7. Real love inherently is focused largely on the happiness and well-being of the loved; jealousy works primarily for self-protection and for self-gain.

8. Love helps us be open to fresh input from our loved ones and experimenting with their new and different ways, ideas, wants, etc.  Jealousy helps us be closed to those things, threatened by them and staying with seemingly safe sameness resulting in relational entropy and stagnation.

9. Love tends to help work with kindness and appreciation involved sexual growth, emotional and physical intimacy, fun explorations and mutual satisfaction.  In sexuality, jealousy tends to make for stress, tension, inhibition, one-sidedness and phoniness.

There are a good many more ways jealousy and love conflict as well as more things to learn about them.  It is useful to learn about all of them but that’s enough for now. Link “Passionate Love – Wondrous and Perplexing”.

One More Thing

I suggest, in this Mini-Love-Lesson, there is lots to think about and talk about, and it will be enriching to do so with others.  If you do that, please mention this site and its totally free subscription service providing regular, important and helpful love information.

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

Love Success Question:  If you get jealous, will you use it to strengthen and improve yourself and your relationship, or to harm and drive away someone you love, or what?

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?