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Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers what self-love means and does not mean; a list of 12 of the many things healthy self-love helps us do; and how to work and grow using this list.


What Self-Love Means

Healthy, real self-love means you highly value, honor and enjoying the unique bundle of miracles that you are, and that you have been since birth.

Self-love means because you highly honor your own essence and your individual shaping by life, you treat yourself well respecting the one-of-a-kind self you are.  Therefore, you are prone to act to safeguard and develop your gifts and appreciate your unique nature.  Self-love also can mean that you powerfully strive to thrive, live with vitality, delight in your natural self, and that you can be in awe of your own, miraculous, natural processes.

Self-love can mean you actively desire and work for your own well-being and strive to be your best self, not only for yourself but for those you love and care about.  You do that partially because the well-being of others, in a sense, selfishly means a great deal to you.  Self-love also can mean that you take healthful pleasure in the many ways you are built to experience pleasure and share pleasure.  Self-love also can mean that you work against the anti-self-love teachings, programming, and influences that come into your life that would rob you of your strengths, restrict use of your talents, and deprive you of becoming the best self you can become.  Self-love also means that you act toward yourself, feel toward yourself and think about yourself in the ways that are in accord with the definition of love offered at this site.

What Healthy Self-Love Does Not Mean

Healthy self-love does not mean becoming uncaring, ungenerous, mean, stingy, greedy, egotistical, covetous, uncharitable, miserly, narcissistic, hedonistic, sociopathic or self-absorbed.  In fact it means quite the opposite of those things.  That’s because healthy self-love leads to more and better love of others.

You see, when you love yourself healthfully you have the selfish desire to see your loved ones do well, and that leads you to act for their benefit.  Their benefit is your benefit.  It is those who are poor in self-love that go ‘out of balance’ and become stingy, destructively selfish, mean-spirited, etc.  Healthy self-love helps you live by the ancient wisdom which says “Love Others As You Love Yourself”.

What Healthy Self-Love Helps You To:

1.    Believe that the love you have to offer others is good and, therefore, you offer it more

2.    Have a self generating source of energy and power to get through hard times when no one else is giving you their love

3.    Have greater self-confidence and, therefore, accomplish more

4.    Have greater self-reliance and, therefore, be less dependent

5.    Develop more adult maturity so you can emotionally take care of yourself rather than be like a ‘needy child’ who must be taken care of

6.    Be free to ‘want love’ instead of living in a state of ‘need love’ like a weak and needy person more susceptible to false love addiction

7.    Become more ‘inner self-directed’ than ‘outer other-directed’ and, therefore, live more true to yourself, rather than betraying yourself for the approval and acceptance of others, or rather than becoming dutifully or slavishly conformist

8.    Enjoy the praise, thanks and compliments that come from others, rather than automatically discounting them, or being suspicious of them, or becoming addicted to them

9.    Become motivated to take care of yourself so that you have more to offer both to yourself and others, instead of needlessly sacrificing and wasting yourself

10.    Be careful that the love that’s coming to you is of good quality, instead of taking       anything you can get (which includes phony love, contaminated love and love substitutes)

11.    Open yourself up to love chances, opportunities and adventures, instead of being overly protective or defensive about the love you have and, thereby, letting lots more love in

12.    Love life, love others and all that can be loved much more freely because you keep enough of your heart full through healthy self-loving to be able to give a lot

Working and Growing with This List

As a sort of homework to help grow your healthy self-love, you might consider doing these things.  Go back over the 12 items seeing which ones ‘grab’ your attention the most.  It is rather likely that those are the ones that it would be really good for you to examine closely and see if they point to areas you might want to make improvements in.  Are there any of the above items that cause you any level of discomfort or disturbance?  If so, that may represent some area you perhaps are vulnerable in and which needs some strengthening.

Are any of the above items more puzzling, confusing, confounding or curiosity generating?  Those, in particular, may (with study) yield clues pointing to areas you might want to and need to explore further.  When working on healthy self-love many people make really good gains by journaling about their learning and growing healthy self-love, and you might want to do the same.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly



Love Success Question
Do you know the difference between when you are being healthfully self loving and when you are being destructively selfish, arrogant, conceited, haughty, contemptuous, scornful etc.?

Entropy Killing Love in Your Life?

Mini-Love-Lesson  #234


Synopsis: First comes how entropy sneaks up and blocks vital needs for love’s thriving and surviving.  Entropy then leads to relational stagnation, then deterioration and destruction.  Next comes ways to counter entropy using nature’s sigmoid curve pattern of near universal improvement.  Jonas Salk’s works on this are then recommended.


Entropy And Love Life

ALERT! ALERT! Describing their couple’s problems Mike and Michelle used two of the main warning terms that can alert a couple’s counselor that their underling problem may involve – entropy.  Entropy may derail the love actions that  keep every love relationship healthy and alive.  The terms Mike and Michelle used were “growing colder” and “falling apart”.  That is what entropy causes wherever it invades – a growing colder and a falling apart.

The word entropy has widespread usage in the sciences.  This is because entropy is seen as a prevailing process in nature, discovered as occurring in a great many fields as far ranging as thermodynamics, where it was first discovered, in biology and social psychology.

In love relationships, entropy refers to social animals (including humans) in bonded relationship with each other experiencing a neuro/emotional cooling-off toward each other and a falling apart, or disorganizing deterioration of their relationship functioning.  Intriguingly, there are some indications that relational entropy may be accompanied by a biological temperature cooling and some neural network disorganization in parts of the brain associated with love relating.  However, those are just surface symptoms in the entropy process.  Relational entropy involves several deeper and much more important dynamic components.

Love Entropy in Your Life

The form of entropy that may affect love in your life is thought to work like this.  In all romantic relationships, you get attracted and then involved and a love or love-like relationship starts taking off.  At some point, this acceleration begins to level off in intensity.  Then, it may take a crash and burn dive and be over (see “Startup Love Is Never Enough !” and “What Makes Love Last?”). If the relationship continues, it goes on into a Plateau stage and this is where entropy comes into play.   Sooner or later, the Plateau phase reaches a critical juncture whereby one of two directions is taken – a slow entropic decline or accelerated improvement.

In the first half of the entropic dynamic, a slow, subtle, usually unnoticed decline starts occurring.  There seemingly safe sameness, comfort and habit start to block-out important relationship, nourishing changes which are increasingly needed.  Those blocked-out, healthy, positive changes contain the very things that keep an ongoing love relationship repeatedly revitalizing itself.  These blocks maintain sameness but result in not opening to fresh inputs, not looking for and perceiving better options, not exploring innovative improvements, not discovering refreshing life variations and not engaging in sufficient, enlivening, love-action diversity.  If some change does occur, there still may be a longing for and attempting to recapture past ways, even when the changes are beneficial.  That is the first half of the dynamic of love relational entropy.

The second half goes like this.  The above entropic process leads to relationship stagnation.  Stagnation inevitably leads to deterioration and deterioration results in eventual relational destruction.  In this entropic process, the behaviors that convey love tend to be increasingly taken for granted.  Then they reduce in frequency and potency.  This reduction in love-conveying actions starves the relationship of love interactions and their relational life-giving and sustaining function.  Without actions giving and receiving love, the love relationship does not thrive and eventually may not survive even though love feelings can still exist.

Preventing and Curing Love Entropy

In family functioning studies, long ago it was discovered that the healthiest families and couples look the most different from year to year compared to mid-range-functioning and more dysfunctioning families and couples.  Together, the high functioning loving families and couples learn new things, go new places, do new things, interact with new people, make new friends have new adventures, engage in new ways to enjoy life including sexuality, and express their love in new as well as old ways.  They also continuously work together to improve, sophisticate and mature their ways of interacting with each other.  Most of this work is done in an enjoyable fashion though it still may be pretty bumpy during various problematic times (Timberlawn Successful Families Research Studies).

Higher functioning love relationships do tend to level off into Plateau phases but when they begin to decline a bit it is more likely to be noticed and worked on jointly.  This team work leads to a new phase of improvement acceleration where refreshing and re-invigorating change occurs.

New higher plateaus are reached and the process repeats itself in an upward, stair climbing sort of pattern of love relationship revitalization.  Crises and other problems occasionally lead to a downward spikes in relationship functioning.  With work, they usually recover and the highest plateau of functioning can be returned to.  Depending on the type and degree of difficulty, recovery may take some time.  This acceleration, leveling off on a new higher Plateau, followed by new acceleration achieving an even higher new Plateau process is what prevents and cures relational love entropy.  As couples age, the upward steps do tend to get smaller but often easier to achieve as long as health and general welfare are maintained.

Throughout the anti-entropy process, whenever emotional cooling is detected, participants jointly engage in fresh warming up love behaviors.  Whenever decline or threats to love functioning happen, more serious love relationship repair actions are taken.  Whenever signs of stagnation are revealed, conjoint plans are carried out for having new, positive experiences.

Frequently old, positive, love and life behaviors continue or occasionally are returned to but usually with a new twist or variation that helps them be both old and new at the same time.

Following the Sigmoid Curves of Life and Love Improvement

The acceleration upward, leveling off and accelerating again to a higher level pattern has been found to be an improvement pattern that exists in many things including many areas of human life and love.  It has a name.  It is called the Sigmoid Curve.  That curve has a sort of flattened out, S-shaped configuration.  It follows the pattern that airplanes taking off often follow.  They begin going down the runway faster and faster, then take off and try to travel on a steep incline upward, then level off for the long haul.  This is being looked at as perhaps a universal, natural pattern of improvement in bio-psycho-social dynamics.  This pattern of improvement can be sabotaged by the dynamics of entropy.   It is suspected that when people work with natural patterns things tend to go synchronistically better.

Together Mike and Michelle took to heart the knowledge you have just read, and went to work learning about and practicing the how-to’s of giving, getting and doing healthy, real love in new and better ways (see “Learning about Love – Together”).  They also learned to spot the beginning symptoms of entropy and to work toward upward, accelerated improvement instead of letting the destructive forces of entropy ruin their relationship.  They closely followed what they learned about using the Sigmoid Curve for love and life improvement.  If you happen to want to learn more about all this, you might want to start by reading A New Reality, Human Evolution and a Sustainable Future by Jonas and Jonathan Salk (of polio vaccine fame).  Courses and Workshops sometimes are available on the Sigmoid Curve and avoiding entropy which are applicable to just about every aspect of life via the Salk Institute.

One More Thing. Talking to others about what you just read can turn out to be exciting, stimulating, enlightening and quite fun.  So, if you do that, please mention this site as a source of knowledge about healthy, real love.  Thanks.

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

Quotable Question: If we only do the same old thing and don’t at least occasionally experiment with the new and different, can we become renewed, refreshed, re-enlivened or love renewed?

Alphabet Love Test

To take this test, first read the brief statement of what love can be given for each letter of the alphabet.  Then read the sentence below the statement and choose the answer (and record the number) which comes closest to your own..  If you do not know or cannot be sure enough, record a zero for your answer.  However, it is best to make the ‘best guess’ you can, coming as close as possible to what you think your answer might be so you do not have too many zero scores.  Choose only one answer for each stimulus sentence.


A   Love Can Be Affectionate
      I show love affectionately     1. Badly     2. Poorly     3. Fairly well     4. Very well.
B   Love Can Be Beneficial
      I act to benefit those I love    1. Rarely    2. Seldom    3. Often     4. Quite frequently
C   Love Can Be Caring
      I show I care to those I love   1. Ineptly    2. Tolerably well    3. Quite well    4. Very well.
D   Love Can Be a Delight
      I obviously delight in those I love   1. Rarely   2. Seldom   3. Often   4. Quite frequently.
E   Love Can Be Enriching
      I realize the enrichment of other’s love   1. Rarely    2. Seldom   3. Often   4. Quite frequently
F   Love Can Be Fun
      I do ‘fun love’     1. Rarely     2. Seldom     3. Often     4. Quite frequently
G   Love Can Be Giving
      I express love through giving  1. Deficiently   2. Mediocre   3. Moderately well   4 Quite well
H   Love Can Be Helpful
      I am helpful to those I love    1. Rarely    2. Seldom    3. Often    4. Quite frequently
I   Love Can Be Intimate
      Emotional intimacy for me is   1. Laborious    2. Difficult    3. Pleasurable    4. Superb
J   Love Can Be Joyful
      I experience the joy of love   1. Deficiently    2. Mildly    3. Strongly    4. Powerfully
K   Love Can Be Kind
      I show loving kindness   1. Rarely   2. Seldom   3. Often   4. Quite frequently.
L   Love Can Be Liberating
      I feel love’ s liberating influence  1. Rarely    2. Seldom    3. Often    4. Quite frequently
M   Love Can Be Merciful
      I give merciful love  1. With great difficulty    2 reluctantly    3. Easily    4. Abundantly
N   Love Can Be Nurturing
      I nurture others with love  1. Poorly    2 Tolerably well    3. Moderately well    4. Very well
O   Love Can Be Observant
      I observe those I love   1. Inadequately    2. Sporadically    3. Carefully    4. Expertly
P   Love Can Be Powerful
      I exhibit powerful love  1. Sparsely     2. Tenuously     3. Commonly     4. Marvelously
Q   Love Can Be Questing
      Via love I quest for growth and improvement  1. Passively   2. Modestly   3.Enthusiastically  4. Passionately
R   Love Can Be Receptive
      I receive love   1. Badly    2. Poorly    3. Fairly well    4. Extremely well
S   Love Can Be Sexual
      I mix love and sexuality  1. Almost never     2 Incompetently     3. Well     4. Superbly
T   Love Can Be Tender
      I give tender love  1. Awkwardly     2. Clumsily     3. Tolerably well     4. Expertly
U   Love Can Be Unconditional
      At offering unconditional love I am   1. At a loss    2. Reluctant    3. Liberal    4. Generous
V   Love Can Be Victorious
      I strive to win with love   1. Never     2. Infrequently     3. Frequently     4. Consistently
W   Love Can Be Willing
      I give my willingness to those I love   1. Miserly    2 Sporadically    3. Freely    4. Joyously
X   Love Can Be Xenial. (Hospitable)
      With those I love I am xenial   1. With resistance    2. Dutifully    3. Pleasantly    4. Happily
Y   Love Can Be Yielding
      I yield to those I love   1. With anger   2. With resentment   3. With acceptance   4. With ease
Z   Love Can Be Zestful
      I zestfully join with those I love  1. Hardly ever   2. Not often enough   3. Fairly often   4. Quite often

Scoring
The number corresponding to your response on each question is your Score for each sentence.  If you chose a number ‘1.’ response your score is one.  If your answer was a ‘2.’ response your score is 2 on that item, and so forth.  Add up all your ‘1.’ responses, ‘2.’ responses, ‘3.’ responses and ‘4.’ responses; then add them all together for your TOTAL Score.  Do not add your zero (don’t know & not sure) responses.  Now, use the following scale to interpret your score.

Scores zero – 26 suggest you may not know enough about yourself and healthy, real love, how it’s done and how to evaluate yourself in relationship to healthy, real love.  A lack of love knowledge may lead to love failure.  Considerable study of love, therefore, is recommended, perhaps coupled with developing your introspection skills.

Scores 27 – 52 suggest you may not have given love and how to do it well and successfully anywhere near enough attention and, therefore, love failures may be all too likely in your life.  Lots of study of the behaviors that convey love (See “An Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”) and those that help love grow and develop, followed by practicing what you learn is recommended for your consideration.

Scores 53 – 78 suggest you are doing the actions that lead, at least, to a fairly successful chance at succeeding at love, and that it will be wise for you to study and learn more of the skills, techniques and ways of healthy, real love.

Scores 79 – 104 suggest you have a well above average understanding of how to grow and develop a healthy love relationship or that you are giving yourself too much credit and may be in denial about how much you need to learn.

It is useful to go back and study your lowest scores on each of the above sentences, thinking of them as possible areas you might do well to make improvements in.  Studying your highest scores may tell you something about your strengths concerning healthy, real love.  Developing your strengths even further as you also strengthen the weakest areas is considered a rather good strategy.

The Alphabet Love Test also may provide a good exercise for a couple to do together, and it also can be used by families and friends.

The Alphabet Love Test is just one of many ways to get a bit clearer and more well-informed about yourself and your healthy, real love strengths and weaknesses.  It is not to be considered a definitive instrument as it only has what is called face validity.  It, however, may provide a rather good stimulus for thinking about love and factors that have to do with love in their many, rich and varied forms.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question
Do you consider yourself to be a student of love, or do you mostly let love and your love relationships be a matter of luck and whatever you learned growing up?  Which is your guess as to which of these approaches gets the better results and which does not?

Here And Now Love

Synopsis: Mindsets that miss out; examples; here and now "distracters"; those good at here and now love; giving here and now love; now for the future; a helper test; Joy and sorrow in the now; training yourself.


Love is best experienced with a "here and now" mind-set.  That takes focusing your awareness fully in the present while love is being given and received.  It is surprising how difficult this is for some people.  So many miss out on full, love experiences because their mind is focused on something from the past or the future and, therefore, not in the "now".

Let’s look at a few examples.  She gives him a loving kiss but his focus is on problems at the office so he does not fully feel the love coming to him.  He, ever so lovingly, smiles at her but her mind is on making sure their children clean up their room so her subconscious sense of loneliness grows a bit bigger.  Out of love the small child puts heartfelt effort into making a picture present then gleefully hands it to the parent.  However, the parent’s mind is on the issues of tomorrow and barely looks at the gift and quickly dismisses the child’s special made, love gift and the child.

The parent misses the feeling of love coming from the child and the child misses out on the receptional love the parent could have given in return.  Plus, the child may learn disappointment is what comes from trying to give love, and they might be being ‘taught by example’ how to not receive love offerings fully.  A friend gives a loving compliment but the intended recipient almost doesn’t hear it at all because that person is focused on whether or not they did the right thing about yesterday’s difficulty.  I bet you can think up your own examples and personal experiences.

So often people grow "love starved" because they are inexperienced at living in the here and now.  Lots of people need and want more love and, in fact, demonstrations of love may be coming their way.  However, they’re missing out on the nourishment of that love because they’re not good at switching into a "here and now" focus.  So many are so occupied with anxieties about the future or painful incidents from the past they don’t see the enriching, strengthening love available to them in the present.

Many have love opportunities surrounding them and all they need do is ask for a hug, or a smile, or to be lovingly listened to for a bit and they would get the love that’s available.  Then they could go about life a little better because love well received usually helps counter pain from the past and anxieties of the future.  Of course, there are appropriate times for making plans for the future, and acceptable times to be learning from the past, and busy times too.  But if love is available, or being offered, don’t miss out on it even if soaking it up needs to be brief.  This is where the "quality of reception" is more important than the "amount of time" spent.

Some people are really good at"here and now" love.  They see loving looks coming their way and fully absorb and are nourished by those looks.  There are those who delight in a lover’s hand as it warmly slips into their own, and their mind is on that and that alone.  Well loved are the ones who don’t give a rapid, perfunctory “I love you too” reply to an “I love you” statement.  Rather, they allow themselves to feel the love just sent their way and in essence digest and are nourished by it before they make a heartfelt reply.  They are more likely to say something like “Thank you, that feels so good, and I’m really glad you do” rather than giving an automatic statement without much feeling.

For some, getting and giving loving hugs spark and spice up their lives.  For others hugging is a quick, empty ritual because their focus is away from the here and now.  Here’s a question.   Do you think those who are really good at really focusing their mind on each love event, as it occurs, live better?  And if you aren’t already doing that do you want to be one of them?

Another part of  "here and now"  love has to do with not missing out on here and now opportunities for giving love.  I like to recommend demonstrating your love often and much.  Love is one of those things that the more you give it away the more you have to give, so long as you remember to give enough of it to yourself too.  To give love often and much you have to work at not letting too many distractions from the past or about the future get in the way.  Say words of love with loving tones, give looks of love, touch with love, and frequently do all the ways of demonstrating love and I’m betting you’ll be so glad you live that way.  Watch out that you don’t let the fear of doing it poorly, or the fear that it will not be well received, or things like that stop you.  When it comes to love it usually is better to make a mistake of commission rather than one of omission.

Do you know how doing well with "here and now" love improves your future and how that works?  First, when you really soak up love and allow yourself to fully ‘get it’ you change your brain chemistry for the better.  Then improved brain chemistry changes your body chemistry for the better.  This means your immunity mechanisms fight off infections better, and fewer stress hormones are produced and your aging process is slowed.  Also your improved brain chemistry produces more good feeling neurochemistry, generally helping to make you happier and more positive about yourself in life.  All this means you are more likely to live longer and enjoy life more.

That’s not all.  When you get really good at "here and now" love you store up good feeling memories that later you can draw upon to help you get through bleak and bad times.  Those who only ‘sort of’ feel loved when it’s coming their way may be much more likely to experience depression, despair, hopelessness, etc.

Those who do really well at encouraging"here and now" love to come their way are usually better at giving love.  This makes for more generating of mutual love and cycling of love in relationships.  The more love generated in a love relationship the better and healthier the relationship is likely to grow, and the closer the participants are likely to feel toward one another.  That means you and those you love will be more bonded and are likely to experience being more energized and also more loyal to each other.

Here is a little helper test.  Wherever you are right now, look around and see something you can feel, at least a little positive about, that you might not have really noticed before.  Now listen closely and try to hear some sound you didn’t notice until right now; especially listen for sounds that you can be at least a little interested in.  Now touch something, preferably pleasurable, and feel its texture more fully than you have before.  In every environment there always is more you can notice and at least mildly like in a "here and now" way.  Now, think of doing the same things with someone you love.

See something more, hear something more, and feel their textures more.  Be aware that as you do this you are more fully perceiving precious parts of your valued loved one.  With that awareness you might want to tell your loved one that you are enjoying and appreciating them right now.  After that do the same with yourself as an act of healthy self-love.  Notice that if while you’re doing this your mind goes anywhere else, to the past, future, far away, etc. yank it back.  You can force your mind to be in the here and now when finding things to be at least a little positive about and, therefore, to enjoy.

One of the best and greatest joys in my work happens when I hear couples, family members, friends, etc. say things like “I feel so loved right now”, “We are really doing our love and it’s great”, “I just have to hug you right now because I’m overwhelmed with feelings of love”, “Finally we’re all really loving each other in such good ways, and it’s the best thing in the world”, “At long last I love myself, and I know I’m really okay”.

One of the saddest parts of my work as a psychotherapist comes with those who lost a loved one like a child, spouse, family member, dear friend, etc. and I hear “I wish I would have told them I loved them more”, “We didn’t spend enough time loving each other”, “We never took enough time out of our too busy lives to love each other like we could have”.

With some work you can train yourself to pay attention to the love coming your way in the here and now and really get it.  With repeated effort you can notice your here and now opportunities to give love and you can do so.  You purposefully can yank your mind away from the future (and get back to it later) when you have a ‘here and now’ love opportunity.  Likewise, you can yank your mind away from the past when there is a "here and now" opportunity to do love, grow love, experience love, etc. (and later return to whatever you were thinking about from the past).  With some work we all can be better ‘here and now’ lovers.

Hopefully with these thoughts in mind you will do "here and now" love a bit better and a bit more often.  As you do that remember to tell yourself here and now “Good for me” and other healthy, self love statements.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question In the next 10 minutes who will you show some love to, and how will you do that?
Remember, it’s OK if your love target is yourself.


Passionate Love - Wondrous and Perplexing

Mini-Love-Lesson  #232


Synopsis: Contrary views and differing forms of passionate love; how it is much more than sex; the romance and the eroticism; the three neural networks involved; its fading and rekindling; true love or not; a real and false passionate love difference; and the pain, problems and pleasures of passionate love are succinctly and with fresh information and perspectives presented here.


Most Sought, Most Mysterious, Most Troublesome

Euphoria, ecstasy, intense eroticism and all sorts of profound, powerful positive feelings - that is one view of passionate love.  Another is much less lovely.  It contains jealousy, obsession, compulsions, enslavement, drives to control mixed with total surrender and submission, intense insecurity covered by authoritarian domination, dangerous and destructive rage and some think a subconscious death wish.  More recently that disturbing view has been increasingly identified with mental illness and false love syndromes and not with healthy, real love (see our Real Love False Love e-book). Nevertheless, passionate love often is viewed as the most desirable form of love and the one that provides the greatest thrills, turn on’s, emotional fireworks, enlivening arousal, intrigue, enticing danger and incredible sex.  For so many, it definitely is a love not to be missed!

Much More Than Sex!

Passionate love often involves intense and extremely exciting sexuality but is much more than just sex.  In fact, sometimes passionate love is not sexual at all though that is what so many focus on when they think of passionate, romantic love.  Passionate, romantic love has been defined as a state of intense seeking for and or a sense of being in an ecstatic union with a reciprocating other.

Passionate love is felt with powerful compelling enthusiasm, eagerness and intense desires not always erotic.  The desire in real, passionate love is to be hugely involved with, enraptured by and immersed in the totality of who or what is loved.  Sometimes passionate love is not about a who but rather a what.  Religious zealotry and fervor are identified with passionate love as are patriotism and sometimes altruism.  To understand passionate love more fully, let’s first look at passion itself.  

Passion can refer to any emotion felt very powerfully and in ways that are compelling, almost uncontrollable, frequently consuming and involving intense yearning, craving, adoration, relishing, zeal, euphoria, compulsion, ecstasy and acceptable or even desired agony.  Now, let’s consider love (see “The Definition of Love”).

Passionate, real love can be identified as love felt with powerful, compelling enthusiasm, eagerness, intense pleasure and a huge drive to be connected with and able to act for the happiness and well-being of the loved.  It involves a great, high valuing and enjoyment of the loved, a valiant nurturing and brave protectiveness toward the loved and when romantic profound affection and eroticism.

The sharing, seeking for and experiencing of intense pleasure is involved in passionate love.  Simultaneously with passionate love comes a diminished awareness of pain, fear and everything which is unpleasurable.  Fully passionate, real love can involve incredible emotional intimacy, and what is sometimes called a great intermingling of spirits and a sense of ecstatic, cosmic connectedness.

Passionate love can be likened unto Germany’s grand, roaring Rhine River - fast, vast, extremely exciting, enormously enjoyable and all to often seductively dangerous and disastrous. When thinking of passion, one might do well to ponder the Rhine’s legend of the irresistible Lorelie who lured many a boater to a drowning death in its powerful swirling turbulence.

Differing Forms of Passionate Love

Think for a minute beyond  those two most commonly focused on areas of passion - the romantic and the erotic types of love.  Are you passionately in love with life, with nature, with a spiritual involvement, with beauty, with a great cause, with your children or family or with any deeply satisfying or meaningful endeavor?  You see, there are many ways to have true passionate love beyond the romantic and sexual, wonderful though they may be.

What about Romantic and Erotic Passionate Love?

It seems we are considerably hardwired to seek for and get into erotic and romantic love and love-like relationships.  It appears this has been crucial to our species survival.  Furthermore, it has been instrumental in helping humanity attain its preeminent status on our planet.  Not only that, but seeking and getting into love relationships has turned out to be exceedingly healthful for those who manage it successfully.  However, for many others who have tried and failed at love, it has often been disastrous.  For those who only partially learn to do love-relating well, it often has been a painfully growthful and exciting but arduous mixed blessing.  Nevertheless, our strong natural drives for sex, for passionate love, and for other kinds of love too, are now understood to have pushed us into populating the world, and to have become the most creatively cooperative of all species.

The Three Neuro Networks of Passionate Love

Psychoneurological research involving electronically looking into the brain while romantic love relationships are focused on, reveals a lot about passionate love.  That research points to three neuro networks involved when we feel passionate love.  One of our brain’s networks appears to handle attraction, another facilitates lust while a third processes emotional connection and attachment.  Operating together at strength, they help us have and experience the incredible feelings of romantic passion.  Sometimes that later leads us into lifelong, healthy, real and lasting love relationships and sometimes not.  In both cases, and after a time, romantic passion fades.  Replacing it can be a much more general, life assisting type of love variously identified as life partner love, spousal love , marriage type love, love mate love, companionate love or companion love.  These are thought to be processed by additional neural networks and somewhat different neurochemistry than that of passionate love.

What about Fading and Rekindling Passionate Love?

Some couples with life partner love can, and frequently do from time to time, briefly re-enliven their passionate love feelings.  Others practice various alternate lifestyles to re-experience their passion via the new and different.  Real love is not thought to be a part of the alternate lifestyle approach very often (except perhaps for those who become throuples) (see “Throuple Love, A Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?”).  Still others are glad to leave passionate love behind because it took so much energy, concentration and work that left little time for the rest of life.  Many others bemoan the fading of the passionate and long for its return.  Some of those search for and find ways to bring it back at least temporarily; quite a few others don’t but probably could with some professional counseling or coaching.

Is Passionate Love True Love?

Some think passionate love may not be real love at all but rather a sort of pre-love state testing whether lasting partner love can come into existence or not.  Others insist that passionate love is the real thing and the only kind worth totally surrendering to.  Still others note that several identified forms of false love-- namely Limerence, the IFD and the Fatal Attraction syndromes (see our Real Love False Love e-book)-- are full of passion but by no means do they dependably result in anything like healthy, real and lasting love. (Also see Title Index for each)  There are brain researchers who note how passionate romance and addictive opiates similarly seem to activate certain brain centers.  A difference is that romantic passion eventually fades or evolves naturally while drug addiction and some false love syndromes do not.

Romantic passion in the past has been variously referred to as being smitten, bewitched, spellbound, infatuated, love crazed, blessed out, beguiled, temporarily besotted, lovesick, having a crush and my favorite twitterpatted.  Interestingly none of those terms convey the idea of long lasting love even though those experiencing passionate love frequently pledge everlasting love, to love forever, etc.  The truth seems to be that a very high number of highly passionate, romantic relationships do not stay that way or even continue in any form once the passion fades.  Although, some do and those in them frequently proclaim theirs was real love right from the start.

A Possible Difference between Real and False Passionate Love

It is suspected that false, passionate love is the kind that pushes out and is destructive to other forms of love and love relationships.  Family love, friendship love and parental love and even pet love are all known to suffer, be neglected and even rejected when people are involved in passionate relating.  However, it actually may be that in passionate, real love those other love relationships tend to be enhanced, better appreciated and better taken care of.  The suspected reason is that the selfishness factor increases with false love and decreases with real love.  No one knows for sure.

It is entirely possible that some people have a real love springing up within a highly passionate beginning relationship while others do not.  Some of those who do not probably are experiencing a passion-filled, more temporary, false love syndrome.  Others may be experiencing a natural and healthful, but short term, romantic and passionate involvement which will provide an enriching interlude but not a deep and lasting love.  Terms like shipboard romance, close encounters of the temporary kind and weekend love affairs may have arisen from this kind of passionate, non-real love or only a mini-love experience.

The Pain, Problems and Pleasures of Our Passions

Maybe, more than you might think, there are people who learned to relate in and with love quite well after first having had passionate love’s peak emotional and sexual experiences followed by horrible, heartbreak disasters.  It is interesting what they have to say about their times of passionate love.  Lots of them proclaim they are quite glad for their previous times of passionate love but would not want to go through them again.  It was for them, a great adventure and they grew from it tremendously but it involved far too much chaos, agony and effort.  They also tend to proclaim that the love they have now fits their life far better than the tumult, tortures and tentativeness of their past passionate involvements. link “Adamant Love - and How It Wins for Us All” link “Ebullient Love - Love’s Joyous River” and link “Serene Love - A Gentle Power Flowing”  One of the things they learned was to be very self lovingly careful when it comes to passionate love.

One More Little Thing

Wouldn’t it be good to talk over what you just read with one or more others to see what they might think about passionate love and these ideas?  If you share this with them, we would appreciate it if you mention our many Mini-Love-Lessons, this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

Quotable Question: If you fall into passionate romantic love, will it end like other falls – in a crash?