What is LOVE, Dr. Cookerly?

7 Other Definitions of Real Love Worth Considering

Various disciplines and schools of thought define love quite differently depending on their focus and perspective. Here are seven composite, summary definition statements culled from seven differing theoretical approaches to defining love.

1. An Artistic Definition of Love
Love is the art of treating the loved beautifully. This art is accomplished, as in all the arts, by skillful performance which is acquired by experience, study, observation and training. The aim of the art known as love is to powerfully and ingeniously create mutual, beautiful, aesthetic living experiences for and with the loved sometimes resulting in exquisite, awesome, intimate enrichment unavailable by any other means.

2. A Behavioral Economics Definition of Love
Real love can be defined as a special case of equity theory. A person emotionally invests, has their investments accepted and gets a positive, equitable return on their emotional investment in this definition. This causes further investment and as additional returns build up emotional equity is stored. The stored emotional equity can be drawn upon in times of negative return or low return. However, unless the accumulated, emotional equity is considerable severe loss or continued lengthy low returns can lead to a cessation of emotional investment which in turn can lead to a cessation of the love relationship.

3. An Evolution Psychology Definition of Love
Love is a powerful, evolutional, genetically encoded survival mechanism whereby those life forms that strongly attach to one another, or to some entity, produce a survival advantage often involving superior cooperation, collaboration, coordinated effort, unity of purpose, defensive tactics and strategies, and mutually reinforcing pleasure-based, pain avoidant bonding.

4. A Metaphysical Definition of Love
Love is metaphysically defined as the prime cause of cosmos and opponent of chaos, the pre-eminent, transcendent uni–force in the universe uniting all being and creation together which in its ontological, highest earthly manifestation, is the root life force permeating and guiding all life toward life’s greatest transcendental advancements, wholeness and primacy.

5. A Neuroscience Definition of Love
Love is a poorly understood neurochemical, and perhaps neural electrical phenomenon, probably primarily processed in the brain’s limbic system which was genetically evolved to make us value, join with and assist the survival and healthful well-being of those loved usually via interactional relationships.

6. A Psycho-Socio-Dynamic Definition of Love
Love is that which produces a set of internal feeling states by which one senses great affection, care, warmth, positive regard, continuing attraction, intimate personal connection and a desire to share with, be beneficial to, protect and experience happiness interacting with who or what is loved.

7. A Theological Definition of Love
According to the theologies of many world religions real love is defined something like: the true and total nature of God and, thus, the most important of all things, the essence of all that is deific, the substance and the essence of true spirituality, the first and always force which birthed creation, the core power of divinity, the source of all other real loves, that which if we are without makes us as nothing even if we have all other virtues, faith, powers, knowledge, talents and wealth, and that which we are to be about above all else.

Note: please remember that these seven definitions are just composite samples of the many love definition efforts in a wide variety of varying schools of thought and study. With that in mind, let us suggest that you might want to work on your own personal definition of love.

♥ Love Success Question
Has your heart made mistakes or been confused about real love and, therefore, needs the help of your head?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Definition of Love Series

Parenting Series

Better Parenting Through Love Series

Parenting Series: How To Love Your Child Better

Parenting Series: Love Motivating Your Child (& Every One)

Toward Good Behavior

Parenting Series: Paul’s Points On Love For Parents

Here is a simple seven step system for motivating your young ones (and sometimes for motivating the ‘child self’ in an adult) toward the actions desired and seen as good. It is a love empowered system which tends to help love relationships grow as guidance is given, boundaries are set and discipline rendered. It is a system that has been found to work with a vast array of very different types of youth and others, and could be the system most likely to work for you because it works for so many others.
(Continued)

False Forms of Love Series

False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome

False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies

False Forms of Love: Love/Lust Confusion

False Forms of Love: Meta Lust

False Form of Love – Nympholepsia

False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies

False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments

False Forms of Love – Spouse Acquirement

Syndrome

False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome

False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding

False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction

Syndrome

Dealing With Love Hurts Series

Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt
Accurately

Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From

Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips

Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance

Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain

While life’s greatest joys can occur because of love some of life’s greatest hurts also can occur because of love going wrong, gone wrong or love lost. Love relationship failure and its profound agony, the despair of love leaving, the brutal stab of love rejection, the anguish of love betrayal , the angst of love in doubt, the sickening emptiness of love never present are but some of the hurts we humans face when dealing with insufficient and malfunctioning love. Few people are raised with good examples, helpful knowledge and useful guidance concerning dealing with the many types of hurt possible in love relationship situations. The good news is we can learn the skills it takes to cope and even grow from these painful experiences.
(Continued)

Work With and Without Love

Synopsis: Intriguing concepts; Successful failure; Sacrifice and imbalance, Four factors most don’t know to think about; Healthy self-love; and Asking good questions for happy, healthy, work success via love.

How do these ideas strike you? 1. Work is to serve life, not life to serve work.
2. To love your work and work your love is to make much of life ‘play’.
3. The best work is ‘love made manifest’.
4. One of the healthiest acts of self-love is to find work that you would pay to do if someone wasn’t paying you to do it.
5. With work, love and play in balance we succeed at life. Without all three in balance we fail at life.

Harlan told me his story which, sad to say, I’d often heard before. His version went like this. “I did what my upbringing taught me to do. I put almost all my time and effort into succeeding in business. To accomplish this success I put my wife and kids ‘on the shelf’, so to speak. I thought I would get back to them once I had climbed high enough on the ladder of success and made enough money. I lied to myself saying I was doing it all for my loved ones. The trouble was my loved ones did not stay on the shelf. "My wife ran off with a guy who doesn’t even make half of what I do. My kids treat me like the stranger I am to them, and I only have business friends or, in other words, no real friends at all. I enjoyed my business success so much I neglected learning how to enjoy the rest of life. Now I am rich in money and status but concerning love and joy I live in poverty. Please help me.”

Well of course, I and those who work with me went to work helping Harlan learn to help himself in all his neglected areas. After some rather intense therapy and a lot of ‘practice work’ putting concepts and realizations into healthy actions I’m pleased to say Harlan now lives a much more balanced and far happier life.

Work is such an enormous part of most people’s life. Work is also an enormously important factor influencing how well one does healthy self-love and healthy relational love. Yet many people do not give these aspects of their work-life much thought. There are those who sacrifice their emotional and their relational life for work. There also are those who sacrifice their physical health for their work. Some people actually do work themselves to death. Like Harlan there are many people who, perhaps unknowingly, sacrifice their love relationships for success, money, status and other work related goals. There also are work related problems that sabotage love which hardly anyone thinks about.

Here are just four:
*    Succeeding at the wrong thing Here are some examples: Dean is a very well-off, successful, corporate attorney but he longs to be a camp director – he loved scouting as a boy. He dreams of this almost nightly and his anti-depression medicine seems to be working less and less. Janet just wants to raise her kids which is what she both loves and is super good at. However, being a high dollar, traveling, medical equipment rep just has too many payoffs, even though it takes her away from her family for weeks at a time. Next year John swears he’s going to stop selling real estate and start back to school to become a veterinarian, but will he? This is the fourth year he has made this proclamation.

Sarah is a rising project manager in an upscale, big-city, healthcare company but her doodles and daydreams are all about being back on a Navajo reservation working with children where her life felt most fulfilled. Each of these people do not love their work even though they are good at it. Sadly, they are more likely than the average person to develop stress related illnesses, damaging alcohol or prescription drug abuse, love relationship deterioration, and an existential crisis resulting in what most people call a complete breakdown. Hopefully none of those will happen. Each of these people just may live unfulfilled, unhappy lives being successful at the wrong occupation.

*    Loving only work It’s wonderfully healthful to love your work, enjoy your labors, revel in succeeding, be passionate about the challenges and so forth but only if you balance it with other things to love like healthy self-love, healthy relationship love, healthy love of life, healthy spiritual love, etc.. There is much more to life than work, even highly meaningful work. People working for important causes, people manifesting their talents in the arts, professions, etc., people doing fascinating research into the great mysteries, and people just enjoying doing a really good job at something they are good at — all can be in danger of imbalanced living because their work is so rewarding and enjoyable.

*    Only tolerating your work Do you ‘love’ your work? If you don’t do you suspect you ever will? Many people will leave a job or occupation they hate but will stay in a vocational situation they only can tolerate. This often is referred to as being “stuck in a dead-end job”. It is true that a great many people’s life situation does not provide for much more than a vocational situation which is merely tolerable. However, as an act of healthy self-love searching for better than that and risking a change can mean you will have a longer and happier life, and everybody you love and care about probably will enjoy you more.

It’s always a joy when I get to help a person find the kind of work for which they can get decent pay and be passionate about. It’s surprising how often this leads to improved financial success. I once helped a couple who had been saving for years to change occupations from being well-paid engineers to metal sculptors but they just were not brave enough to make the transition. Finally they worked up their courage to go ahead and become ‘starving artists’ devoted to their passion. However, it didn’t pan out that way because in their second year they were making twice as much money with their art as they ever had in engineering. Sometimes it works out like this and sometimes not, but usually the life happiness level is greatly improved.

*    Poor self-love makes for a lousy work life Let me suggest that people who are high in healthy self-love tend to manifest that self-love partly by going after work that actualizes their talents and in which they find enjoyment or even great enjoyment. Conversely, people with poor self-love and its accompanying low self-esteem and low self-confidence often put up with low satisfaction types of work and less than desirable work settings.

People with high, healthy self-love know they are worthy of good treatment and they won’t tolerate for long people or conditions that are too negative for them. Those who grow a healthier self love seem, almost invariably, to keep making work-life improvements of one kind or another. People weak in self-love are seldom proud of the work they do even when they do a pretty good or better job at it and often they don’t go after promotions or improved placement. At least that is my experience with the many people I have counseled concerning these issues.

Let’s look at some questions concerning love and work. For you, are love and work two different things or are they integrated? Do you put love into your work? Do you love yourself through your work? Do you love the people you work with? Does the way you go about work influence the way you go about love away from work? Does the way you go about love influence the way you go about work?

Now look at a bigger question. Are you succeeding at the big three i.e. Work, Love and Play?    Are you keeping the big three in a fair amount of balance with each other? Will it be good for you to give some thought to your work and its influence on your healthy self-love and on your love relationships? Hopefully this will help you examine the enormous part of life we call work.

As always – Grow and Go in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Does the word ‘work’ elicit an emotion in you that you like to feel, or an emotion you don’t like to feel, or a neutral feeling, and what do you suppose that means about you?

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