Love Thinks No Evil Nor Keeps A Count Of Wrongs Done

Mini-Love-Lesson #246

Synopsis: What is thinking evil; the strikingly harmful psychology of thinking evil for individuals and love relationships; score keeping’s corrosive problems; and an interpretation enrichment puzzle flows from; in and about Paul’s ninth tenant about the nature of love.

What Is Thinking Evil ?

Do you know how to think no evil?  That is the first part of Paul’s ninth tenet about the nature of love.  Do you have clear ideas about what thinking evil might really mean?  The second part has to do with keeping score as many people call it.  Do you keep a count, or score, on who has wronged you, hold grudges, plan or fantasize revenge, hope or pray for bad things to happen to those you oppose?

Do you obsess or enjoy thinking about things that cause harm and destruction?  Do you think evil of yourself?  Do you think evil thoughts about loved ones you get frustrated with, irritated with, angry at or feel hurt and/or betrayed by?  Do you harbor hateful thoughts toward friends, relatives, close family, children or people of any other love relationship (see “A Dozen Kinds of Love to Have in Your Life”)?  How about groups or classes of people (see “Love Against Bigotry”)?  Are these the kind of things Paul meant when he was inspired to give us this teaching about love?  Do you agree with the idea that real love does not cause, motivate or lead us to evil thinking?  What actually is evil?

To this mental health professional, evil is that which is anti-healthful to individuals and/or to groups of people including everything from two-person relationships to societies at large.  Others have different ideas.  I often have wondered if originally all morals and ethics eventually related back to primitive guesses about individual and societal health issues, one way or another.  Is evil really that which is sick, malignant, life harmful and destructive, psycho-bio-socially dysfunctionally corrupting and, therefore, ultimately in opposition to human survival?  I am sure many ethicists, moralists and others might tell you differently.  So, what do you understand the meaning of good and evil to be?  And what do you think about how thinking evil may be influencing you and the relationships of your own personal world?

The Psychology of Thinking Evil and the Harm It Does

In psychology, evil thinking can be seen as a form, or subcategory, of negative thinking.  Both for individuals and relationships, filling your thoughts and/or focusing too much on the negative, the destructive and the harmful can and does negatively impact our psychological and physical health.  It also can have a strikingly corrosive effect on your way of relating to others and usually in the way others reactively relate with you.  Such negative thinking has been shown actually to be able to shorten your life.  How?  Essentially by causing your biology to frequently make and circulate damaging stress hormones through you, along with triggering the biochemistry of mounting anxiety, fear states and toxic tension.  All of that makes for heart attacks, strokes, the development of poor health habits and increased addictions susceptibility.

Relationally, those who spend too much mental time and energy on the negative often become less positive, less cooperative and less happy with those they have love for.  Furthermore, suspiciousness, fearfulness, over cautiousness and compulsive safety consciousness may occur and tend to limit or dampen co-experiencing fun, adventuresomeness, sexuality and loving interactions (see “Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully”  and “Love in the Fridge”).

It is important to note that thinking about evil and thinking evil are two different things.  This is especially true emotionally.  Thinking evil thoughts, and enjoying it, is believed to be addictive as well as being erosively destructive.  Being agonized over thinking evil thought is not only painful but usually unproductive.  Being tortured by, or obsessed with, evil thoughts is pathological and often in need of the help of a good mental health professional.

Relationally, there appears to be a connection between thinking a lot of evil and/or negative thoughts and increases in couples and families having angry fights and episodes of domestic violence.  Also, there seems to be a correlation between negative thinking and the depletion of the brain’s production of the neurochemistry needed for processing happiness and loving feelings.  Furthermore, in close relationships, feelings of frustration, irritability, anxiety and depression seem to have a circular, cause and result, cyclical dynamic with cognitive negativity.

What Does Keeping Score Do to Us ?

Paul made a special point of telling us love is not about thinking a lot about wrongs done.  Psychologically and relationally, this is a good idea because it helps keep us from being repeatedly impacted by the bad of the past, more able to be focused on the good of the now and the possible good of the future where progress is possible.  Perhaps even more important, keeping score gets in the way of the freedom that forgiveness provides us, the creating of reconciliation and the opportunity of fresh starts.  Awareness of what has gone wrong can be useful so as to learn from it and behave more cautiously and successfully in the future.  Otherwise, not so much.

However, millions of people have been so hurt in love gone wrong experiences they never again try love relating.  Hence, they suffer love malnutrition and starvation along with its life destructive effects.  The question then becomes how to keep moving forward toward healthy, real love but with sufficient safety precautions.  That is one of the many places a good, love knowledgeable counselor or therapist can be of considerable help.

Individually, being obsessed with wrongs done, defeats, betrayals, losses, unfairness, mistakes, etc., rather than just learning from those experiences and doing better, can have very detrimental effects.  Interestingly, this turns out to be especially true for our immunity mechanisms.  Seeking vengeance, getting even, planning revenge, holding grudges, etc. is definitely a prescription for self and relationship sabotage.  Thus think no evil and keep no score of wrongs is a pretty good prescription for mental, emotional and relational health.

Interpretation Enrichment Puzzles

I like to suggest the more you can study different scholarly-based translations of a writing in a different language, the more you may deepen and broaden your understanding of that writing.  Different interpretations can help you better see the wider understandings, applications and possibilities of what was perhaps meant in any original.  Studying the original language also can be a great help.  However, that will not necessarily give the right or true meaning because words in every language are always at least slowly altering over time and location.  They differ as to common usage, exact definition and connotation.  These variations then create an ever-changing need for variations of translation.

Especially, does all this apply to this ninth tenant of Paul’s teaching on love.  Paul is understood to have written in ancient biblical Greek “ou logizetal to kakon”.  This usually gets translated into English at least two different ways and sometimes both.  Way one usually reads something like “love thinks no evil”, or “love thinks not evil”; other variations exist such as “love does not impute evil”, “love is not of an evil mind” and “love does not cause evil thoughts”.

Way two usually gets interpreted something like “love does not keep an account of wrongs”, “ love keeps no score of wrongdoing”, “love does not take into account wrongs suffered”, “wrongdoing is not scored by love”, etc.  Other variations include “love does not brood over wrongs”, “does not keep a record of complaints”, “does not keep track of other people’s wrongs”, “does not keep score of sins”, “keeps no resentful score of things wrong”, and “keeps no account for getting even or blaming”, etc.

I was advised that fully 16 of the most popular New Testament translations do not include part one – the “think no evil” interpretation and that at least an equal number of other translation efforts do not include part two – the “keeps no count or score” part.  Furthermore, I have been instructed that there are quite a few other learned and popular approaches that do include both parts one and two.

Why this big difference?  I don’t really know except to say translators vary a lot on this question.  Interpretation scholars also are known to have rather different ways of trying to get ancient words and meanings across into contemporary English understandings while also attempting to be as accurate as possible.

I have including part one and two here not because of biblical scholarship but rather because as a mental health and relational therapist both parts seem quite useful for health and well-being  I hope you may find them so in your life and in your love relationships.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Do you think it’s true that how a person thinks about love is how they become about love, and how they don’t think about love is how they don’t become concerning love?

Love is Not Rude

Mini-Love-Lesson  #242

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

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

Our Renaissance of Rudeness And Your Love Life

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

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

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

Are You Secretly Rude Positive?

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

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

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

What Is and Is Not Rude?

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

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

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

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

Is Rudeness Really All That Important?

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

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

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

How Love Against Rudeness Can Work

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

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

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

One More Little Thing

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

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love

A   20   Factor   Check   List

1.  Well being
Healthy Real Love makes us want for the well being of loved ones.

Toxic False love wants primarily for our own well being, wants and desires to be all important, and can sacrifice the supposed loved one for self.

2.  Self Love Healthy Real Love makes us balance our healthy self love with our love of others.
 
Toxic False love wants others to sacrifice and diminish their self love for our benefit.

3.  Strength Healthy Real Love causes us to want our loved ones to be strong & powerful in their own lives.
 
Toxic False love makes us act to diminish our loved ones’ strength so we can dominate and control them and, thereby, feel more false safety.

4.  Growth Healthy Real Love promotes the growth, development, education, and advancement of those we love.
 
Toxic False love works to block & hamper growth out of fear of being surpassed, outdone, and abandoned.

5.  Aloneness Healthy Real Love allows & promotes alone time, understanding it’s healthful benefits.
Toxic False love fears being alone and allowing a supposed loved one to be alone or off to himself or herself.

6.  Sex Healthy Real Love mixes both self love & other love into shared eroticism making it democratic, varied, open to exploration of new & different intimacy, & always guided by caring.
 
Toxic False love is absent of sufficient love expression &, thus, often is sexually demanding, obsessive, or dominated by sameness &/or fearfulness.

7.  Power Healthy Real Love pushes us to share power equally, work to synthesize & compromise, operate with free speech, independent action, alternating leadership, negotiation, & interpersonal democracy.
 
Toxic False love pushes us toward either dictatorial dominance, or an abdication of selfhood through fearful surrender.

8.  Difference Healthy Real Love promotes & delights in the loved one’s differences, ways of being unique, dissimilar viewpoints, divergent approaches, varying ways by valuing the enrichments they bring to relationships.
 
Toxic False love works to suppress & eliminate differences and bring about the false safety of sameness.

9.  Dependency Healthy Real Love helps work for the loved one’s self dependency, one’s own self dependency while also promoting agreed upon, chosen, mutually supportive interdependency.
 
Toxic False love wants the supposed loved one to be dependent on the false lover, or wants the relationship to be mutually co-dependent.

10.  Jealousy Healthy Real Love is not jealous, not even a little bit, because love does not spawn jealousy, possessiveness, or irrational suspiciousness.
 
Toxic False love is jealous because it is grounded in inadequate self love & the fearful insecurity that we can not hold the love of another by our own personal worthiness.

11.  Friends & Family Healthy Real Love causes us to attempt to love, like, or at least be appropriately & be consistently accepting of those the loved one loves & likes (including pets, ex-spouses,  dysfunctional relatives, etc.) but not to the point of supporting destructiveness.
 
Toxic False love causes us to work toward excluding, limiting contact with, & markedly avoiding the loved one’s interaction with their ‘others’.

12.  Trust Healthy Real Love makes us take the ‘gamble’ of trust in our love and the loved one’s love &, therefore, causes us to willfully become ‘vulnerable’ to them, their words, and actions.  This is done to affirm the loved one and make the relationship function in workable ways.
 
Toxic False love makes us mistrust, spy, be suspicious, hinder the freedom, doubt, & distrust the supposed loved one which eventually destroys the love relationship.

13.  Self Disclosure Healthy Real Love helps us accept & become self disclosing of (past, present, & future) thoughts, feelings, actions, victories & defeats, strengths & flaws, & all else.
 
Toxic False love works to hide our less pleasant aspects, be secretive, present false images, & fears exposure.

14.  Priorities Healthy Real Love puts love first of all values.
Toxic False love puts many things above the importance of love.

15.  Healing Healthy Real Love causes us to work for the health of our loved ones.
Toxic False love often works toward illness, or avoids the promotion of healthful living.

16.  Affirmation Healthy Real Love is affirming in word and action.  Compliments of being & doing, praise, brags, showing affirmative support, cheering for the loved one, and more demonstrations are common.  It also makes us look for, appreciate & affirm the qualities of our loved ones.
 
Toxic False love praises & compliments for personal advantage or gain.  It often also dis-affirms with criticism, put downs, devaluing & debasement.

17.  Tolerance Healthy Real Love causes us to tolerate the less pleasant aspects of those who are loved unless those aspects are clearly destructive.
 
Toxic False love tolerates little demanding its own way, or tolerates destructively to weaken the supposed loved one’s strength.

18.  Reception Healthy Real Love makes us highly receptive to our loved one’s likes, needs, wants, ways, and especially expressions of love.
 
Toxic False love makes us neglectful, avoidant, critical, & undervaluing of our loved one’s efforts to love us.

19.  Gifting Healthy Real Love helps us frequently and openly enjoy gifting our loved ones with what they want both with object and experience gifts.
Toxic False love helps us give gifts we want, gifts designed to manipulate, impress, result in return gifting from the loved one, or to give few or no gifts at all, and to gift with poor and negative attitudes.

 20.  Joy Healthy Real Love helps us take joy in those we love, take joy in their joy, work to enjoy what they enjoy, share what we enjoy, & create mutual joy.
 
Toxic False love works to disregard or discount the joy of the supposed loved ones, and try to manipulate them to only enjoy what we enjoy.

As always – Grow In Love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Image credits: “Fairy eggs fullsize” image by Flickr user melanie_hughes .
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Related posts:

1. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love …
2. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
3. Is “I Can’t Live without You” Real Love?
4. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
5. False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies

Love Is Not Jealous

Mini-Love-Lesson #240

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

Jealousy In Love Relationships

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

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

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

What Is Jealousy?

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

Psychologically What Is Jealousy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Old & Resurgent, Religious Controversy Over Jealousy

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

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

Love Is Not Jealous – Insecurity Is!

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

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

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

Love and Jealousy in Cultures and Societies

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

How Love and Jealousy Clash and Conflict

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

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

2. Love inspires trust; jealousy mistrust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One More Thing

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

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

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

Love is Kind!

Mini-Love-Lesson  #238

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

The Most Important Single Factor

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

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

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

The Kindness Conclusion

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

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

Kindness Is…

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

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

Love’s Kindness Is…

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

Communicating Love-Filled Kindness

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

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

Sometimes Unrecognized Behavioral Sets of Love’s Kindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relational Benefits of Love Given Via Kindness

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

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

Health Benefits of Loving Kindness

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

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

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

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

Tough Kindness

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

One More Tiny Thing

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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