20 Smart Making Love Questions

Mini-Love Lesson #197

Synopsis: These 20 questions are aimed at helping you think smarter and with increasing fascination about the wonders of love and its many mysteries.  Why you will want to do this, why you should do this for your own future good, and how to do this are also addressed.

The New Amazements of Love and Why You Should NOT Learn About Them

Love is even more amazing than most people ever thought.  With the help of science, that is what we are discovering via well conducted research in a wide variety of scientific fields.  New discoveries in everything from (A) anthropology to (Z) zoology and including brain sciences, an assortment of medical fields and even behavioral economics are producing new and sometimes astounding knowledge about love and it’s workings.

To understand and make good use of what is being discovered, you may have to learn how to think about love a lot more than you might be used to.  But wait!  You are not supposed to think about love at all.  You just are supposed to let it happen and trust it will happen if it is meant to be, right?  You certainly are not supposed to try and learn how to think smart about love knowledgeably. “The Anti-Love Forces Are out to Get You” With love, the thing to do is just let nature take its course, correct?

Whether it is falling in love, or love of a newborn or any other love, it will just happen the way it is supposed to according to your destiny, or mother nature, or the stars, divine providence or maybe karma, right?  Trying to actually think smart i.e. informed and knowledgeable about love is not necessary and actually is quite suspect.  Also quite suspect, is learning about any new discoveries or new knowledge concerning love, astounding and useful though that new knowledge may be, right?

Why Should Love Be Any Different?

If you learn to think smarter i.e. with more knowledge, creativity, understanding, wisdom and usability about your health, finances, work, hobbies or any other area of your life, you are more likely to be more successful in dealing with that area of your life, right?  Not only that, but doesn’t remaining ignorant in an important area of your life mean it is more likely there will be major problems and failure in that area?

So, why don’t we teach people to think about love?  Is it because we are afraid it will steal loves magic?  The truth is, that it is a lie.  It is false because the more we learn about any big topic the more amazing and, dare we say, magical it becomes.  Love is no exception.  Science is proving that.

A Way to Get Smarter About Love

Pondering curious and puzzling questions has proven to be an excellent way to learn how to think smarter.  So, here is what I suggest.  Read the following 20 questions and give some thought to each.  Pick the most interesting ones and give them some more thought.  Maybe talk over with someone what those questions bring to mind, and maybe look up stuff and read a bit about them.  Then think this.  How can I improve my thinking about the things I am learning concerning love.  Maybe write out your thoughts and maybe read more?  Maybe talk more to others about love?  Then be sure to work with the more personal instructions given at the end of the 20 questions.  By doing these things, you will be practicing learning to think more and better about love.  That most likely will make your love-functioning better, happier and a lot more interesting (see “Thinking Love to Improve Love”).

The 20 Smart-Making Questions

1. Is love like food, something that comes in many varieties (romantic, parent, pets, self, etc.) and is, at the core, one thing – something that nourishes us, or are all those types of love actually unrelated?
2. Can many people romantically love, or be loved mated, with two people at the same time, like many Mormons, Tibetans and Euro intellectuals have thought, and also why do you think what you think about that?
3. Can real love motivate harming or even killing a loved one, as many police conclude, or is it insecurity, possessiveness and false love misidentified as real love which causes that violence?
4. Who is right, St. Paul who taught love is not jealous or the French courts of love who ruled jealousy was proof of real love?
5. Is love of comrades the same thing as friendship love, or are there distinct differences?
6. Can friendship love include sexuality?
7. Do lovers who forgive adultery have a stronger (better, bigger, healthier, etc.) love, or weaker (insecure, dependent, etc.) love than those who do not forgive adultery?
8. Is love the prime spiritual force in the universe from which all other loves come, as several major religions teach, or is it just one of many feelings we can experience?
9. Is love just an emotion, or is it a vital natural process which triggers many different emotions?
10. Who’s right, some social scientists who said love is an invention of culture having no basis in natural fact, or the behavioral scientists who trace love back to the dinosaurs and the development of the brain’s limbic system?
11. Do animals actually love or can only humans love?
12. Can the lack of healthy, real love in one’s life cause serious physical and psychological health problems?
13. Was Ovid right when, in the year one, he taught that lasting love requires skill and, therefore, the work to develop one’s love skills, or is the more common concept that lasting love is a matter of luck and just finding the right partner correct?
14. Do people who learn to think about love more fully, accurately and extensively achieve more success in love relating than do people who rely on love success being determined by some mysterious, unknown force?
15. Is romantic love just one of many types of love, or is it separate and essentially different from all the other types and kinds of love?
16. Do we find love or do we grow love, and which concept is better to focus on and work with?
17. Who is right, those who say self-love is a good thing or those who say self-love is a bad thing, and why?
18. Can people really love their family, clan, tribe, state, country, cause, work, art, religion, deity, nature, life, people, humanity, the universe, etc., or is using the word love just a way to say something is important and valued?
19. If we experience real love for someone, is it forever as some religions hold, or for at least as long as we live, or can real true love die, fade away, dissipate and no longer exist?
20. Of the following, who do you suppose has the most useful, valuable ideas and understandings to teach us and help us learn about love, and also of these, who would you be most open to learning from?
(The following all have things to say about love)

A. Behavioral scientists (research psychologists, ethnologists, etc.)
B. Brain scientists (neurophysiologists, neuropsychologists, etc.)
C. Social scientists (sociologists, social psychologists, etc.)
D. Mental health practitioners (counselors, clinical psychologists, etc.)
E. Medical professionals and practitioners
F. Marriage and family therapists, couples counselors, etc.
G. Philosophers, (including seers, sages and wisdom masters of old)
H. Poets and songwriters
I. Theologians, religionists and clerics
J. Romance writers
K. Grandparents, family, friends, etc.
L. Others      
                                                                                                                   .
Do you want to include in this list astrologers, fortunetellers, matchmakers, shamans, rishis, curandaros, etc. and do you also want to think, of all these, which ones would you mistrust the most?

Dare to Make It More Personal

Now that you have seen the general questions and given them some thought, dare to make it all much more about you and your own personal love life!  You can do that by going back through the questions and seeing which ones you can easily restate using the word you, meaning yourself.  For example, question #2. becomes “can or could you romantically love two people at the same time?”  Some of the questions take a little bit more rewording than others.  Then too, you might want to make some notes on your current thinking about the questions that are more personally applicable.  You also might read and/or talk to someone with more intimate, self-disclosure occurring.

Another way to make this exercise more personal is to think about someone that is special to you and apply the questions which you suspect that person would believe, feel, or do.  For instance, question #2. becomes “could someone special to you romantically love you and someone else at the same time?”  Then ponder about how that might change how you think about this question and about that special someone.

The third way to make it more personal has to do with talking to a special someone honestly and openly about what you both think and feel when dealing with each question, both in general and more personally (“Startup Love Is Never Enough”).

Connecting with the Wisdom of the Ages and the Cutting-Edge

In ancient times and again in the Renaissance, European people read, thought and wrote about love quite a bit and they did this as intelligently as they could.  That is, they did it until the Catholic Church began to ban profane i.e. non-sacred and not church authorized thought, speech and writings about human (as opposed to spiritual) love.  Widely read and talked about books such as, in English called “Dialogues of Love” written by and for Jews but of much broader popularity and “The Art of Love” in five volumes and “Remedies for Love Sickness” were suppressed and disappeared.  It probably was not until Stendhal in the early 1800s tried to intelligently research love and wrote his eventual breakthrough book “On Love” that some people began to give love serious, intelligent thought.

Today Loveology (as it is being called and pioneered in Russia) is being looked at along with happiness in China, is being studied in laboratories in the West and researched in many academic and scientific fields around the world which is starting to produce astounding (magic like) results.  You to can join this cutting-edge thinking smart about love phenomenon.  Maybe by reading this mini-love-lesson you just have.

Help spread love know how, tell someone about this site.

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

♥ Love Success Question  Is there anything happening in your mind working toward dodging, postponing, being reluctant about or vaguely disturbed about learning to think smarter about love?  If so, what do you suppose that is all about?

Startup Love is Never Enough !

Mini-love-lesson  #196

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson is about helping people get beyond just having startup love and growing on to having lasting love that can work for a whole lifetime and much more.

What Too Many Couples Say!

“It looks like our honeymoon period is over”.  “It seemed like we were so in love at first but now it’s all fading out”.  “Is our love starting to die?”  “We were so great in the beginning but now we’re just getting to be another unhappy couple like so many of the couples we know”.  These are the all too common kinds of comments a great many couples make after a startup of seeming to be very in love.

But wait!  Research shows there are a whole lot of other couples who rapidly recover from that potentially disastrous slump and others who never experience the “honeymoon is over” thing.  They, in fact, just keep getting better and better.  So, what makes the difference?  Is it luck, fate, the stars, communication, is it that one or both of them are doing something the others are not, or what?

Real Answers That Help

For some couples the answer is they didn’t have real love in the first place but rather a form of false love.  It could be limerence or some other false love which means they need to learn about real love and its differences from false love and then what to do about it.  For many other couples they had real and sufficiently healthy love at the start, but there were two very important things about love they didn’t know or didn’t know in a deep and solid enough way.

The Block:   Part 1 of the Primary Answer
The truth is it might not only be about what they do not know.  It might also be about a falsehood so many couples have been taught or subconsciously programmed to believe.  This falsehood blocks them from learning or deeply realizing a preeminent and profoundly needed understanding of an unwanted truth.  It is an understanding of what it really takes to succeed at real love-relating over time.  So often the blocking false teaching has to be given up before what really works is able to be learned at the required gut and heart levels.  That turns out to be harder than it might sound because the teaching usually has gotten rooted deeply into our subconscious belief system, and we so want to believe it, and reject whatever contradicts it.  Therefore, let’s deal with that blocking falsehood first.

A Ruinous Doctrine of Romantic Love
A thrice divorced client in great anguish asked me a question I have actually heard put many ways, many times from my patients and clients.  “Once I fall in love with the right person, isn’t that love going to be enough for the rest of my life?  So why do I have to do anything more about love?”  I replied, “If you really have deep love for someone and find out you can get better and better at loving them, won’t you want to do that – get better and better at love?  Isn’t that what true love would have you do?  If you have children, wouldn’t you work to be better and better at loving them?”  The client thought for a moment and then with a look of enlightenment said, “Help me doc, I have so much to unlearn and even more to learn.”

Don’t you or didn’t you want to believe that One day you meet your one-and-only, true love and you both automatically fall in love with each other.  Then by the nature and magic of love you both also automatically live happily ever after.  And that is all you have to do about love.  Succinctly put, that pretty much is the core of the romantic doctrine.

Do you know that it is quite possible that some version of this guiding romance dogma is alive in your very own subconscious mind?  Worse, it could be subtly steering you toward the likelihood of your own romantic ruin?  That can be so, even if your conscious mind sees big problems with it as a guiding, operational principle for your love life.  The research shows that this doctrine, indeed, may work for those who do not get to have an ongoing, real love relationship over time, like Romeo and Juliet who’s lives ended in their teens, and possibly for precious few others.

Do you ever wonder why in so many of the great romance stories, both new and old, the couples do not get to be together for even as much as a year before something wipes one or both of them out or separates them forever?  Possibly it is because if they were a longer lasting couple, the authors of those love stories know the couple would start having problems and would have to learn the real secrets of lasting love or break up.

The Block:   Part Two of the Primary Answer
The Much Avoided Real Secret of Lasting Love
Have you ever run into the idea that families are people farms and what makes them successful is how well the couple starting the farm knows how to work their farm with love.  Please notice the word work and how different that is from the romantic doctrine’s words automatic and magic.

Successful, lasting love-relating takes skillful work.  Ovid, Rome’s great love poet, taught this in the year 1 AD (or CE).  It takes the work of learning how to do love work.  It takes the work of learning loving teamwork; it takes the never-ending work of learning how to give out and take in healthy, real love ever better; it takes the work of growing healthy, real love; it often takes the work of practicing healing love; and it takes the work of learning how to individually love each of the individuals involved in your love network, including yourself.  It also takes the work of learning how to keep fresh or repeatedly refresh, renew and re-enliven your love relating.  The good news is with improvement oriented practice everyone can learn how to do skillful love work.  And more good news, probably it also will be immensely rewarding to you and those you love.

What Startup Love Is Good For

Startup love is only good for starting up.  It seems to be Mother Nature’s way of helping couples get started but after that you have to learn, work and practice a whole lot more than Mom Nature provides.  If you are going to get to have strong, lasting and improving love, you will have to work at it.  Lasting love is complicated, challenging, confusing and lasting love requires continuing commitment and continuing improvement-focused-behavior, in spite of victories and defeats, advances and setbacks.  Becoming complacent with victory or too easily giving up with defeats, is not a path to a strong, growing and lasting love.

Startup love between parents and newborn infants works much the same.  After the early, natural, initial, love bonding of a parent with a child, comes all sorts of work on how to love that particular child in the particular ways they need for their growth and development  (At this site’s mini-love-lessons see Parenting Series: Paul’s Points on Love for Parents).  Those parents who go to the trouble to learn about the major ways of nurturing a child with the appropriate behaviors of love have been showed to do much better than those who do not learn that knowledge or practice it.

Startup love in friendships, with comrades, new family members, with pets and others can work the same as with couples and infants but instead often may depend on slow growth, love development.  In any case, startup love is best seen as something to be added to, by deliberate work at doing better and better love skills development.

If Your Love Is Crashing, Sinking, Fading, Drifting, Slumping or Plateau-ing???

If you sense or suspect a love relationship of yours is doing one of the above, start by thinking about your ways of love-relating.  How are you relating with love and how can you improve relating with love to and with your loved ones?  To learn how to do better, you can do a host of different things.  You can read all the mini-love-lessons listed in the Subject and Title indexes of this site which seem to apply or grab your attention.  You can study the eight major ways or categories of behavior that social psychology research has discovered helps love get delivered from one person to another (Start with the mini-love-lesson titled Behaviors That Give Love – the Basic Core Four). You then can read more about those in our book Recovering Love.

You can work with St. Paul’s list of what love is, what it gets us to do and be in the New Testament.  You can work at talking your beloved’s love language by studying Chapman’ s The Five Love Languages.  You can see if you can find a real-love knowledgeable couples or family therapist, counselor, personal coach, cleric, mentor, guru, or other guide and work with them as an individual, or better yet, as a couple or as a family.  You can look for and go to personal growth and relationship classes, workshops, retreats and also online courses having to do with healthy, real love development.  You can read everything you can get your hands on about growing healthy, real love – which you are already doing by reading this.

In other words, you can start, by yourself or even better with a loved one, doing the work of learning the how to’s of better love relating.  I again want you to think of a farm.  If the people running the farm just rely on nature to produce the crops they soon would go back to living as primitive hunter/gatherers and sometimes starving.  This, in fact, is the same with love.  In regard to love, many live at the hunter/gatherer, primitive people level, unaware that they can do far better.

If you learn, practice and keep working to improve your work of farming love, you very likely will do very well.  If you rely only on startup love thinking it is so great it will last you a lifetime and, therefore, you do not have to work at it – well, good luck, because you probably are going to need it.

Help spread love knowledge, tell somebody about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How do you feel about hearing that you could have inside you a misleading, destructive, non-conscious program effecting how you go about love?

Related posts:

1. What Makes Love Last?
2. Is Love Ignorance The Problem?
3. Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love?
4. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
5. Can Love Overcome Incompatibility? 

For Longer Life - Love That Which Is Greater Than Yourself

Mini love lesson #192

Synopsis: Four major candidate categories of greater than yourself love and their quantity and quality of life benefits backed by research are covered in this mini-love-lesson that might just result in you adding more and better years to your life and the lives of those you love.

Want to Add More and Better Years to Your Life?

The research results are in and they are very clear.  The major way to a longer life that is healthier and happier can involve loving that which you understand to be larger, grander and greater than yourself.  That is what we conclude drawn from a host of longevity, quality of life and love relational studies done in a wide variety of universities and medical centers.

Things “Greater Than Yourself”

In the lives of those people considered to make a positive difference in their world, it often is found that they truly loved and gave much of their life to something they considered to be far larger and more important than themselves.  Sometimes it was altruistic – helping the disabled, the disadvantaged, the needy.  Sometimes it was political – helping the cause of freedom, democracy, oppressed minorities and those politically misused and abused.  Often it was medical – administering to the sick, searching for the cure of a dreaded disease, preventing or limiting the spread of illnesses, building health care facilities.

Education in its many forms has been the greater than yourself cause of many.  Nature is another cause –  the environment and assisting the survival of many other species we share the planet with.  For many others it is been one form or another of what we call the arts and humanities.  A caring religion, devotion to a compassionate deity or a positive philosophy and set of principles frequently has been involved as has a general sense of loving in its broadest meaning.

Almost invariably the people who have given themselves to something they saw as greater than themselves have experienced a great many positive effects in their lives for doing so.  May you also!  Let us look at four main candidates for this life extending and life improving type of love.

Love of Life

Do You love life?  Do you love living, experiencing the many awesome marvels and wonders of life itself ?  Do you know how to be awesomely affected by this incredible gift you are given to feel, think, be aware of and to be a part of existence and its endless mysteries and miracles.  Most things in the universe can not do that, so far as we know.   In fact, of the many living creatures on our planet we are the ones blessed with being able to do that best, so far as we know.
There are people so enamored of life they truly love it and experience it much more fully than most.  So, it is understandable that research shows those are the ones that tend to live life longer and healthier.

Those who more frequently experience awe and who find life wondrous (as in marveling at gorgeous scenery, being deeply moved by great music, being inspired by the astonishing phenomena of nature or heart-touched by viewing a newborn infant of almost any species) are aware at a high level. Then there is marveling at the world of different life forms seen via the microscope or the vast universe seen via the telescope; those may be the ones who have the greatest life experiences.  Frequently the same life-appreciating people are the ones doing the most to affirm, preserve, defend, protect, improve and advance the causes of life itself.

Unknowingly for most, there is a great payback for loving life.  These life-affirming and life-appreciative activists significantly benefit from greater production of cytokines in their biological systems.  Cytokines are super important to all sorts of cellular health, growth and replacement in just about every part of the body.  Without them serious deterioration and increased susceptibility to diseases of all sorts exists in the body and the brain.  One recent source of research about this is from the University of California at Berkeley.  You might want to check on what Dr. Dacher Keltner has to say about this and related health and longevity issues.

Love with a Higher Purpose or Cause

Closely related to the love of life people are those that have discovered a greater than themselves cause or purpose in life.  There are so many examples of people who just had to find and give their lives to something that mattered.  Something it was to improve life conditions, advance or enrich our world or some portion thereof.  Sometimes a life purpose has to do with the actualization of a talent as often occurs in the worlds of art but also for gifted intellects in science.

Sometimes it is labeled a calling and involves a passionate curiosity, interest or inner drive to create something of use, meaning, inspiration, etc..  Also, a calling to a cause can be to provide a service, defend against a threat, achieve a worthy goal or to maintain, conserve or restore something of impactful quality.  Whatever it was, having a positive and constructive higher-purpose-love tended to make healthier, happier and longer living people who had a greater than self purpose.

Do you want to live at least seven good years longer than you probably otherwise would?  If so, find and get busy with your purpose in life.  Find something more important than yourself and love it (or who and what it helps) and you might extend your life quality and quantity for up to seven years.  It has to be beneficial, constructive and positive for those it effects.  Causes that are basically centered in avarice, negativism, the inconsequential, regressiveness, negation, entropy or are life harming do not tend to work.  In fact, they often work in reverse harming their adherents.  That is what the preponderance of research and clinical opinion points to.

Looking forward to what you can do for your cause every morning as you get up can make everyday feel worthwhile, more exciting, more enjoyable and considerably healthier.  According to a study in the esteemed British medical journal, the Lancet, a strong sense of life purpose makes you 30% less likely to die of any and all causes (including accidents).  That may hold true for every year you are actively involved in your life’s purpose.

Spiritual Love

Having an active, spiritual, love relationship with whatever you perceive to be your metaphysical something greater (higher power, the force, the life force, nature, the universe, universal love, the great mystery, your deity, spiritual entity or energy or more simply God) probably will add between 4 and 14 years to your life depending on which study you read.

This longevity also appears to be rather dependent on how active you are in your spiritual life.  Regular meditation and a sense of communicating with your greater something, plus doing various spiritual rituals and spiritually motivated acts of service, along with meeting with like-minded others all seem to contribute to longer and healthier life according to a passel of related research.

Love of People and Other Living Creatures

If your love of something greater than yourself has to do with people in general, the human race or any other large group (i.e. children, the elderly, your country, identity group, etc.) and you are actively involved in what you are doing about that love, your life likely will be better for it.  Furthermore, health benefits also accrue to those who actively love other species.  This especially is true of the species who are good at loving back and those good at demonstrating behaviors exemplifying love toward each other.  Dogs, great apes, horses, parrots, cats, elephants, dolphins and a host of others are all candidates demonstrating at least some of the behaviors and the brain chemistry that goes with love.

Love of people in general, various groups of people and other living species gets very similar positive results to loving particular people like spouses and family members and also having healthy self-love.  Such love helps your immune system get stronger, makes for blood pressure improvements, lowers risk of heart attacks and strokes and has a wide range of other health benefits.  Adding to your love of particular people, the broad scale greater than yourself aspect diminishes the risk of early death by about 45% according to a study in the PLOS Medicine Journal.

Love of smaller groups such as one’s family counts too but in somewhat different ways.  Having strong, healthy, love connections with family and dear friends also can lower your chances of dying early unless those relationships are too often highly stressful and highly problematic.  Adding a life purpose, greater cause or love of larger human or animal groups can add quite a bit to life expectancy and quality of life both, so long as other anti-health and anti-love factors are not overwhelmingly strong.

So, ask yourself how is your love of humanity, the human race or any big part of it?  Check out your love of our creature cousins and how active you might be on their behalf.  If you are doing well here, your quality of life mentally, physically, emotionally, and just about in every other way is likely to be better.  You also are likely to have less illness, quicker recovery from illness, live more joyfully and have a far greater sense of life fulfillment.  That is what the preponderance of research is showing.

As you can see, the above categories overlap and integrate, are expandable and are in no way exclusive of one another.  Those who actively live their love for something they see as greater than themselves has given millions a better and longer life.  Emulate them and you may do likewise.
Help us spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Would it perhaps be good for you to write out a completion of this sentence stem?

Related posts:

1. Is Love the Most Important Thing in the Universe?
2. Is Love a Value?
3. Spirituality and Love Great and Grand”
4. Cuddling for Greater Love and Better Sex – a Love Skill
5. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life 

From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again

Mini–Love-Lesson # 185

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson teaches you about how healthy self-love supports and improves love of another, how that influences how much love comes your way and how it improves love’s quality.  This mini-love-lesson also covers self-love’s influence on the magic ‘five to one ratio’ that keeps relationships alive and growing, and it reveals the importance of love cycling.

What About This First Love Yourself Stuff?

“To love another you must first love yourself” is a frequently stated concept – you may have run into it before.  You even may have wondered about it.  Is it true?  Can self-love really help you in your love of someone else?  Are problems in love relationships rooted in a lack of self-love?  (See mini-love-lesson Self-Love – What Is It?)  What does love yourself really mean?  How exactly does self-love effect loving another?  Doesn’t this idea contradict the ethical and religious teachings that say self-love is a bad thing and a serious sin?  If someone I love doesn’t love themselves is that hurting our relationship?  How exactly does one go about loving themselves?  Yes, there are a great many questions to ponder concerning this often repeated concept.  Let’s see if we can answer some of them and let’s start with this one.

What Happens in a Relationship Lacking Sufficient Self-Love?

Without sufficient self-love, an adult love relationship is not adult enough!  At least frequently that is the case.  Especially in romantic and life-mate style love, childlike neediness tends to occur and get in the way.  Dependency forms of false love, including the much written about one called codependency, develop.  Healthy, adult style real love is blocked from developing.  Immature, dysfunctional ways increasingly tend to sabotage the interactions in the love relationship.  Usually this destroys the growth of healthy, real love and the relationship comes to a painful end.  At best, the relationship never attains its potential for fulfillment, happiness or healthy adult functioning.

One way to think about it goes like this: the love relationship is dominated by the love-needy, inner child self in one or both partners.  That subconscious, inner child self wants parent type love instead of adult-to-adult love too often and too much.  That makes it easy for one or both partners to have lots of child level, fear-based dynamics.  Then frustration, misunderstandings and miscommunications increase.  Frequently sibling-like fights break out and immature, unhappy, childish emotions prevail.

Worst of all, a great lack of developing, adult ways of going about life together occurs and keeps getting worse.  The how-to’s of adult, healthy, real love never are learned because needy, child-level love is the best the couple usually can manage.  They may at times play well together in passionate sex and other fun ways which helps them keep going but that too usually fades as resentments and disappointments go unresolved.  Adult love skills never sufficiently are learned and adult, problem solving, love-based teamwork goes unpracticed.

Erich Fromm, the great psychotherapist and social philosopher, once said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love”.  Without sufficient self-love we keep getting easily wounded and then we act to wound back the one we love most and we don’t know how to stop.  We keep wanting our loved partner to play the all-forgiving, loving parent and fix us.  If they don’t, it just gets worse because we do not know how to do self-love based, self fixing, let alone couple fixing.

Self Fixing and Team Fixing Via Self-Love

With sufficient self-love you do not easily get hurt but when you do it is a lot easier to either fix yourself or ask your loved partner to lovingly assist you in your adult self fixing and to work with you in relationship fixing.  Without that self-love, you are likely to ignore your own needs or get defensive, manipulative, demanding or overly wimpy.  Then you may put too much needy, fix me pressure on your beloved.  Healthy, real self-love helps you stay adult and keep working out adult  “I win, you win” improvements and solutions.  Insecurities, frustration and anger may corrupt cooperative, love interactions. If you can stay on track with the help of your real self-love, and not go into escape or attack modes of reacting, improvements can occur.

When hearing what sounds like criticism or putdowns, with self-love it is easier to think something like “It’s getting kind of hard to catch what this person is throwing at me, so it must be time to remind myself that I am abundantly okay and wonderful enough, so I don’t need to let myself get all hurt and upset.  In fact, I’m also strong enough to hear, with love, what this person has to say, knowing it may tell me something useful and perhaps tell me more about them than me”.  Without sufficient self-love you might find yourself thinking something like “I’m under attack and have to attack back or escape, and what a terrible person my beloved is for attacking me” or “Of course my beloved is right and what a miserable and inadequate person I am”.  Self-love can help you stay okay enough to keep working on mutual solutions even when things are hard and not going well.

The Lack of Self-Love and the Growth of False Love

Those who lack sufficient self-love are thought to be much more vulnerable to false forms of love infecting their lives.  It works sort of like the starving person who is much more likely to eat anything they can get and, thus, is in danger of becoming malnourished and food poisoned.  The self loving person can be much more discerning about what they take in.  They also are much more likely to insist on getting higher-quality, real love.  If they are love knowledgeable and can tell the difference, they will not long put up with false, stingy or poor quality love efforts, which is what low self-love causes people to do.

It seems dependency forms of false love are particularly common among those who are low in healthy, real self-love.  Living with large amounts of neglect and both psychological and physical abuse, along with unfulfilling false love, is seen to be much more common among those with low self-love.  Susceptibility to destructive addictions unfortunately frequently can become part of this picture.

The dynamics described above show how important it is to learn the differences between healthy, real love and the major forms of false love.  That is part of why Kathleen McClaren and I wrote Real Love False Love, Which Is Yours? which is the only book we know of covering multiple forms of false love and the only book that tells you how to understand each and what you can do to avoid, escape or transform false love into real love.  By the way, Real Love, False Love is now available internationally at Amazon.com, in the Kindle edition at a new low price; reviews are desired.

What Happens in Relationships That Have Enough Self-Love?

The couples who have enough healthy self-love in both people are thought to be much more able to accomplish the almost magical five to one rule.  The five to one rule refers to the discovery that when couples send back and forth 5 love-positive statements or actions for every 1 anti-love or non-love statement or action they are far more likely to succeed as a lasting, okay couple.  This 5 to 1, positive, communication, ratio dynamic especially is found to be helpful when couples are interacting where conflict is involved.  Those with low self-love are thought to be much more likely to fall below this ratio which means mutual misery and possibly break-up is much more likely. (Consult the “Love Positive Talking” mini-love-lesson).

High self-love also means a greater likelihood of avoiding, or more quickly fixing, all the problems mentioned above.

With healthy self-love you have far more love to give because your cup runneth over, a lot and often.  Not only that, but because you seldom are in an empty or needy state, you want to give your love more and better.  It is like the difference between being hungry and malnourished with only scraps to eat or having a full larder and wanting to create and serve up wonderful meals for all those you care about.  Not only are you able to feed the hungry but you can serve up love meals that are much healthier and especially tasty.

One of the greatest advantages to high self-love is the lack of fear in people who have it.  With high self-love they tend not to fear being worthy enough, being important to their beloved, being afraid of rejection or abandonment or being unlovable.  Those with low self-love tend to fear those things a great deal of time.  High self-love people also do not have to fear asking for the love they want and the way they want it showed.  That means they are free of having to play psychological games and other trickery trying to get the love they hunger for.  In turn, that means they do not have to go for long periods tolerating not having love showed to them (being fed) and they are not likely to undervalued or poorly receive the love coming their way.

Remember, with high enough healthy self-love, part of your self-care is to insist on getting frequent, high quality love and not just scraps.  First insist on that of yourself as well as insisting to yourself that you give likewise.  Then you can lovingly effectively go after what you want with and from your beloved.

People with healthy self-love tend to have more love to give and tend to do it better. That helps make them more okay and, thus, more desirable to healthy, self loving others.  Two strong, okay, loving people make a strong loving couple much better than if one or both are weak or stuck in victimness and in need of repeated rescuing.

The Return Trip of Love

In healthy, happy, well functioning, love relationships there is a cycle of love going out to a beloved and then love coming back from the beloved.  Self-love is very important for creating this cycle and keeping it going.  Sometimes there are things that get in the way like a crisis, having to be absent from one another for a lengthy time, external ongoing heavy demands on time and energy for one or both, etc..  At these times healthy self-love is a big assistance for getting through them.  Healthy self-love can motivate healthy self-care to compensate for gaps in the ongoing cycling of love. Healthy self-love also can provide strength and motivation for getting those gaps closed so the love cycling is flowing again.

It is not good to barter giving love so as to get it because real love is a free gift.  But when two people connect in love with each other, a two-way cyclical dynamic can be created.  The same happens in families and friendship groups except the numbers of participants often are larger.  Part of the support for the dynamic of healthy love cycling is healthy self-love.  Healthy self-love supports and often motivates healthy love of others and then it motivates an other to send back love, creating an ongoing cycle of love.

Work at keeping your cycle running and your love relationships likely will be lasting  (See mini-love-lesson “Cycling Love for Lasting Love”).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  How good are you at self-love and self-care, while at the same time lovingly interacting with someone you love, especially when there is a difficulty occurring?  (We suggest you take some time with this question and maybe talk it over with a loved one to find out how they see it).

Related posts:

1. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
2. Infidelity & The Love Messages That Block & Stop It
3. Respect – As a Love Skill
4. Unselfish Self-Love 

Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Mini love lesson #185

FREE, over 200 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson helps you look at how unknowingly you may have been subconsciously infected by destructive teachings about self-love and much more.

What They Say about Self-Love

“You can’t let people think you love yourself.  If you do they will think you are conceited, you have the big head and are stuck up.  Then no one ever will like you or want you around”.  Did you ever hear anything like that as a kid?  Did you ever think anything like that about yourself?  How about this: “You can’t love somebody else until you first love yourself”?.  I hear that idea about once a week from different people.  Then there is “self-love leads to becoming a sex pervert”.  Of course, there also is the great commandment or admonition “love others as you love yourself”.  Have you ever wondered what that “love yourself” part is all about?

Do these contradictory statements about self-love confuse you, or cause any inner conflict or have you just never given any of that much thought?  Whatever is in your subconscious mind about self-love – contradictory or not –  could be having a surprisingly big but hard to see influence on how well you do in life.  It especially could effect your success at love relationships.  Self-love has been found to be a big factor in love of others, work success or failure, the harmony or lack of it in child raising, general health, victory or defeat in any endeavor, defense against stress illnesses, resilience in overcoming setbacks and how much good you do or don’t do others.  So that we can really understand the issues involved in self-love, let’s briefly look at a few of its surprising and intriguing development issues.

How Did Self-Love Get Such a Bad Thing Reputation?

It is the government’s fault.  Does that surprise you?  You see, a major source of anti-self-love propaganda was put out to support the form of autocratic government known as monarchy.  That propaganda effort has been going on for several thousand years and continues to this day.  Historically, self-love was thought to encourage people to be for themselves instead of living for and in obedience to their liege lord, or monarch.

Self-love also was seen as a social order disruptor.  That is because self-love leads to individuality and that leads to being uppity or trying to raise yourself above your preordained, proper place and station in life.  Everyone keeping in their place in the order of things was understood to be the basis of social stability and collective safety.  Self-love meant self interest might prevail over the interests of authority.  It was greatly feared that self-love could even help lead to that horrible thing known as democracy.  By the way, that is why marrying for love never had much of a chance until America got invented.

The Royals and the priests of ancient Greece used religion to teach that the one thing the gods could not tolerate was human pride.  Apparently that was because prideful people could get uppity and in doing so might challenge and maybe even overthrow the gods and the Royals.  The early church seems to have picked up on this, joined in with the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and has been, off and on, condemning self-love as a dangerous sin threatening authority and the orderly functioning of society ever since.

Words & Terms Used to Effect Your Thinking about Self-Love

Here are two lists of some of the words and terms that may have gotten into your mind and the minds of those you care about concerning self-love.  In the first list the words tend to carry negative connotations and trigger negative feelings about self-love.  The second list is more positive and represents more recent influences and understandings related to self-love.  Notice what you feel as well as what you think while you read each word or term.  That can help you ascertain how you may have been influenced or programmed to react concerning self-love.

Self-love has been called antisocial, alienating, conceited, disobedient, egocentric, egotistical, heresy, hedonistic, indulgent, jealous, narcissistic, non-empathetic, prideful, selfish, sinful, self-centered, self exulting, self-important, self interested, sociopathic, subversive, stuck up, uncaring, ungodly, uncharitable, and vain.  Is it any of these things to you?  Was it any of these things to the people who raised you?  Is it any of these things to the people who are important in your life now?

In recent years in many more modern circles, self-love has begun to be seen in a much more positive light.  Healthy, real self-love has been called autonomy assistive, altruistically beneficial, balancing, charity inspiring, constructive, confidence building, contributory, democratic, empowering, energizing, ego supportive, enlightening, emotionally healthy, freeing, good parent modeling, honest, individualistic, individuation fueling, mentally healthy, pride making, protective, resilient, socially beneficial, self caring, self honoring and self strengthening.

Can you see how healthy, real self-love can be helpful to each of these factors in a person?  Is it reasonable to you that each of these factors may be elements of self-love or its result?  Does it seem right to you to conclude that self-love is something you and everyone else would do well to have lots of?

Healthy Self-Love Against the Problems and Deficiencies of Today

Millions are in counseling or therapy today because they suffer from crippling low self-esteem, inadequate self-confidence, poor self-concept, inferiority fears, feelings and complexes, issues of deficient self worth, self limitation syndromes and the like.  Still millions more would do well to become engaged in counseling or therapy for the same reasons.

Then there are millions more suffering from overcompensation reactions to the same problems and that is what leads to narcissism, arrogance and the like.  Let me also mention those who are lost in escapist patterns of addictions stemming from the same root sources.  Then also there are all the millions of children, spouses and families ill effected by those who suffer from these same causes.

Developing sufficient, healthy, real self-love is seen by many mental health professionals as the cure, or at least part of the cure, for all this.  Alienation, debilitating isolation, love starvation and a lot of other problems can and frequently are made better by healthy, self-love development via love infused therapy.  That at least is the growing clinical conclusion being drawn from the new understandings of what healthy, real self-love actually is all about.

For Growing Healthy, Real Self-Love, Consider Doing These 3 Things

If you or anyone you know or care about seems to suffer from any of the maladies mentioned above, consider these actions:

First, read, study and put into practice what you learn from the following list of mini-love-lessons on self-love found at this site.  It might be best to read them in the order given but it’s okay to do it otherwise.

0.  Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? (You are doing this one)
1.  Self-Love – What Is It?
2.  Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It
3.  Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
4.  Unselfish Self-Love
5.  Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
6.  Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism
7.  Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love
8.  Self Talk for Improving Love

By doing these additional, eight, brief mini-love-lessons on self-love, in effect you will have taken a short course on self-love and how to grow it.  There is lots more to learn but though I’m biased I say that is a great start.  These mini-love-lesson teachings on self-love have been known to help a great number of people to start and improve the way they grow their own healthy self-love.  Hopefully you can do the same.

Second, consider finding a good, love knowledgeable counselor, therapist, personal coach or mentor.  Then work with them on a regular basis focusing on the development of healthy, real self-love.  This can be done in individual or group sessions and sometimes quite well at personal growth workshops, special retreats and seminars.  But be careful.  We suggest you get user references before you select because quality can vary greatly.

Third, nothing helps you learn something like teaching it.  Leading a discussion group, a reading club, or facilitating a self-study class or giving an out right class on healthy, real self-love or something similar likely will put you in touch with a lot of fine people and help you really get this super important, life-changing knowledge.  You also informally can do something like introducing and talking over these self-love topics with friends, family, workmates or whoever.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Seriously, how often is your self-love an active part of your everyday life?

Related posts:

1. Why Love Problems Hurt So Bad
2. Love Affairs: Bad?, Good? and Otherwise
3. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
4. Self-Love – What Is It?
5. Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism