How Smart Is Your Love? - A Test

Synopsis: Here you will find: why your love needs to be done smart; important background for taking the test; test instructions; the test; scoring instructions; interpretations; love smart homework using the test; and some concluding concepts.

Why Your Love Needs to Be Done ‘Smart’

Arguably love relationships are the most important thing you do in your life.  Your love relationship with your mate, family, children, friends, self, your deity, your purpose in life and life itself, all are very important and, therefore, best done ‘smart’ as opposed to dumb, ignorant, uninformed, without knowledge or stupid.

Think about doing your love relationships with the teamwork of your head and your heart working together in harmony.  We have some pretty good evidence that suggests people who do love this way have greater love success than those who don’t.  We also have evidence that suggests a great many people do not go about love smartly.  As one of my clients once said, “Putting the word smart and the word love together in the same sentence just does not happen in my head”.

Maybe you’ve been programmed dysfunctionally that way also.  Well, if that’s so and you really want good results in your love relationships I suggest you explore putting love and smart together in the way you do love.  Taking the following little exam will likely help you do just that.

Important Background for Taking the Test

You will be presented with a dozen questions designed to help you assess your ‘smart love’ functioning in order to do more ‘smart love’ and get more love successful.  There is research showing that ‘the love successful’ act differently than those who are less love successful. There are clinical findings showing that you can learn the actions of the more love successful and in the process become much more healthfully loving and loved.

There also is data  showing lots of people think love is a matter of luck and, consequently, they don’t work at learning what works and what doesn’t work in love relationships, until maybe it’s too late for a current love relationship to survive.

Also there are lots of people who repeat their failures time and time again, and also those who give up trying because it’s all just too painful.  If you experience a love failure the choices seem to be either to conclude you just are not lucky in love, or it’s always the other person’s fault, or you might conclude you are doing something wrong and you can learn how to do something much more likely to work.  That last conclusion is ‘a smart love choice’.

If you depend on learning instead of luck you’re much more likely to have greater love success in all types of love relationships – romantic, parent/child, family, friendship, spiritual, sexual, humanitarian and self-love.  The subject matter in each of the following test questions can help you start thinking more ‘love smart’.

Instructions For Taking the Test

Read each of the following questions carefully and read the four possible answers numbered one through four for each question.  Decide which answer comes closest to your best estimate of the correct answer for you.  Record the number of the question and then record next to it the number of the answer you have chosen.  Example: If on question three you choose answer number two you would record 3 – 2., for that question.  Try not to leave any questions unanswered.  After you have finished the test we will tell you what to do next for scoring and interpretation. Here are the questions:

1.    When a loved one is talking can you repeat back to them what they just said fairly exactly, showing you’re really good at loving listening?
1 rarely    2 occasionally    3 often    4 usually

2.    When a loved one is within arms reach do you reach out and give them a love touch?
1 rarely    2 occasionally    3 often    4 usually

3.    When you see a written article, TV show, news item, etc. that purports to have something to tell you about love (not sex) do you dive into it, study it, etc.?
1 rarely    2 occasionally    3 often    4 usually

4.    If you had a chance to go to a fairly inexpensive, three hour seminar or workshop on the psychology of healthy, real love would you go?
1  no        2 probably not    3 probably yes    4 definitely

5.    If a friend or relative you respect recommended a book about how to do love well would you read it?
1  no        2 probably not    3 probably yes    4 definitely

6.    If you heard that some people were studying their love history, including past love successes and love failures, and were learning a lot from doing that, would you want to do the same thing?
1  no        2 probably not    3 probably yes    4 definitely

7.    Do you ask your loved ones how they want you to show them your love?
1 never    2 hardly ever        3 occasionally    4 frequently

8.    Do you work at clearly understanding how you want love to be shown to you?
1 almost never    2 seldom    3 occasionally    4 frequently

9.    If you have a desire concerning how a loved one treats you, do you work at discovering how to clearly and lovingly to communicate and request your desire?
1 almost never    2 seldom    3 occasionally    4 frequently

10.    Do you study your loved ones working to know what pleases, assess and benefits them?
1 rarely    2 occasionally    3 fairly often        4 frequently

11.    When there’s a problem in a love relationship do you work at lovingly talking it over with whoever is involved, striving to find new and better ways to love your way through the problem?
1 rarely    2 occasionally    3 fairly often        4 frequently

12.    When a loved one is upset do you work to learn and find ways of showing emotional support, care and concern for the loved one’s upset feelings?
1 usually not    2 once in a while    3 most of the time    4 almost always

Scoring
Score 1 point for every time you recorded a number one answer, score 2 points for every time you recorded a number two answer, and 3 points for every number three answer, and 4 points for every number four answer.  Then add up those points.  That is your score on this test.

Interpretation
    Scores 0 – 11 suggest you have too many “don’t know”, “not sure”, etc. answers and, therefore, you probably need to intensely study how to do successful love relationships.

Scores 12 – 24 suggest you probably are not going about love in a very smart way, and therefore, you are likely not to learn how to improve your love successes until you study a lot more how to succeed at love.

Scores 25 – 36 suggest you probably are learning a little about being love smart and love successful, but probably not nearly enough if you really want to improve your love relationships.

Scores 37 – 45 suggest you’re going about love in a fairly smart and fairly likely to succeed way, and if you keep this up and study more about love success you will succeed even more.

Scores 46 – 48 suggest you possibly are overconfident, or perhaps insufficiently insightful as to what you’re really doing, or maybe you are not giving close enough attention to your answers, and then again you could be cheating.  The other possibility is you actually are quite excellent at love.

Love Smart Homework, Using the Test

Go over your lowest scores and think about what you would have to do to improve them.  Each question’s content can be used as a suggestion for improvement, so contemplate the questions that way.  You might want to ‘journal’ what you think.  Now, go over your highest scores thinking about the content of those questions.  Use them to suggest to yourself ways to go further in learning how to do smart love.  Following that, look over your midrange scores and consider what it would take to improve those scores if you were to take the test again next year.

Do understand that this little test is just a way to help you more closely consider how to use your brain with your heart and arrive at greater love success for you and your loved ones.

Concluding Concepts

Smart love is knowledgeable love!  Smart love is done with learning and knowledge acquirement which is put into practice and continuously improved upon.  Socrates and Plato worked to acquire love knowledge and gave us the famous “Symposium on Love”.  Paul knew that love could be done with knowledge and gave us his wonderful description of love in the New Testaments, First Corinthians, 13.  Rumi knew love knowledge must be discovered and learned and put his teachings into his grand, wisdom-filled, love poetry.  Buddha gave us The Song of Compassionate Love, and Jesus gave us his teaching parables on love.

Many other ‘wisdom masters’ of old implored all of us to become love knowledgeable and, therefore, bring about greater love success in our lives, in the lives of others and throughout the world.  Modern science increasingly is backing up what the wisdom masters of old were teaching.  Hopefully, this will boost your own ability to become more love smart and, thereupon, more love successful.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
So far in life have you depended more on being lucky at love or on learning about love?

Related posts:

1. Alphabet Love Test
2. Smart Kids from Smart Love 

Gender Diversity & Romantic - Heart-mate Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #195

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson is designed it to help people get clear on the confounding romantic and heart-mate love, lifestyles & sexual issues that stress and distress people who have gender diversity issues and those who seek to understand and assist them.

Love and Gender

We all are built to give and get love.  Also we all are built having gender and with that comes our sexuality.  Our gender factors influence our romantic and heart-mate love thinking, love feelings and love behavior.  Science increasingly shows much of our gender and love processes are natural phenomena largely occurring in our brains but also affecting our bodies in a great variety of ways.  Love, gender and sexuality all turn out to be a lot more diverse and varied than we used to think.  We should not be surprised about that because nature can be said to love variation and diversity.  That probably is because of its great survival value for our species.  By the way, science shows all this to be true not only for humans but for a lot of different kinds of higher order species.

In regard to gender, there is a lot more going on than being just strictly male or strictly female.  Some people are born physically both.  Some are understood to be born both genders in their brains but not in their bodies.  Others have the brain of one gender and the body of another.  There seem to be others who go back and forth, and still others who spend part of their life as one gender but then natural forces within them emerge bringing about a change to another gender.  After that, natures variations start to get complicated and hard to describe.

Now, let’s add in sexuality.  Did you know that some people are sexually attracted to both men and women but may only want to do heart type or spousal love with one of those.  Then there are those who romantically love and want to live married to both.  Are you aware that occasionally a head injury can result in a change of sexual preference.  On and on variety goes.

The truth is if you can think of a love, lifestyle or sexual relationship variation, it is a good bet that somewhere on our planet there are people doing it.  Not only that, but all that diversity may be backed by naturally occurring, normal, healthy variations in the brain motivating the variant sexual/love/lifestyle (different than usual) behavior.

Gender Is Not Binary but Your Society/Culture May Be

You do not really choose your gender.  Via nature, your gender chooses you.  For some people that can seem like a quite befuddling choice.  For others it is a very threatening and highly stressful, confused choice.  Usually that is because they live in a culture or society that pigeon holes all people into strictly either male or female.  For the bisexual, homosexual, transsexual, and anything-else-sexual, this can be a really big, life warping and even life-threatening problem.  In more loving societies and in those becoming so, diversity in love, lifestyle or gender variation, life can be easier, safer, healthier and more naturally actualized.

Becoming Aware of the Questions Gender Diversity Can Bring

Who or what are you attracted to and who is attracted to you?  Is it different from who you want to love and be loved by?  Is that different from, or in opposition to what you have been taught?  The questions can become ever more difficult.  For instance: If you are a boy who lusts for girls but wants to become a girl, does that make the inner you a lesbian?  If it does, is that a moral issue or a religious issue or maybe even a non-issue?  If your questions are confused how can you ever discover what is true or real for you and about you?  How can you become okay in a culture that says it is not okay to be you?  How can you give and get  love healthfully in society that will punish you for deviation from its norms of how people should and should not love?

These are but some of the stressor questions complicating the romantic, heart-mate and spousal love lives of those having a gender diversity.  We suggest this means the gender diverse really can use lots of good, healthy, friendship love, family love and help with their own healthful self-love development.

Gender Conflicted Romantic and Heart-mate Love

For those who are unresolved about their gender identity, there often is painful and confusing difficulty concerning what to do and what not to do romantically.  That blends into what to do and not do socially, sexually and maritally.  Romance and spouse type love for some seems like a lonely impossibility and hopeless or at best problem-filled future.  Some give up trying, others decide to settle for whatever and whoever comes along, while still others pretend or work desperately to become a normal heterosexual.  That can lead to becoming trapped by one version or another of a false love syndrome, a fake marriage or having a conflicted life of infidelity subject to it’s ruinous ravages stemming from deception and betrayal.

Daring to reveal one’s true, sexual proclivities to a romantic interest, can present an agonizing life labyrinth to attempt navigating through.  Just figuring out who you are attracted to and who can be attracted to you is hard enough for anyone having any gender confusion.  Nevertheless, when romantic or heart-mate love connections do occur and are sufficiently reciprocated, real and marvelous love can occur and grow.

Another problem is what to do with one’s sexuality.  Gender variant people often have gender variant sexual desires.  This clearly and easily is seen in the intensely bisexual person who naturally wants to have sex with both males and females and even perhaps with others who are less easily gender identified.  That, by the way, might qualify them for being a bit omni-sexual.

Sexual experimenting, toleration for variance, alternate lifestyles like group marriages, communal living & other unique relationship arrangements can come into play in these situations.  Running afoul of cultural norms based in heterosexuality is common in these situations and, of course, adds to the stressors involved.

Around the world and throughout history, one can find successful examples and models of how these gender variations have been successfully handled and where healthy, real love has prevailed.  Sadly, there also are lots of examples where it has not.  Openness to heart-mate love of many variations is growing, especially in urban centers around the world.  Push back regressive reactions against these relational variations also are growing fueled by prejudice, judgmentalism, condemnation and irrational fear.  The worldwide trend, however, seems to be a bit more pro-love than anti-love for those of varying gender orientations.

A Synthesized Solution

Who do you feel attracted to?  Notice that this question is not what gender do you feel attracted to.  That too is an okay question but I suggest not the primary question.  If sometimes you are attracted to a kind, generous, funny, sexy, particular person who happens to be a man, and other times you are attracted to the same traits in a female, it’s the traits that may count more than the gender.  In this kind of case, it may be your job to carefully explore both attractions.  But do not confuse attraction with love.  We get attracted for all sorts of different reasons that are not love.

Who do you get interested in?  What do they do that interests you?  How are they intriguing you?  There too, your job is to explore and experiment into that interest.  Something inside you has said, notice that person.  It probably has not said just, notice that gender.  Go explore and adventure carefully with that person no matter what their gender or gender variation is.  Let the relationship grow into whatever it grows into.  It may be a friendship love, a romantic love or even something without a name.

Who stirs you up and gets you puzzled as to what you are feeling?  Go explore and adventure around, with & toward them – carefully.  See who you become with them and what they have to offer.  That is your job assignment coming from deep, inner forces that point you toward particular people you might just end up loving and being loved by.

The love you grow with a person may turn out to be a whole lot more important than their gender or gender variation.  However, the gender factor is indeed an important one.  It may have a lot to do with how your life and future lifestyle goes.

Now, if it totally does not feel right for you to romantically get involved with someone of a particular gender or gender variation, then probably – do not do it.  Do, however, question whether those are really your own, deep, inner, real feelings or are they what you have been taught to think you should feel.

Whoever you love is whoever you love, irrespective of their psychobiological gender.  Whether or not you can do heart-mate or spousal love with them is a question to face later after your relationship has had time to grow and perhaps become one of healthy, real heart-mate love or something else.
One word of caution.  Usually it is wiser to be the chooser than the chosen.  Of course, when it gets to be truly mutual that is even better.

Help spread love knowledge – tell someone about this site and its many mini-love-lessons, okay?

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Can you have some kind of love for any and every kind of gendered person you really get to know,

Connection Matching - A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson teaches you about love matchers at work; ‘head’ matching; ‘gut’ matching; ‘genital’ matching; ‘heart’ matching; and jointly growing your connection matching.

Love Matchers At Work

Imagine that you are at a college sponsored weekend workshop for people who want to learn how to improve their love connection matching.  You’re in a small group discussion and you hear the following things:

‘Head’ Matching

Sophia says, “I thought he was just right for me. He was super sexy, oh so sweet and kind, and amaze!, amaze! he showed his emotions very easily and well for a guy.  The problem emerged later.  I hate to say it but he just wasn’t smart enough, and the love that I thought would follow the infatuation just didn’t show up.  We couldn’t really talk except in very simple ways.  I discovered that a love-mate I might spend the rest of my life with has to be bright and relish the exuberance of intelligent discourse, or at least be interested in learning to do that . I need that kind of stimulation; it’s just who I am.”

Learn from Sophia.  Are you in need of a good intellectual or mental match for making a good, lasting love connection?  For a mate, a good friend, or a good close family member you really ‘click’ with, will you do best with a good ‘head’ match to go along with a good ‘heart’ match?  If your mental matching isn’t right or compatible enough what will that mean for your relationship?

‘Gut’ Matching

Jacob remarked, “Regretfully, I broke it off with Ava although in many ways, at least on the surface, she seemed perfect.  Ava was bright, and wonderfully educated and we could intellectually talk for hours.  Also Ava was super-sexual, even more than me.  Besides those attributes she was fairly affectionate, rather thoughtful, forgiving and understanding, and I guess you could say kind of loving.  Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

“Well, unfortunately Ava had no guts.  She was a coward about everything, except maybe sex.  Also her range of emotions seemed kind of narrow.  Besides getting scared about all sorts of things, and being sort of sweet or sexy, she was emotionally mostly flat.  She just didn’t get passionate or emotionally involved about much of anything, and wasn’t willing to ‘step out of her comfort zone’.  That’s the reverse of me.  I get excited about all sorts of things.  So our time together got to be rather boring.  Ava helped me realize I need my love-mate to have and show lots of strong feelings and get emotional about all the big, important things in life.  Otherwise, life just passes you by, and I refuse to live that way.”

Learn from Jacob.  Are you in need of a love-mate who, at the psychological ‘gut’ level, shows lots of spirit, knows and shows their emotions well, is somebody who can feel deeply and maybe also quite bravely explore life?  Or maybe you need a person with a milder ‘gut’ makeup.  Being well matched at the ‘gut’ or emotions level as well as at the ‘heart’ love level can be ever so important.

‘Genital’ Matching

Olivia commented, “I broke it off with Mason because, truth be told, sex is a lot more important to me than is was to him.  Until I admitted that to myself, I thought I was going to marry Mason.  I kept thinking sex would get better and become more essential in his life too.  We talked it over and I let him know I wanted more powerful intimacy, lots of variety, and big sexual adventures.

“He said all the right things but his actions didn’t change much.  It was like our parts just didn’t match.  I think my heart knew all along, because I never felt like we really connected at the core heart level either but I kept thinking we would. . I guess I was fooling myself because so many outside parts did seem to match up pretty well.  We were from the same background and both my mother and my friends liked him.  But this big, important, very personal side of me just didn’t fit with that  part of him.”

Learn from Olivia.  How well matched can you and your love-mate get to be erotically?  Poor matching at the psychological, ‘genital’ level can and often does lead later to ‘cheating’, affairs, bringing home an STD, and a growing vulnerability to other seductions.  It also can lead to repeated fights or passive/aggressive friction, and abrasive draining ways of relating.

‘Heart’ Matching

Noah smiled and said, “You all are really helping me think Isabella and I may be really right for each other.  We connect well at all four levels.  Head-wise we talk about all sorts of things and seem to be a really good, intellectual match for each other.  Gut-wise, we cry and laugh and really share our feelings – pretty much all the time.  She’s better at it than I am, but I’m opening up more and more.  And what you’re calling the genital level, well, we are a little naïve there but were excited about exploring all sorts of erotica together.

Best of all is how we are at the heart level.  I’ve never felt so much connection and deep respect for anyone like I do with Isabella.  I see how wonderful she is and I’ve never felt so many good emotions as when we’re together.  We’re so much more alive than we were before we met.  We even differ with each other well.  We both want to learn how to love each other in the best ways, and we’re working at that like by being at this workshop.”

Learn from Noah.  Are you working at and getting good at connecting at the heart level?  It’s important to connect at all four of the levels talked about here, but most important of all is connecting really well at the heart level.

Growing Your Connection Matching

Hear what Emma had to say.  “When William and I first met he was all about what you are calling ‘head’ stuff.  He was Mr. High IQ.  But he did it in a fun and interesting way. He got me into reading all sorts things I’d never even heard of, and got me excited about ‘the world’.  Then I discovered he had another well-developed part.  He opened me up to wild, crazy sex and what a scary, wonderful universe that turned out to be.  Then it was my turn.

“Sort of by using sexuality, I led him into getting into his emotions and sharing all our intimate feelings together.  Then intellectually and emotionally we started studying love because we knew we were ‘falling into it’ with each other.  So, I guess you could say William got me into the head and genital stuff and I got him into the heart and gut stuff.  I think it often works that way with men and women”.

Learn from Emma.  Are you good at opening yourself up to what a love-mate, or for that matter a friend might be able to introduce you to, and can you recognize what your own inner, psychological ‘head’, ‘heart’, ‘gut’ or ‘genital’ levels have to offer?  In a love relationship are you willing to work at connecting with another at all four levels?  One of the many, beautiful benefits of becoming a loving couple is how both people can open up new worlds to one another.

Know that most couples don’t match exactly, but rather have high, medium or low connection matching in the four areas we are exploring here. What predicates the development of a really good, healthy, love relationship is the willingness and ability to develop and expand areas that might need some improvement for better connection matching.   In choosing a love-mate it usually is so helpful to consider how good your connection matching is or what the distance between you might be in all of the four areas.

Know that there are many lasting, excellent, love unions where people only connect at the heart level and possibly the genital level too.  In those situations other connection matches can be made with deep, good friendships which satisfy needs at other levels.  Know also that when two people in a love relationship decide to work at exploring and developing their connection matching at all levels they can do it.  And in doing so they can greatly expand the world they get to live in together.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
When thinking about psychological connecting in a relationship at the ‘head’, ‘heart’, ‘gut’ and ‘genital’ levels, which do you think you’re best at and which might you most need to develop further?

Related posts:

1. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
2. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
3. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

What Makes Love Last?

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson first discusses love maintenance and its importance; then touches on male and female false training; followed by a list of a dozen “Lasting Love Factors”; and ends with how those factors might be achieved in your love life.

Love Maintenance

Once you fall in love the rest is automatic, isn’t it?

You will magically live happily ever after once you have found your one true love, isn’t that right?  Once you both make a commitment, get married, etc. you’re in a state of relationship security and the rest is mostly easy -correct?  Of course, intellectually you know these statements may not be true and you might have to do some hard work to keep a love relationship going and not lose it.  Subconsciously, however, you may be programmed to believe in and depend on some very false myths about love and what it takes to succeed as a couple.  No one ever told you a story in which Prince and Princess Charming had to go to marriage counseling to keep their love alive and progressing.

The truth is love relationships take a lot of maintenance work, just like everything else of major and lasting importance.  About love and marriage, a super-rich real estate developer once said, “If you have to work at it (love) something is wrong.”   He went on to explain that if something was wrong with it you might as well get rid of it and start over, which is what he did – marriage after marriage after marriage after marriage.

Almost everybody wants their major love relationship to be lasting.  Unfortunately not much is done to teach people they must do the maintenance work and the improvement work that makes a love relationship last.  We certainly can’t rely on lasting love being magically automatic.

Male and Female False Training

Many a man has been trained to think ‘love work’ is ‘women’s work’.  That’s a prescription for a heartbreaking breakup.  Many a woman and also a lot of males have been subconsciously programmed to think “if he or she loves me they will know what to do, and do it”.  That too is a prescription for a lot of heart ache and an eventual, big, love failure.  Both people in a couples, healthy, real, love relationship will have to work at it, and they’ll have to do that labor in good team work to make it last.

A Dozen “Lasting Love” Factors

1.    There has to be healthy, real love and not sick, false forms of love.

2.    Love repeatedly has to be shown through behaviors to demonstrate, deliver and trigger feeling loved.

3.    Power is democratically shared.

4.    High appreciation and respect are mutual and commonly communicated.

5.    The relationship supports the growth of healthy self-love in both partners.

6.    Both partners repeatedly enjoy each other.

7.    Truth prevails and deception is absent.

8.    Emotions are shared and empathetically treated when shared.

9.    Problems are treated in an ‘I win, You win, Nobody loses and, therefore, We win together’ approach resulting in an ‘It’s us against the problems’ teamwork and not an ‘Us against each other’ style.

10.    The major kinds of behavior that tend to destroy love relationships are absent.

11.    There is high valuing of the love relationship and the love partner and both are frequently and sincerely expressed.

12.    There is a consistent working on the relationship for both growing, improvement and repair when needed, and never taking the relationship or the loved partner for granted or undervaluing either.

Achieving The Above

You can learn and do a lot about all of the above 12 factors.  Also you can do what it takes to make these 12 factors a description of your couple’s love relationship and make it deeply joyous, inspiring, energizing and a lot of simple fun.  Not to work in teamwork with one another to achieve the above 12 factors in your couple’s life could be destructive and dangerous to the health and well-being of your love.  At this website you can find mini-love-lessons to assist you in achieving each of the above 12 factors.  Books, other websites, workshops, seminars, retreats, relationship coaching and counseling, and couples therapy also exist to assist you.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Which of the above 12 factors gives you the most trouble, grabs your attention or puzzles you the most, and why do you suppose that is?

Related posts:

1. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love …
2. Adultery And No Divorce Love 

Living Well via Loving Well

Synopsis: About your tree of life; love well to live well in every way; a few important definitions; why love research is hard to research; different kinds of love give different results; and a love prescription for nourishing your tree of life.

How Is Your Tree of Life Growing?

Let’s say you have a tree of life on which grow many fruits.  There are the fruits of your labors, the fruits of your learning, the fruits of your relationships, the fruits of your very nature, the fruits of your appreciations, your fun and your joys, and all the other fruits of your involvements and of your being.

As you partake of the fruits of your tree of life your spirit is nourished.  But there is a question.  What nourishes your tree of life?

Consider this.  Healthy, real love nourishes your tree of life like nothing else.  Abundantly given and received, healthy real love is the most important of all things that bring forth life’s high order thriving.  Arguably, all of life’s ever increasing, enriching variety and all of life’s most important enhancements and improvements have been and are love related and love nourished in one way or another.  As sundry philosophies and religions have purported love is for life the greatest of all things.  Therefore, it follows that love may be for you and those you care about the most important of all things.  So, are you giving love due regard?

Love Well to Live Well in Every Way

The better you are at love the better you function, the healthier and happier your life is, and the longer you are likely to live.  Love poorly and you live less well functioning, less happy, less healthy and less long.  That is what a growing preponderance of worldwide research from a wide variety of fields is telling us.  Mounting evidence shows that people who are in well-loving couples relationships, families, friendship networks and love-oriented communities live the best lives, by every way of measuring quality of life.

A Few Important Definitions

Love, or more accurately – healthy, real love –  as used here is simply defined thus:
Healthy, Real Love Is a Powerful, Vital, Natural, Process of Highly Valuing, Desiring for, Often Acting for, and Taking Pleasure in the Well Being of the Loved (see the column at the left of this page  “Definition of Love Series” for further and more full definitions and discussions).

Love can be viewed as a biological reality having largely to do with the brain’s limbic system and various neurochemical, and biochemical, and perhaps neuro-electrical phenomena in at least higher order species.  Love also can be viewed as a psychological reality having to do with the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with love.  This especially involves the eight groups of behavior which have been found to convey love and trigger different, healthy, neurological and biological processes in both the giving and receiving of love (see the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love).
Love can be seen as a relational reality because it is in relationships that love’s biological and psychological phenomena occur, as has been found by various individually focused and socially oriented scientific research disciplines.

Loving well is defined as consistently acting toward others and toward yourself in all matters of high value in ways consistent with the eight groups of direct, love behaviors known to convey, receive and trigger bio-psycho-social love reactions.  Loving well can be described as consistently practicing and developing one’s love skills until, more often than not, one is successful at love efforts, love relationships and love thriving.

Why Love Research Is Hard to Research

With some disappointment we must note that the word love often is avoided by some but not all researchers.  This seems to be because “love” is used as a synonym for sex, and perhaps because of its often confusing, contradictory and sometimes pathological use in poetic and romantic literature.  Researchers who try to avoid the use of the word love often use substitutes like “affectionate attachment”, “warm positive regard”, “intimate personal ties”, “close-knit connection”, “emotionally bonded relationship” and a host of similar terms, all of which might easily be translated as “love” by learned readers.  Interestingly researchers in the older, more established disciplines don’t seem to mind using the word love at all.  The word and the topic love show up in the professional literature of the several neurosciences, medicine, biology, primatology, experimental psychology and even in economics.

It seems only in the newer social sciences and the helper-fields (like the several forms of counseling) that there appears to be a squeamishness about using the word love.  This avoidance of the word love and the resulting plethora of substitute terms does make it considerably harder to look up research results related to love.  Nevertheless, with some prodigious effort it can be done.  So, here are a few of the overall trends from that research.

Different Kinds of Love Give Different Kinds of Benefit

Committed-couple love relationships have been found to help people avoid disease, have a general higher level of overall health, and assist people in dealing more successfully with most of life’s difficulties.  In some studies “marrieds” do a little better than co-habitating couples, but with other factors the reverse is true.  Co-habiting couples have been found to have better, all-over, psychological well-being than do the legally married and those living single without a committed relationship.  However, “marrieds” have been measured as having somewhat better physical health.

Men tend to be a bit healthier in marriages but women in cohabitation, according to some studies.
The one, big drawback to couple’s love occurs when one of the couple dies.  The surviving partner is more likely to fall ill and die within a two-year period of the loss unless friends, family, altruistic causes and/or unless another romantic love comes strongly into their life during that time.

Families in a number of nations who frequently act to love well often produce far happier, healthier people who are better able to cope with stress and, therefore, don’t tend to suffer from stress-related illnesses nearly as much as the less loving.

Friendship love which occurs in close-knit, interpersonal networks produces considerably lower mortality rates at all age levels in international comparisons studies.  With friendship love there is a much reduced likelihood of self-destructive behavior, fewer heart attacks, less cancer, less arthritis, fewer gastrointestinal upsets, fewer skin problems, fewer headaches and fewer complications from pregnancy.

Humanitarian and altruistic love also produce excellent health and longevity results, as does living in love-oriented communities.  The evidence suggests all of these love sources act as a protective shield against toxic and stressful environments.  A lowering of bad cholesterol and a raising of immunity functioning especially is common with those who love altruistically.  Much lower use of mood affecting drugs, legal and illegal, is another result according to various researchers.

Spiritual love and well loving people active in spiritually-based communities have been shown to have healthier behaviors, less substance abuse and healthy sleep and appetite habits.  This seems to hold true for people from ‘Austria to Australia’ and across all major ethnic and religious groups.
The well loving who also are quite sexually loving measure as happier, more vitally alive, more productive and more creative.

Healthy, real self-love is a very important factor in living well.  Some hold that it is the single most important type of love for having a happy, healthy, long life because it is viewed as central for excelling at all other types of healthy, real love.

A Love Prescription for Nourishing Your Tree of Life

Living by way of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of healthy, real love has been found to be more important to happy, healthy living than a good diet, exercise, low stress environments, education, wealth, ethnicity and a host of other similar factors – not that these factors are unimportant.  So, if you desire the good life get into love every way you can.  To do this I suggest you study this site’s love’s definition and its major functions, and also take a look at the various forms of false love along with the different kinds of love, and everything else you can discover about what love really means and how it’s done.

Especially learn and practice the behaviors of love and the skills of love.  Learn to give love, think love, feel the many emotions and physical sensations of love, and learn to receive love well.  To do all that obviously is what this site is all about, so you might want to visit it often, and tell friends family, and maybe even enemies about it.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question What will your life be like if you devote a fair amount of time and energy to learning and practicing healthy, real love – and what will it be like if you don’t?

Related posts:

1. Loving Others "As" You Love Yourself ???
2. Self-Love – What Is It? 

Friendship Love And Its Extraordinary Importance

Synopsis: The many marvels of friendship love, an example of widely varying emphases on friendship love and its vast importance, friendship love in good and bad times, and evaluating what friendship love may do for your life are given here.

Friendship love may have saved more lives than any other kind of love!  Friendship love may help people through hard times as much as any other type of love!  Friendship love is often the longest lasting type of love in many people’s lives.  For lots of people friendship love has been the most reliable kind of love in their lives.

Friendship love can be the type of love that has the least complications, hassles and problems.  In the lives of no small number of people it is friendship love that has been the deepest and most profound type of love they have experienced.  So, Dear Reader, I urge you to consider the role of friendship love in your life and its potential in your future.

“Shocked!  That’s what I am, totally and completely shocked!  Trevor and I were going to be married next month and now it’s over, all because I told him he would have to say goodbye to his friends who are single after we are married.  He told me he loved me dearly but to him his deep love with his friends had done him more good than any other kind of love, and he was not about to give up any true friend for the uncertainty of a marriage.  He told me that where he came from friendships were for life while marriages may or may not last, and he thought that anyone who would ask him to give up his true friends couldn’t really love him, and with that he broke off our engagement”.

Teresa who was reporting this had grown up in an American social sphere in which marriage and romantic love were seen as far more important than friendship love.  Trevor on the other hand has been raised in a sphere of European society that emphasized the great importance of life-long, abiding, solid, friend relationships based in real, unending love.  For Trevor and people raised in that social sphere the end of a profound friendship was the cause for far deeper grief than the end of a marriage or even a love-filled romance.  Also in Trevor’s world to use the word “friend” had profound significance while in Teresa’s it was used often in a light and not all that meaningful way.

Mild and very recent acquaintances were sometimes referred to as friends in Teresa’s world but that would never happen in Trevor’s.  Thus, you can see that in different parts of the world and in different social spheres friendship love is given very different levels of importance.  With some “friend” implies the existence of a true, deep, love relationship of great value.  With others “friend” refers to a much more shallow and inconsequential, often temporary relationship in which there is nothing even approaching true, deep love.

Here a deep and true friend is someone with whom you have developed a healthy, real love.  A true friend basically can be a person as close and important to you as a dearly beloved sister, or brother, or other close family member.  Deep and abiding, love-filled, true friendships can make people “family” in the best meaning of that word.  In fact friendship love is as important and sometimes even more important than family love in the lives of many.  It is often friendship love that prevails when all other loves have been found wanting.  There are many who say it was the love from a friend that got them through and able to survive a great tragedy, a horrible defeat, or monstrous loss in their lives.

Often it is a true and deeply loving friend who will tell you the uncomfortable to hear truth about yourself when no one else will.  It is friendship love that gets that friend to stand by you as you blunder and struggle with your life, and your flaws and shortcomings.  It is friendship love that motivates a friend not to give up on you even when you are being absurdly wrong, stupid and self-defeating.  Friendship love for many people is the only love that sustains and protects them through disasters and the bleak times of desolation.

In good times it is friendship love that can provide free flowing companionship, egalitarian compatibility, shared fun, delightful comradeship and someone to share victory celebrations with.  In those times which are ordinary and mundane friendship love can bring easy going relaxation, anti-lonely connection and sweet, pleasant acceptance.

How are you doing at true, deep, abiding, friendship love?  Have you given true friendship and friendship love enough thought?  Enough effort?  Enough importance?  Do you have some ideas of what you might do if you were going to go after more and greater friendship love in your life?  Are you aware that friendship of the deep and love-filled type may greatly enrich your life, open your life to new horizons, cause your life to be lived at a higher plain, and perhaps even save your life?

There’s lots more to consider when thinking about real, friendship love.  I like to ask people to look at the possible future importance of real, friendship love in their lives before getting into a lot of the “how-to’s” of growing friendship love.  If you’re going to really succeed at love broadly friendship love probably has to be one of the things you give a real good look at.

One more thing about this important kind of love.  It is of great importance for you To Be a truly loving friend.  Some people want more and better loving friends but don’t give much attention to being one.  To help you think about this you might want to check out  “The Definitions of Love” in the column on the left of this page, and in particular “The Behavioral Definition of Love” entry.

As always, Grow and Go in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you think of a past acquaintance, or friend, or lover you would like to reconnect with and see if you might be able to grow toward a true, friendship-type, love relationship with that person?  If so, what might you do about that?

Related posts:

1. Friendship “Like” to Friendship “Love”
2. Love Bids and Their Astounding Importance
3. A Dozen Kinds of Love to Have in Your Life

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Becoming Well Loved and More Loved – Three Main Ways

Synopsis: Here you get to learn about the counter-societal, teaching idea of getting yourself well loved; and three main, different than usual, ways to achieve that; a three level understanding of love actions you can take; and dealing with the question of who is to be in charge of the love in your life; plus some fine book and mini-love-lesson recommendations.

The Importance of Getting Yourself Well Loved

Since you are reading this you probably have an understanding of the importance of love in your life plus you are being proactive not just relying on luck, fate, etc. to take care of your loved needs.  What you may not know is just how widespread and deep the importance of love goes and some of the major things you can do to put healthy, real love into your life.

The evidence is mounting.  Research in a wide array of scientific fields points to those well loved as living healthier and longer, happier, more productive, more successful, living more balanced, having better sex, helping others more, contributing more to the general well-being of all, recovering from illnesses faster, having better friendships and having greater success in all types of love relationships.

The converse also is appearing to be true.  Being poorly loved or unloved looks to be bad for your health and well-being in just about every area studied so far.  You might read Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

The good news is you can get yourself well loved.  The not so good news is much of what our love-ignorant world tells us to do to have love, find love, etc. doesn’t work very well.  And then there also is the myth that you should do nothing until love finds you or your love fate is determined by mystifying forces over which you have little or no influence.  One educated estimate reports that relying on that myth gives you about a 15% chance of succeeding at love.  Luckily, certain in-depth analytical works suggest your subconscious probably does not believe in that myth and naturally pushes you to actively go searching for love whether you consciously know it or not.  Now, if you add conscious learning and thinking about love, like you are doing right now, you can vastly improve your chances with some well-chosen and well informed actions.  However, those actions are not commonly understood very well.  They fall into three major categories which I will present you with right now.

I. To become well loved – become more lovable and then even more lovable!

We can know that basically you already are lovable because you grew and got enough love to survive your first two years of life.  Otherwise, you would have died of a failure to thrive illness like marasmus because that is what happens to unloved infants.

Your Lovability is something you can do a lot things about.  First, it helps to understand what being and becoming lovable means and what those things you can do about it are and are not. One thing to do, if you do not already, is to own-up to the idea that you already are in possession of at least some natural, lovable attributes.  Your job is to grow them and your all over lovableness, add to it, practice it and then show it.

Being lovable itself can be simply defined as having and exhibiting attributes, traits and characteristics which attract and draw affection and loving thoughts, feelings and actions to you.  So, what do you know about the traits and characteristics associated with being lovable?  It is important to know that lovability has both a more surface and a more deep meaning.  Both are worth consideration.

Lovability at the more surface level means exhibiting traits like being adorable, amiable, charming, cheerful, cute, complimentary, engaging, embraceable, fetching, genial, pleasing, rewarding and winsome.  There are others you may want to add.

Being lovable in a deeper meaning way includes characteristics like being kind, caring, compassionate, able to be tender, emotionally warm, accepting, supportive, trustworthy, harmonious, positive, non-judgmental, affirmative, self disclosing, tolerant, friendly, assertive rather than aggressive, and most of all easily willing and able to be sincerely loving.  Here too, there are other characteristics you might want to include.

Now, you might want to start evaluating your own having and exhibiting lovableness traits and characteristics, along with goals and actions for making improvements.  Consider journaling those.  I also heartily recommend reading Lovability by Dr. Robert Holden, a book that could really help you grow your own lovability.

II. To Have Love – Become Loving and Then More and Better at Being Sincerely And Actively Loving!

This is an old teaching literally going back at least to the year one when Ovid put it forth in his teachings and writings on love and sex in his famous The Art of Love.  Modern, behavioral, science research suggests he was quite right.  Those who are good at being actively loving to themselves as well as to others are the ones most likely to get good, healthy, real and lasting love coming their way.

Becoming more loving requires learning what being loving is and how it is done.  It is a bit more involved than you might suppose.  Therefore, you may have to study it rather closely and repeatedly.  You may have to learn to think more lovingly and more about love itself (see “Thinking Love to Improve Love”).  You may have to cultivate getting yourself in touch with the many emotions of love and feeling them more fully (see “An Alphabet of Love’s Good Feelings”).  Most of all, it takes learning and practicing the behaviors that convey love and help you gain skills for getting love to happen.  For your healthy self-love, it helps to greatly enjoy doing all that.  Some of love’s sages teach that if you are excited and joyful in the process of learning to be more and better at loving, it is a good sign indicating you are doing it well.

To help you learn what the behaviors of love are, I recommend you familiarize yourself with this three level, 12 point schema.  Remember, love is complicated and this will actually make it more clear and simplify it – some.

BEHAVIORS THAT CONVEY LOVE CATEGORIES

Cardinal Behaviors of Love (those of comprehensive and inclusive preponderant importance)
Nurturing love actions (growth, developmental, actualizing)
Protecting love actions (guarding, prevention, defending)
Healing love actions (healthcare, recovery and well-being)
Metaphysical/Spiritual love actions (meditation, prayer, ritual)

Crucial Behaviors of Love (those that are acutely important and decisive in major, ongoing love relationships)
Affirmational love actions (affirming the value of the loved)
Self-Disclosure love actions (sharing oneself, transparency)
Tolerational love actions (tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness)
Receptional love actions (receiving love well gives love)

Core Behaviors of Love (those that are basic and foundational)
Tactile love (connection, affection, sexuality)
Expressional love (facial, tonal, gestural, postural)
Verbal love (words spoken and written)
Gifting love (object gifts and experience and service gifts)

To learn and have a fuller understanding of these categories, I suggest you consult the Behaviors category in this site’s labels links below and start with the mini-love-lesson titled “Behaviors That Give Love – the Basic Core Four”.  My book, Recovering Love, covers the Crucial and Core Behaviors more fully and very usefully.  The Five Love Languages, by the Rev. Dr. Gary Chapman, has helped a lot of people with the how-to’s of being loving with a different and somewhat simpler, action-oriented approach.

III. To Become Well Loved and More Loved – Become Love Active, and then Much More Love Active!

Go create your own new and better chances for love.  You can do that by going the same old places you always go, with the same old people but risk acting in more loving, new and different ways.  You also can do that by risking going to different places and with new groups of people while acting more loving in your new and different ways.

Take what you are learning about love and put it into actions again and again.  Go out and about being lovable and loving!  Make the places you inhabit your experimental love lab and your practice fields.  Have fun with honing your skills when helping people feel more loved, valued, attended to, cared about and enjoyed.  Give some thought and a little planning to quick hit-and-run loving, fast guerrilla attack love and brisk who was that mysterious stranger love actions.  Get some images in your mind of what those terms might mean and enact some of them.  Practice on just about everybody including yourself.  Do be sensitive to other’s adverse reactions and tame it down a little when necessary.  But if done with a smile and sincere good-will, you probably will get positive reactions and will be modeling good loving and lovability in the process.

It can be very important for you to pay the price of discomfort as you go explore new and different groups of people.  To do that well, it is important for you to ponder what you think of them rather more than be concerned about what they think of you.  Remember, socially it works better to be the chooser than the chosen and certainly far better than being the beggar.  Usually, the trick is to be friendly assertive (not aggressive) as you listen and ask questions more than you talk or work to impress.  It is very okay to target people you are attracted to but don’t forget attraction and love are very different things (see “Attraction or Love or What?”).  Much of what you do probably will not work very well, especially at first.  Healthy, real love usually does not usually come easily nor should it.  It works best if you count your victories as a whole lot more important than your losses.  You can learn how to succeed from both victories and losses.

Who Is Going to be In Charge of Your Love?

Doesn’t your life of love belongs to you?  Yes, you can share ownership with those you love and those who love you but isn’t it your joyful job to not only give but get yourself well loved?  That, of course, flies in the face of much cultural training which teaches going after love gets in the way of getting it, that it is egotistical and selfish and it is not the way love is supposed to work.  Could it be that those ideas were invented to keep the competition de-activated?  Could it also be that, regarding love, whoever said “the race goes to those who dare to run it” was right?  I might add that it also goes to those who learn to run well and practice a lot.

If you really get determined to get yourself more lovable, more loving and more love active and you use the three major ways (Core, Crucial and Cardinal behaviors) plus employ everything else you can learn to do about healthy, real love, it is likely but not guaranteed that your life of love will be a much bigger, better success.  Work happily to become more lovable, more loving and more love active and see what happens!

One More Little Thing

Who can you talk this over with who may enjoyably disagree or challenge these ideas or your ideas about these ideas?  While you are at it, we would like it if you tell them about this site and its many, totally free, mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who and what got you to think the way you have in the past thought about love and how well has that worked?

Compersion: A Newly Identified Emotion of Love?

Mini-Love-Lesson #214

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson introduces and discusses a newly identified emotion opposite to jealousy; it tells of couples’ experiences with it; its surprises, some of its problems, its proclaimed benefits and the growing attention being paid to it.

Learning About Love’s Many Emotions

We are starting to comprehend that love is not an emotion but does involve and manifest, not just one but many different emotions.  There are the different emotions of feeling loved, loving and lovable.  There is passion, compassion, serenity, tenderness, ebullience, protectiveness, empathy, union, kindness – and many, many others.  Increasingly, love is understood to be a powerful, natural, vital, life process more akin to great life processes like metabolism, circulation, breathing, etc. than to just feeling an emotion, even a strong emotion (see “Definition of Love Series”; “Many Good Feelings Brought on by Love”; “An Alphabet of Loves Good Feelings”).

With these understandings, we also are beginning to identify the many emotions of love and discover how they influence our health, well-being and relational life.  In the 1960s, an emotion of love was newly identified and named at the highly influential Kerista commune.  This emotion only has started to come into a broader awareness and usage, and only in some relationally-focused communities.
This newly identified emotion has always been here.  However, it seems to be rare, especially in cultures producing a lot of personal insecurity.  It is seen as an emotion which is opposite to the feeling of jealousy.  It is described as a wonderful blessing to the lives of the individuals and couples who experience it.  The name the Kerista community gave it is “compersion”.  It is pronounced sort of like the “com” in compassion, plus “Persian” as in a person from Persia.

A Couple Feeling Compersion

I first professionally encountered the emotion of compersion many years ago though I did not know its name then.  While counseling a couple, they told of having unexpected, strange but extremely wonderful, love-filled feelings for one another while sexually adventuring experimentally with another couple.  They reported no jealousy, only joy at observing their own spouse having new, different and very pleasurable sex with the other couple.  They both struggled to described the feeling they mutually experienced.  One said it was like being allowed into an incredibly rare and very beautiful, very personal, intimate sharing experience with their spouse.  The other related being awestruck by seeing how their beloved was with first one and then both of the other couple.
They both further related that they felt amazingly closer and more deeply connected to one another as a couple after all four were satiated and resting.  They also were quite relieved that there was no jealousy or other bad feeling involved, as they had worried might happen.  Through their story, I was introduced to this emotion, later recognized as compersion.

This couple previously had successfully completed some couples counseling.  This time they had returned wondering if something was wrong with them for having these new, strange but wonderful and perhaps addictive pleasures.  They had entered the adventure hoping for some “hot, naughty, go wild” excitement vowing it would be just a one time only, long held, and shared fantasy-fulfilling event.

Now, they cautiously wanted to figure out if repeating the adventure with the same or other couples could be a good thing because it had been such a big, totally unexpected, good thing in their lives so far.  They also had promised each other to be reassuring and comforting of each other if either one felt insecure, threatened, jealous or anything else negative, which so far they did not.  So, they asked the question “are we crazy and is something wrong with us for feeling the way we do, or what?”.
That session ended with them agreeing to do some research on what other couples had experienced in similar situations and find out if there was reliable information about couples doing this sort of thing.  They came to the next session excitedly telling about discovering what the Buddhists call “MUDITA”, a feeling of joy in another’s joy, coming from joy being shared and experienced with someone else.  This couple also had discovered what the polyamorists were saying about the happiness of couples sexually, romantically and even maritally being involved in other love relationships.

They also had uncovered a range of problems that sometimes go wrong in such arrangements.  Then there was the potential of dangerous, sexually transmitted diseases which this couple was beginning to take more seriously.  Those discoveries led this couple to the conclusion that, for now, they had done enough adventuring and when STD’s were more medically manageable they might revisit the issue.  Until then, they would enjoy sharing their memories and creating erotic fantasies together.
Since then, I have counseled couples, throuples (see post “Throuple Love, a Worldwide Growing Way of the Future?”), polyamores and other alternate lifestyle relators who expressed having similar experiences and feelings.  Thanks mostly to the polyamore community, the word/feeling compersion and its definition, understanding, etc. is spreading.

It now is coming into wider usage to explain these feelings of joy when observing an intimate other’s sexual, romantic, even marital, joyful experience.
I think learning about loving in all its varied ways, even when unusual or different from what one is used to, can expand one’s thinking and perception of what love encompasses; this certainly has been true for me personally and professionally.

What do we need to know about the Emotion of Compersion?
This word is understood a bit differently in several different communities.  There are those who see it as unhealthy and perverse.  In others, it is argued that compersion is a proof of real, strong and healthy love.  That is because compersion is thought to reveal a person whose love surpasses jealousy, envy, insecurity, possessiveness and the cultural training to feel those things in romantic, love relationships.  Arguably, it also shows a person able to be happy for the happiness of the person they love, being happy without fear concerning the source of a heart-mates happiness.

Among poly, throuples, swingers, trans, bi and certain religious groups, there is a debated point that goes something like this:

If you and your partner, who you deeply love, can feel joy at seeing each other take joy in having sex with others, doesn’t that give evidence of you and your partner possessing a very strong and secure love bond?  Doesn’t it also offer evidence of your healthy self-love being quite strong?

If you and your heart partner both can observe and participate in sex with another, feel joy without jealousy or feel threatened, being insecure, angry or fearful, is that not proof of having a powerful, unconditional love for one another?  Isn’t it also evidence that you and your love mate have freed yourselves from society’s training and programming effects which often result in destructive jealousy, possessiveness, suspiciousness, mistrust, distrust and fear-based ways of seeing each other?

In its broadest usage, compersion is related to feeling love-related-joy whenever you see someone you love have happiness in their experiences with another person, irrespective of whether or not those experiences are sexual, romantic or of marital type love.

Examples can help.  Here are two:

After a counseling session, I saw an adult daughter happily introduce her mother to her father’s girlfriend.  Then all three of them went to pick up the father and go to dinner together.  It had been arranged that the girlfriend was going to spend the night with the father and mother, and that the daughter would fix breakfast for all of them the next morning.  In a follow-up session, all related that they were quite happy seeing each other be happy with each other and with the whole experience.
A husband and wife both told of how happy they were to rush home and tell each other about the dates they had just gone on with romantic others.  They took joy in each other’s date experience, often getting sexual with each other in the process, but not always.  Sometimes they were just happy for the other one’s happiness.

Compersion is related to another newly identified, similar emotion called “frubble”.  Feeling frubble means feeling joy when those you love are actively expressing their love to one another.  It may or may not be about sex, romantic love or marital type love in some communities, but in others it definitely has to do with sex or some manifestation of adult to adult love.

In certain religious circles, there are those who can relate compersion to the Buddhist emotion of mudita and/or to the ancient Greek koinonia which, as an emotion, has to do with the feeling of a joyous love unity with the Deity and simultaneously with one’s own gathered and similar feeling community of faith.

More specifically and more usually, compersion has to do with a person feeling not jealous, but love-filled joy when experiencing someone they intimately love have a happy, sexual and/or love experience with a third-party.  It definitely is an “I’m happy when I see you happy because I love you” kind of emotional experience.

Some think compersion may happen more easily in those language groups who do not have a possessive case way of talking or perhaps even thinking.  It also may be easier for those growing up in cultures with multiple person marriage systems and non-monogamous emphasizing societies.

Do You Want to Feel Compersion?

Compersion can be strongly recommended over feeling the destructive anguish of jealousy or lifeless indifference.  Of course, if feeling simple uncomplicated trust can be achieved via monogamous couple love, that also can be quite desirable.  Learning to feel compersion might save you from a painful breakup, or divorce, or a lot of horrible fights, or times of fear-filled loneliness, and depression.  Compersion also might be the only way leading to success in certain love relationships.
Compersion for many, means first battling jealousy, possessiveness, insecurity and its related low self love, suspiciousness, defensive anger, compulsion to control, tendencies to start to fight or take flight, avoid risk and conform, and a host of other problematic things.  A great deal of tolerational love (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”) also may be necessary.

It seems a fair number of those who come to feel compersion fairly easily, often had to fight their way there by way of lots of internal struggles.  They went back and forth between compersion and jealousy, or felt both simultaneously, as they worked to keep a primary love relationship alive and growing and with those struggles they grew a deeper, more intimate love.  Others continue, and with enough healthy, real love and loving support, may likely win their struggle.  Frequently self sabotage from a jealous and insecure, internal self is the biggest problem.  Those who succeeded are reportedly very happy about it.  Others have tried and given up but hopefully they grew and learned a lot in the process.

Paul, of the New Testament, tells us love is not jealous.  He did not tell us that love, instead of jealousy, could manifest the emotion of compersion maybe because no one knew about it or had a word for it.  However, now you do know about it and even might want to do something with that love knowledge, or not.

One More Little Thing

Wouldn’t you find it interesting and enjoyable to spread some love knowledge by talking over compersion with someone, and if you do, please mention this site and its many totally free love lessons.  Thanks.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  What do you think of the idea that if you have enough healthy self-love you won’t be jealous?

Related posts:

1. Throuple Love, a Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?
2. Envy With Love and Jealousy Without
3. Self-Love – What Is It?
4. Thinking About Love, How Good Can Yours Get?
5. Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So! 

Dog Love Is Real Love !

Mini-Love-Lesson #206

Synopsis: The exciting, new, and not so new, scientific evidence offering proof that dog’s love is real love put simply, some of the many and often surprising benefits of a love relationship with a dog, and what you can learn about real love from a dog and a dog’s love is summarily presented.

Canine Love and People

Time again in my psychotherapy practice, I saw love of and from a pet, mainly dogs, make a huge, sometimes life-saving difference.  Sometimes a depressed and lonely person getting a dog turned the tide of a deteriorating life into one moving up and forward.  Frequently in treating hurt and troubled children, a pet dog and its love proved to be amazingly therapeutic.  Many times getting a canine pet, especially a puppy, greatly aided parents and whole families become more love-oriented.

Pet dogs in the lives of the postwar trauma and disabled veterans, who I and my colleagues treated, was often crucial.  Some couples I worked with first learned some of the most important how-to’s of love from their pet dogs.  In divorce and love-loss recovery, dog love has been vital in preventing breakdowns, suicides, addiction relapses and countless hours lost to depressive malfunctioning.

But of course there are the disbelievers who say dogs really can’t love only humans can do that, and there are those who are quite sure that for dogs it’s just all about food.  There are the skeptics who ask, “How can you can really prove dogs can really love” and they say to dog lovers “Aren’t you just anthropomorphizing and seeing what you want to see?”  Plus, they ask, “Where’s the definitive evidence?”

Also from health insurance companies has come similar ideas justifying denials of services for canine assisted psychotherapy.  And that is even though increasing numbers of research studies have appeared which show how much it helps.  In fact, a whole movement for canine assisted counseling and psychotherapy has blossomed into existence.  I’m familiar with a number of therapists involved in pet assisted therapy.  They tend to claim, sometimes only secretly, that it is the love relationship between the patient and the dog that makes the therapeutic difference.  However, they have avoided reporting so officially because that isn’t thought to be acceptable in certain circles of professional influence.

Of course, for ages dog owners have proclaimed they absolutely know their pets truly loved them and they truly love their pets.  Countless true stories exist about dogs heroically saving their masters and even members of their master’s family’s lives.  Sometimes even after experiencing great pain and injury themselves.  But was it really because of love?  Well now, thanks to the brain sciences, we are beginning to have solid, science-based proof that dogs give and get real love.

The Brain Sciences and Dogs Who Love

It took a while to teach the 90 subject dogs to be still in MRI machines to get their brains scanned, while half received food in one experimental trial condition and half received verbal love messages in another.  One hypothesis was the data from the dog’s brains would show high activity indicating they valued the food in the reward centers of their brains far more than the verbal love sounds coming to their ears.  It was surprising to learn that for many dogs the two proved equal; the food did not elicit a greater response and wasn’t superior.  But in a significant number of others dogs, the neurological brain activity measurements proved the verbal love messages and sounds to be much more rewarding and more important than the food.  So, for dogs, receiving a verbal, behavioral love input was shown to be equal to, or superior to receiving food.  More brain science research on dog love is continuing at Emory University under the direction of neuroscientist Dr. Gregory Burns.

Other findings have showed that dogs can recognize and differentiate their master’s face from other human faces.  When they make this recognition their brains light up much like humans do, from infancy on, when seeing someone who they share a love relationship with.  It has long been observed that dogs go more quickly to their masters who exhibit loving behaviors including just loving facial looks.  These dogs also then begin to give actions of affection to their loving masters.  This strongly suggests that the limbic system brain centers that process love and the neurochemical reactions of processing love are likely to be much the same in humans and dogs.  That is exactly what the research evidence is increasingly pointing to.

Now, as we begin to scan inside the dog brains, we are beginning to see amazing similarities in how dogs and humans psychoneurologically process love.  The brain activity evidence shows that the neuro-electrical and neuro-chemical events in the limbic system of dog brains react much like a humans does when getting and when giving behaviors commonly associated with love.

Consider any two living beings having similarly structured brains.  When in the brains of any two such living beings, the same regions of their brains react the same way neuro-physically, neuro-electrically and neuro-chemically; and also when their accompanying, observable behavior is much the same, there is a most logical interpretation to be arrived at.  That interpretation is it is only reasonable to conclude that those two being are processing (i.e. mentally experiencing, thinking/feeling) much the same thing.  This exactly is what is proving to be true with dogs and humans interacting with each other while exhibiting the behaviors commonly associated with love.  Thus, the preponderance of this growing body of evidence points to dogs love being real love.  We are not likely to get much better evidence for this conclusion until someone invents a real way to actually do the Vulcan Mind Meld.

What Does Animal Comparative Psychology Have To Say?

The psychologists who compare the actions, reactions and interactions of animals with the same in humans are not at all surprised at the kind of results or conclusions just mentioned.  Not so long ago, the great comparative psychologist, Dr. Harry Harlow, proved that to baby monkeys receiving mother love was more important than receiving food.  Some infant monkeys even would starve themselves to death preferring to receive loving contact comfort from a mother surrogate rather than give that up for acquiring needed food.  No one expected that result and when it was discovered that part of the experiment was altered so infant monkeys did not have to suffer further starvation.

Harlow also discovered that baby monkeys who did not sufficiently receive the behaviors that give love in infancy and childhood were never able to successfully mate or healthfully interact with other monkeys.  This was true until they were given monkey therapy in the form of being lovingly treated probably by graduate student lab assistants.  Just like with human babies, non-loved and little-loved monkey infants were prone to early death involving failure to thrive deterioration syndromes.

It is to be noted that at the time of that research few researchers using animals thought that love, or for that matter most psychological factors, had much of anything to do with animals’ physical health and survival.  Consequently, it was Harlow’s discoveries which led to a revolution in the improved treatment of lab animals and after that zoo and circus animals; and the effects of those love findings are still spreading.  Human infants already were receiving much better love behavior treatment because pediatric research had discovered the same thing Harlow did with lab monkeys.  His famous research book is Learning to Love .

Now through comparative psychology’s efforts, along with neuropsychologists and other neuro-scientists, we have learned what looks like a very important general truth.  That truth seems to be that all higher order species, and especially mammals, have brains that make similar, healthful responses to the behaviors that are associated with giving and receiving love.  Therefore, the evidence more and more points to many animals, including dogs and humans, being able to give, get and do real love.
Hence, the preponderance of available evidence points to what dog owners have always known.  You really do love your dog and your dog really does love you.  It is a real love relationship and it can do you a world of good to have that love relationship.

The Many Benefits of Loving and Being Loved by a Dog

When you have a good love relationship with a dog, your stress hormones are likely to be lowered as is your bad cholesterol.  Your neurochemical reactions which allow and help you be happier will be much more active, and your immunity mechanisms will work better at keeping you from getting sick or infected.  The relating you do with others is likely to be more love-oriented and more effectively responsive.  If others see you with your dog, they are likely to be more positive toward you than they might have been.  Playing with and walking your dog will get you more exercise.

If danger is around, your dog is more likely to become alerted to it before you and then may alert and save you from some dire occurrence.  If you are ill or wounded in some way, having your pet dog around is likely to help you heal faster and maybe heal better.  If you are recovering from injury or engaged in any other kind of recovery and rehabilitation, it is much more likely to go better as you keep lovingly interacting with your pooch.  Psychologically, a love relationship with a good pet dog often acts like a good antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication with no bad side effects.  On and on go the benefits; we don’t have space here for all of them so far discovered.

Learning Love from Dogs

Once long ago, as a scout with other scouts, I was in a large wigwam listening to an ancient Lakota Indian wise woman tell of how the great spirit put dogs into the life of humans to teach us how to love.  It seems, according to that wisdom filled legend, we were not all that good at love until the dogs taught us how.  They taught by example of love’s loyalty, caring concern, forgiving nature, playful affection, protection focus and a host of other ways love gets demonstrated.  So, I suggest you look to your pet dog to model for you some of the best ways love gets done.  Translate what you see into human behavior.  Then see if you can do as well at love as your pet dog does.

Now one more little thing.  You might want to share this mini-love-lesson with a dog lover you know or with someone you think might do well to have a pet dog.  Also you might want to check out this other mini-love-lesson, “Pet Love”.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you give much thought to how much more enriched your life is or may become because of “interspecies love”?

Related posts:

1. Pet Love
2. Loneliness and Love
3. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
4. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
5. Love Is Natural – Love Relating You Learn