Loneliness and Love Absence

Mini-Love-Lesson  #236

Synopsis: The why’s and good reason for loneliness and it’s pain; wrong things to do that don’t end the pain; our epidemic of killer loneliness; social media and some very good news about what can be done about loneliness and the absence of love are all here.

The Why’s of Loneliness ? 

Why do we get lonely?  Do we need loneliness?  Does it do anything for us?  What is the purpose of the pain we experience when we feel acute loneliness?  Did nature, evolution, a deity or all three put loneliness in our lives for some good reasons?  Will our loneliness go away if we understand the why’s and what for’s of loneliness and act on that understanding?  What are the best things to do about loneliness, lovelessness and their agonies?  Are these the right questions that will get us to the best answers about loneliness and the absence of real love in our lives?

The Purpose of Loneliness and Its Pain

Considerable research shows loneliness works like a hunger for something we need for our psycho-biological well-being.  Ultimately loneliness is a hunger for love and the life connections that can lead to love.  When we satisfy that hunger, our physical brain and systems in our bodies work better.  When we don’t satisfy the hunger of loneliness and love hunger, we move toward brain chemistry malfunction, greater disease susceptibility, we become de-energized, less productive, less creative and less socially adept.  When we satisfy this hunger, we reverse all that and also do better at cooperation, feeling a sense of fulfillment and a long list of the other benefits of positive companionship.

Using  the concept that all emotions give us guidance, we can see that loneliness tells us to seek positive connection and nurturing interactions with others.  This includes being accepted, cared about, liked, affirmed, safeguarded and ultimately loved (see “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).  When we achieve the nourishment of being connected and love-bonded, our brain and body chemistry responds very positively and we definitely are healthier, live happier and longer because of it.  This, by the way, turns out to be true not only for humans but for all mammals so far studied, plus many birds and perhaps some other life forms as well.  In short, to live well, we need each other and loneliness tells us when we need to do something about that.  So, to avoid toxic loneliness, actively seek emotionally meaningful life connections with others.  Then work to grow some of them into real, love relationships (“Behaviors That Make And Grow Friendship Love”).

The pain of loneliness tends to grow stronger when we do not succeed at following the guidance message loneliness is attempting to give us.  In a way, loneliness is like a good friend hounding us to do something positive to end the loneliness and not just suffer it (“Loneliness and Love”).

Doing the Wrong Things to End the Hurt

Some people try to end the pain of loneliness and love hunger in very unhealthy ways.  They turn to drugs, drink, or the destructive distractions of enthralling danger and fascinating dysfunction.  This easily can be done with sex, gambling, several forms of false love and excitement junkie behaviors.  All those things might work but only for a while.  Unless the behavior has healthy, real, love possibilities it is probably not going to pay off well.

Some people try to escape the pain of loneliness and love hunger through quantity instead of quality seeking.  Popularity, mass approval, fame, having high status connections, and the like, can result in ego boosts but very seldom in deep and love-bonded, meaningful, love relationships.  Others try to purchase friendships and love not realizing only false friends and false lovers are for sale.

Then there are those who live in crowded loneliness thinking they have many friends but they still feel lonely.  In truth, what they have are basically only acquaintances.  Acquaintances are better than nothing and they have the potential of becoming more if the right things are done to deepen some of the acquaintance relationships.  Remember, it is not about quantity it is about quality.

Tragically, the ultimate escape from the pain of loneliness and love hunger too often is suicide.  For some, the pain of loneliness and love starvation is just too much for them, or so they think.  Sadly, they may see the efforts required are far too difficult and the likelihood of success much too dismal.  Getting  new friends and growing new love often is hard and slow but with the right know-how and practice, it definitely is doable.

Unfortunately, all too many of the lonely and love malnourished have arrived at the conclusion that no one could or will ever like or love them because they are somehow crucially flawed.  Therefore, their future is one of nothing but painful loneliness and love starvation.  This is not true. Time and again in counseling I have seen people learn the skills of friendship-making and love relating.  When this happens, almost universally they go on to love-filled and friendship-filled living.

Preventively, this is where pets can come to the rescue.  I, and quite a few of the counselors and therapists I have trained, report love of and from a pet dog has made a life-saving difference.  For those living in lonely despair, for those who have lost a major love source and for those stranded in social isolation, for whatever reason, pets can make a huge, real, love difference.  Dogs seem to know how to do love especially well but we see cats, parrots, horses and monkeys do quite well at giving and receiving love too (see “Pet Love”).  Initially after a love bond with a pet has formed, it is not too long until the pet owner usually begins doing better connecting with people and then starts attaining a life of greater health, happiness and general well-being.

Our Epidemic of Killer Loneliness

If too often and too strongly you are lonely, you are more likely to die prematurely.  That is because loneliness does bad things to your brain chemistry and brain functioning and then to your body.  In many places around the Western oriented world, research shows loneliness and its detrimental effects are growing to epidemic proportions.  With this epidemic of loneliness, stress illnesses especially are increasing and related life expectancy is leveling off or beginning to decrease.

The research done by the UN, WHO, the US CDC, the National Health Service of the UK, countless medical schools and universities, and a plethora of epidemiologists confirms the veracity of these conclusions.  In England and Scotland, special anti-loneliness programs are being started by the health service, partly modeled on the cultural behaviors in countries in the world where the loneliness epidemic has not taken hold.  So far, they seem to be working well for many.

The Very Good News

The good news is you can hear the guidance message of loneliness which is to push yourself into connecting with others including pets; learn and do what it takes to make and keep real friends and then grow healthy, real, love relationships of several types.  It is likely you will have to overcome both internal and external obstacles, or you would have done it already.  Defeating loneliness is being done successfully by a growing number of people as they work to build their network of liking and loving others.  Do you think you can top and act on that?

Can Social Media Help?

So far, the research results are mixed.  It seems to be that if your connections with others via the Internet are marked by some emotional realness, positivity and backed up with some healthy self-love (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”), healthful sincere connecting may occur.  It also helps if the connections are more face-to-face with the assistance of Skype or similar visual services.  Note: the highly important psychobiological contributions of loving touch still will be missing (see “Love Hugs for Health & Happiness”).

Some of What You Can Do

If you do not have a pet, really consider getting a good loving and lovable one soon ( see “Pet Love”). Next, Look up some how to books on loneliness or friendship making, pick one, read it and do at least some of what it says.  Then start another.  Frequently older books are better than new ones.  For an in-depth approach, I recommend adding to the how-to books Love and Loneliness by the wise and highly readable, existential psychotherapist, Dr. Clark E. Moustakas.

Next you will have to pick an action to take and then risk doing it at least three times, not expecting any success at all.  Learn from what happened and improve the action, then do it again.  After that, add another action and start doing it again and again, not expecting or counting on anything improving whatsoever.  As you go, keep studying the how to’s of healthy, real love and enjoying everything you can about this process.  This is what it takes in experimenting and practicing before success starts to happen unless you are extraordinarily lucky.  Also know it really can help to get the assistance of a good counselor, personal coach or therapist as you tackle loneliness and/or love absence and their life-impacting difficulties.

One Other Thing

Talk about what you have just read with someone and that likely will help to implant these concepts as well as motivate action.  While you do that, we would like it if you would mention this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

Quotable question: is it more our duty, or our privilege to grow our own love giving and getting network?

Intimacy Creation - A Love Skill

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

Intimacy Ignorance

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

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

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

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

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

Two Kinds of Intimacy

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

Sexual Intimacy

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

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

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

Emotional Intimacy

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

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

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

Cultural Complications

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

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

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

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

A Dozen Ways to Work Toward Creating and Enhancing Emotional Intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Friendship Love’s New Significance

Mini-Love-Lesson  #235

Synopsis: Good and better friendship and its new importance for how you identify yourself, feel about yourself, attain better happiness, health and longevity, along with the love guidance of your own answers to important questions are intriguingly presented here.

What You Do and Personal Importance?

Who are you and what do you do?  Isn’t that what everybody asks about when they first meet someone new?  Well, not everyone but those are the questions many people try to answer first just about everywhere in the modern. middle class, Western world.  This is especially true for males and for those whose occupation is their primary identity.  It is a bit less true for those who hold lesser status jobs and those who travel in old wealth circles.  For many millions their occupation is there foremost identifying factor.  Usually tied to that is a sense of their identity, personal worth, societal value and peer group importance.

So, if your occupation is abolished and that work is accomplished using algorithms and creating machines to do your job, who are you and what will you become?  Will you have importance, purpose, worth and significance or will you be and feel useless and without value?  This actually is what is beginning to happen to more and more people as high-tech improvements continue to replace people in all kinds of work.  With a sense of uselessness often comes anxiety, depression, addictions, suicide and other forms of life failure.

However, this does not happen to everyone who loses their work life identity.  Some have been raised to feel important and of worth because of being born into or married into a higher status family, class, caste, race or otherwise more advantaged group.  Then there are a good number who feel good about themselves so long as enough people feel good about them, but if their popularity wanes they may crash.  In the modern Western world, some few others are lucky enough to have been raised in families that understood and taught having a sense of intrinsic worth and healthy self-love (or they learned this on their own through reading, attending courses or being around people who project a love of self and love of others).  Those who have intrinsic self worth have little need of external self valuing factors to feel good about themselves.  Unfortunately, they are a minority.  Some cultures do better at helping people develop a sense of self worth and self love, as do some therapists and counselors.

In many parts of the modern world, the majority of people seem to need an external way of sufficiently feeling good about themselves.  Vast numbers primarily have accomplished this via their work identity.  Take that away and what’s left?

Will Occupational Identity and Its Personal Significance Fade?

Some studies in behavioral economics predict that about 47% of all current occupations are expected to become human free by mid century.

This could grow to 92% by the end of the century according to some experts.  Humans already are increasingly being replaced by smart machines, algorithms, high-tech advances and the like.

So, if this happens to you what is going to happen to your sense of significance, self-esteem, and most importantly how will it affect your healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It”)?  A future looking historian pessimistically warns we are going to have a lot of occupationally useless people around and a great many social and political problems occurring because of that.  So, what is to be done?

Significance Through Love

Can you guess who the people are who suffer least when their occupational or professional identity and its personal validation importance goes away?  The research shows it is the people who have healthy, strong and deep love relationships.  Mainly that means strong, ongoing friendships where healthy, real, sibling-like love exists.  Healthy, loving families and love mates count too.  Perhaps that is because their ways of doing love are very similar to the ways of real, friendship love (see “Understanding Friendship: From Mild Geniality to Profound Love”).  Note: If somebody says “My spouse is my best friend” a healthful mix of love-mate love and friendship love may be occurring. 

Now, let us suppose you met someone new and asked them what they did?  Further suppose that the answer you got was something like this.  “I’m a really good friend and that’s my chief significance”.  Even further suppose that this sort of answer became common and it indicated a primary way to feel good about your own purpose and significance in life.  Suppose also that it became common knowledge that having deep, real, love friendships lengthens life, reduces susceptibility to illness, magnifies general happiness and improves quality living just about every way one can measure it.  All of which is true.  Most of all suppose that nearly everybody’s primary sense of self worth was largely linked to how well they did love relationships and especially friendship love.  Suspect that more friendship love in the world might lead to more altruistic love, family love, healthy self-love and, of course, mate-love along with all the other healthful forms of love (see “Friendship Love and Its Extraordinary Importance”).

What to Do with This?

With the above ideas in mind, let’s look at some very important wide-ranging questions.  If your occupation was abolished and you were replaced by a machine, would your self-concept and self-esteem suffer?  What about your sense of life purpose?  Do you work at improving your friendship skills?  Are you doing things to improve the friendships you have?  How much could pride of being good at friendship love skills help you with your sense of being a person of worth and significance?  By way of healthy self-love, do you give yourself the gift of good friendships?  Do you need to learn more about the how to’s of good friendship and friendship love?  Do you think it might be good for you to make your sense of self worth less work-dependent?  Are you aware that having a few high-quality friends is much more important and healthful than having a high number of acquaintance-level friends?  Are you someone’s good friend?  If so, are you positive about yourself for being a good friend?  Are you in fact your own really good friend?  In healthy self-love could you be your own better friend?

With each of those questions, think of the answers you gave yourself and turn them into guidance messages.  Then, of course, seriously consider following the guidance you presenting to yourself.

One More Little Thing

How about talking all this over with a friend, or potential friend.  If you do that, please mention this website and our free subscription service.  By doing so, you will do us and them a friendly, good turn.  Thanks.

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

Quotable Question: Who loves you best – a friend that tells you what you want to hear, one who tells you what you don’t want to hear but need to, one who tells you both or one who tells you little but very lovingly really listens to you?

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?

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?