Empathy - A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with Katrina’s enlightening complaint; then goes on to explain empathy; empathy and love; empathy in erotic intimacy; and ends with a discussion of what it takes to be love empathetic.

Katrina’s Enlightening Complaint

“Dammit, stop giving me advice! For once try to feel what I feel instead of trying to fix my problem, or fix me!” Katrina shouted this at her lover, Kevin.

Kevin was speechless but looked hurt and quite confused. After a bit he managed to stammer, “I don’t know what you mean. I thought you wanted my help”.

Katrina replied, “I do, but the way to help me is to give me your empathy not your advice”.
Frustrated and dejected Kevin responded with, “I guess I really don’t know what that is or how to do it. I thought giving you solutions and advice are what you wanted and that showed I care.”
With a sigh Katrina then said, “That sort of helps but it does it very poorly. I don’t want what comes out of your head, I want what comes out of your heart! I want your heartfelt feelings. That is the medicine that helps.”

Kevin looked baffled. Katrina sighed again and said “Listen closely. Empathy means to feel the same type of feeling I’m feeling, and to do it with me. If I’m sad, be sad that I’m sad, and do it with me; if I’m angry at someone be angry at them at least a little also. If I’m happy be happy with me and for me. When you see or hear me have a feeling imagine you’re in my shoes having that same feeling and feel it too, or at least have some very similar feeling and show it on your face, and in your tone of voice and in what you say. If you don’t do that it feels like you’re indifferent to me or only sympathizing with me, or maybe having pity for me and you aren’t really connected to me.

“Especially when I’m hurt or upset, but also when I’m joyful, I want to feel our love connection and it is empathy that makes that happen, not ideas. Go into your heart and figure out, or remember when you felt the feelings I’m having, and have some of them again. That gives you a heartfelt understanding instead of a mental understanding of what I’m experiencing, and it shows me you really are with me and I’m not alone. When you do that it helps enormously and it makes me feel close to you and like we’re bonded together in real love.”

Kevin then tentatively but with a caring tone of voice said, “Right now you’re struggling to be patient with me, and under that you have some hurt that I haven’t understood. And because of that hurt you got angry with me or maybe just frustrated?”

Katrina then threw her arms around Kevin and gave him my great big kiss and proclaimed, “Wow! That’s it. You got it! That was wonderful! It is the most empathetic thing I’ve ever heard you say and it really touched my heart. You do understand don’t you?

Kevin replied, I’m at least starting to understand and I’ll keep working on it.”

Empathy Explained

Empathy, as used here, means that you emotionally understand and share another’s emotional feelings and sometimes also their experiences, perceptions and psychological personal processes. Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s emotions or have corresponding emotions similar to another’s. It implies a sense of personal involvement and personal connection which suggests that you have, to some degree, become psychologically infused with another’s feelings and that you care about their experiences.

It suggests that when another person has a strong feeling you can imagine, or fantasize, or remember your own similar feelings and you can emotively place yourself in their position – feeling what they are feeling or at least something very similar. When you empathize you have a sense of being in another’s place, along with them, feeling what they are feeling at least to some degree, sometimes quite strongly.

Personal empathy differs from personal sympathy in that the sympathy means to either have a feeling of harmonious affinity for someone or to have a sorrow for another’s suffering condition. Feeling sorry for someone can be done while feeling emotionally apart and distant from another. Personal empathy is a much more intimate, connected feeling. Sympathy is similar to and sometimes synonymous with pity.

Empathy and Love

Healthy, real love is very much about connection. Empathy demonstrates loving connection in love relationships often better than anything else. Demonstrated empathy also delivers love’s healing effects more effectively and with more impact than just about anything else in many relational situations, especially when someone has been hurt or harmed. Empathetic expression communicates that your loved one is not alone, that someone cares about them, right there and right now in whatever they are experiencing.

Loving empathy communicates to your loved one that they are highly valued and personally cared about. When empathetic love is received well it seems to stimulate all sorts of neurochemical and biological healing, enriching and energizing processes in the recipient but also to some degree in the sender of empathetic love.

Sending love by empathetic expression also is one of the most efficiently powerful ways to get love across to someone else. The facial expression of love-filled, empathetic understanding sometimes only takes a second but may make a world of difference in another person’s life. Loving empathy expressed in the tone of voice of a single word or sentence, likewise, has been known to revive, revitalize and re-motivate a person in dire straits.

Expressing empathy with a gesture or a simple touch is been known to abolish despair and despondency. Love-filled, empathetic gestures like a thumbs-up or other hand motions sometimes can create powerful, connection feelings and enormously energize a loved one’s efforts. Love-filled empathy expressed with the sounds and looks of joy also often can be tremendously encouraging and bonding in all sorts of different types of love relationships.

Empathy in Intimacy

One of the greatest joys in true ‘lovemaking’ can be having a strong, empathetic connection and experience with the person you are making love to and with. Taking joy in another’s joy and experiencing erotic ecstasy because this person you love is experiencing an erotic ecstasy can provide what seems like a magical and mystical, spiritual and oceanic connection of two souls with the universe. Empathy also can join together two truly loving people in incredible tenderness, joyous gentleness and/or in powerful passion.

What It Takes To Be Love Empathetic

Becoming empathetic and expressing empathy well first takes allowing yourself to feel your own feelings. Many people suppress or repress their emotions, emotionally distancing themselves from their own inner wisdom and guidance systems as well as from other’s, and try to live emotion free. Some allow only a few emotions, especially the emotions of power to be the only ones they value. All that gets very much in the way of being empathetically loving.

To have a good sense of what someone else is feeling takes having a good sense of what you yourself are feeling and are able to feel. Once you let yourself fully experience your own feelings, as you are born to do, you not only can get your feeling’s guidance messages but you also can go a long way to empathetically understanding the feelings of others. It helps if you consciously go to the trouble of studying emotions and what they are all about.

Reading about emotional intelligence can help quite a bit. Check out Emotional Intelligence by Dr. Daniel Coleman. Then comes learning how to identify in others what they are feeling, and being brave enough to join them there in their feelings. When someone you love is agonizing over something remember when you agonized over something, and let yourself feel that again at least to some extent. Then show in your facial expression, tones of voice, gestures, touches and statements that you are there with them in the feelings they are having. There is much more to learn about empathy.

You might want to read The Power of Empathy by Dr. Arthur Ciaramicoli & Katherine Ketcham. You also may wish to read the entry on this site titled “Catharsis Empathy”.
Hopefully this mini-lesson on empathy as a powerful skill in doing healthful, real love, will get you started or get you further up the trail of being highly love-effective.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of this old folk saying “A day without tears and laughter shared with someone you love is a day wasted”?

Related posts:

1. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill
2. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
3. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
4. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
5. Non-Defensiveness – A Love Skill 

Respect - As a Love Skill

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

Necessity of Respect in Love

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

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

The Nature of Respect in Love

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

Couple’s Love And Respect

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

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

What’s to Be Respected

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

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

Respectfulness And Its Relational Benefits

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

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

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

1. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
2. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Gratitude – As a Love Skill 

Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love

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

Three Love Action States – and Super Important Questions

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

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

Descriptions of the Three Love Action States

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

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

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

Outcomes Of the Three States

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

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

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

Quality and Quantity Issues

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

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

1. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
2. The Anti-Love Forces Are Out to Get You
3. Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking
4. Touch Only with Love: an Anti-Violence Tool
5. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love … 

Good Time for More Love Learning?

Mini-Love-Lesson  #269

Synopsis: Making very good, helpful, interesting and possibly fun-filled use of your time while socially isolated alone or together by searching into more of the many ways love knowledge is being discovered and spread is the topic of this mini-love-lesson.  It also presents some pretty intriguing sources for the more engaged, deeper, probing students of love and love related topics.

Useful Fun Time Learning?

Might this be a good time for you, or you and yours together, to learn more about love?  There is so much that is new and wonderful being discovered concerning love and all the great things it does for us.  Exciting research into healing love, parent-child love, altruistic love, lasting couples love, love and the brain sciences and hundreds of other “loveology” topics are opening up for meaningful investigation.  They are revealing amazing and highly useful love knowledge we all can use.  At same time, other efforts are working to spread the ancient truths of love taught by various great teachers and wisdom masters of the world’s diverse cultures, societies and religions.  This is making a fresh, possible, worldwide integration of love understandings and the many ways to go about doing love well.

Love knowledge is starting to be applied in areas of life where healthy, real, love ideas and concepts were seldom applied before.  Take for example, how concepts of healthful love are beginning to be introduced into politics.  This is evidenced by the love platform candidate, Marianne Williamson, who made it all the way to several of the US, nation wide TV, Democratic Party presidential debates.  Politically minded people also are increasingly reading about politics and love, as in books like Love and Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer and A Politics of Love by Marianne Williamson.

The Pandemic: A Forced Opportunity for Love Learning

The 2020 pandemic is forcing us to learn how to do love in spite of isolation and safe living rules about do not touch and stay apart.  Some are adapting to the new challenges and requirements and some are not, or are not yet.  Far too many are becoming increasingly lonely, depressed and essentially love-malnourished or even love-starved.  Thus, we all are challenged to find fresh ways to love one another as we love ourselves through this worldwide crisis (see “Isolated and Doing Love Anyway”).

If you are one of the millions who really enjoy learning, this can be a good time for you in that way.  You can use it for learning about the ever widening, fascinating and fun-filled world of growing love knowledge, hopefully like you are right now.  However, there are a couple of caveats.  As you may already know, you may have to wade through a lot of fact-free nonsense, misleading falsehoods and useless puff stuff about love to find the good stuff.  Then I suggest discussing what you are learning and thinking about love with others.  As you do this, maybe you will discover some blocks to learning about love in yourself or in others.

Getting Past the Blocks to Love Learning

Learning about love is probably not as easy as it should be.  There is a lot in the way.  First, of all, as the Buddhist Sage, Thich Nhat Hanh, points out, the word love itself is sick and in need of rehabilitation.  It is often used in frivolous, inconsequential and trivialized ways such as in “I love that food, hat, tune or whatever”.  At other times it is synonymous with loveless sex.  There are those such as forensic specialists that see love as something that is all too often possessive, jealous, insane and essentially as a dangerous, destructive and even deadly force in life.  A multitude of others do not look deeply into love because they see it as only a romantic myth, and/or a made up fantasy entity of no actual substance or consequence.  For others it is just too confusing and indefinite to even try to become current, or up-to-date about.

Some dismiss the importance of love in ordinary human life as too contaminated, earthly, profane and common.  For them, the word Love is worthwhile only when used in a holy, religious context.  There are other blocks to learning about love too numerous to discuss here.  Even with all that to get past, finding material on healthy, real love and its dynamics proves to be well worthwhile, but of course I am biased about the subject (see “Is Love Ignorance the Problem?”).

Until rather recently, psychiatry, psychology and even marriage and family therapy have had only a little to say about healthy, real love.  In the behavioral sciences love often has been seen as a pathology, a sub-topic of sexuality or only as being about shallow, sophomoric romance.  I find it interesting that it took an animal, comparative experimental, laboratory-oriented psychologist studying monkeys (Harry Harlow) to get the general field of psychology to pay any useful attention to love itself.  Now, the newer field of positive psychology offers love a real place in behavioral science.  Much of the best knowledge about love has come from child psychology and before that pediatric medicine.

The importance of love started to be seen by scientists with the early 1900s discovery that infants physically died when they did not receive love conveying actions, even though they were otherwise well taken care of, fed, clothed, etc.  Harlow discovered the same thing for monkey babies in the 50s.  There really is a fascinating history of love discoveries to learn about if you have a mind to search for it.  You might enjoy reading Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum.  For dramatic, engaged and intrigued learning about the early struggles for a science of love, I recommend The Practice of Love by Ashley Montagu.

The media and the Internet offer a plethora of, in my opinion, juvenile and irrelevant mishmash on love, mixed with the occasional jewel of worthwhile, usable and sometimes even inspiring information about love.  Intriguingly, it is Russia that seems to be the country where love is being taken most seriously.  It is there that loveology is an authorized, natural science complete with research grants and advanced degree programs (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology?”).

In spite of all the blocks, you can find, with some effort, very useful, enjoyable to learn sources about healthy, real love and how to do it well if you look for it.  Naturally, I recommend this site for doing just that, but as I have said I am biased and probably prejudiced and opinionated too.

To Learn Love, Get Yourself to Read and Talk More about Love!

Look for some good books to read about love.  Remember, the latest book is seldom the best book on any topic so look for some of the older ones as you search.  The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm is still one of the best for many people.  A more recent one, Teachings on Love by the renowned Buddhist sage, Thich Nanh Hanh, has a lot to offer.  The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman helps a lot of people with couples love, although there are more than five major ways to convey love according to the research.  Of course, for those seeking to recover from or avoid love problems I honestly and heartily recommend our contributions Recovering Love and Real Love, False Love.  Perhaps easiest and quickest is to keep picking entries from this sites over 250 mini-love-lessons.  Some readers pick One-A-Day and report getting a lot out of that approach.  The real point is to keep seeking and gathering input about love so that your outgo about love is always fresh and growing (see “How Love Works - 7 Basics”).

With what you read while isolated, talk to others via phone, Skype, Zoom and other similar services.  Bring up love and love topics seeing what others think and, in the process, developing your own thoughts further.  If you are isolated or mostly isolated together with a Love Mate or family or friends, etc., you can learn and talk together discussing the many aspects of love as you learn about them.  For many, this is great way to develop your own understanding much further.  Some make agreements to read the same material and at regular, preset times talk about it in an online, book club fashion (see “Learning about Love - Together”).

Using whatever degree of social isolation you are practicing, you may utilize that time to ready your love abilities for a freer future.  In the meantime, you can increase your love knowledge about a great many love related things, perhaps starting with protective love as it relates to healthy self-love, family love, mate love and other love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: In this pandemic time, who are you going to tell two or three things about what you are doing by way of protective, healthy self-love and for self nurturing -followed by asking them about what they are doing?

Love Goals and How They Can Help You and Yours

Mini-Love-Lesson  #192

Free Over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

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

What They Are Saying about Love Goals

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

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

What Are Love Goals

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

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

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

Mutual Love Goals and the Wonders They Can Work

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

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

Going from Abstract to Concrete Love Goals

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

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

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

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

Answering Love Goals Criticisms

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

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

A Love Goals Prescription

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

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

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

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

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

Help spread love knowledge – tell someone about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

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