Passionate Love - Wondrous and Perplexing

Mini-Love-Lesson  #232

Synopsis: Contrary views and differing forms of passionate love; how it is much more than sex; the romance and the eroticism; the three neural networks involved; its fading and rekindling; true love or not; a real and false passionate love difference; and the pain, problems and pleasures of passionate love are succinctly and with fresh information and perspectives presented here.

Most Sought, Most Mysterious, Most Troublesome

Euphoria, ecstasy, intense eroticism and all sorts of profound, powerful positive feelings - that is one view of passionate love.  Another is much less lovely.  It contains jealousy, obsession, compulsions, enslavement, drives to control mixed with total surrender and submission, intense insecurity covered by authoritarian domination, dangerous and destructive rage and some think a subconscious death wish.  More recently that disturbing view has been increasingly identified with mental illness and false love syndromes and not with healthy, real love (see our Real Love False Love e-book). Nevertheless, passionate love often is viewed as the most desirable form of love and the one that provides the greatest thrills, turn on’s, emotional fireworks, enlivening arousal, intrigue, enticing danger and incredible sex.  For so many, it definitely is a love not to be missed!

Much More Than Sex!

Passionate love often involves intense and extremely exciting sexuality but is much more than just sex.  In fact, sometimes passionate love is not sexual at all though that is what so many focus on when they think of passionate, romantic love.  Passionate, romantic love has been defined as a state of intense seeking for and or a sense of being in an ecstatic union with a reciprocating other.

Passionate love is felt with powerful compelling enthusiasm, eagerness and intense desires not always erotic.  The desire in real, passionate love is to be hugely involved with, enraptured by and immersed in the totality of who or what is loved.  Sometimes passionate love is not about a who but rather a what.  Religious zealotry and fervor are identified with passionate love as are patriotism and sometimes altruism.  To understand passionate love more fully, let’s first look at passion itself.  

Passion can refer to any emotion felt very powerfully and in ways that are compelling, almost uncontrollable, frequently consuming and involving intense yearning, craving, adoration, relishing, zeal, euphoria, compulsion, ecstasy and acceptable or even desired agony.  Now, let’s consider love (see “The Definition of Love”).

Passionate, real love can be identified as love felt with powerful, compelling enthusiasm, eagerness, intense pleasure and a huge drive to be connected with and able to act for the happiness and well-being of the loved.  It involves a great, high valuing and enjoyment of the loved, a valiant nurturing and brave protectiveness toward the loved and when romantic profound affection and eroticism.

The sharing, seeking for and experiencing of intense pleasure is involved in passionate love.  Simultaneously with passionate love comes a diminished awareness of pain, fear and everything which is unpleasurable.  Fully passionate, real love can involve incredible emotional intimacy, and what is sometimes called a great intermingling of spirits and a sense of ecstatic, cosmic connectedness.

Passionate love can be likened unto Germany’s grand, roaring Rhine River - fast, vast, extremely exciting, enormously enjoyable and all to often seductively dangerous and disastrous. When thinking of passion, one might do well to ponder the Rhine’s legend of the irresistible Lorelie who lured many a boater to a drowning death in its powerful swirling turbulence.

Differing Forms of Passionate Love

Think for a minute beyond  those two most commonly focused on areas of passion - the romantic and the erotic types of love.  Are you passionately in love with life, with nature, with a spiritual involvement, with beauty, with a great cause, with your children or family or with any deeply satisfying or meaningful endeavor?  You see, there are many ways to have true passionate love beyond the romantic and sexual, wonderful though they may be.

What about Romantic and Erotic Passionate Love?

It seems we are considerably hardwired to seek for and get into erotic and romantic love and love-like relationships.  It appears this has been crucial to our species survival.  Furthermore, it has been instrumental in helping humanity attain its preeminent status on our planet.  Not only that, but seeking and getting into love relationships has turned out to be exceedingly healthful for those who manage it successfully.  However, for many others who have tried and failed at love, it has often been disastrous.  For those who only partially learn to do love-relating well, it often has been a painfully growthful and exciting but arduous mixed blessing.  Nevertheless, our strong natural drives for sex, for passionate love, and for other kinds of love too, are now understood to have pushed us into populating the world, and to have become the most creatively cooperative of all species.

The Three Neuro Networks of Passionate Love

Psychoneurological research involving electronically looking into the brain while romantic love relationships are focused on, reveals a lot about passionate love.  That research points to three neuro networks involved when we feel passionate love.  One of our brain’s networks appears to handle attraction, another facilitates lust while a third processes emotional connection and attachment.  Operating together at strength, they help us have and experience the incredible feelings of romantic passion.  Sometimes that later leads us into lifelong, healthy, real and lasting love relationships and sometimes not.  In both cases, and after a time, romantic passion fades.  Replacing it can be a much more general, life assisting type of love variously identified as life partner love, spousal love , marriage type love, love mate love, companionate love or companion love.  These are thought to be processed by additional neural networks and somewhat different neurochemistry than that of passionate love.

What about Fading and Rekindling Passionate Love?

Some couples with life partner love can, and frequently do from time to time, briefly re-enliven their passionate love feelings.  Others practice various alternate lifestyles to re-experience their passion via the new and different.  Real love is not thought to be a part of the alternate lifestyle approach very often (except perhaps for those who become throuples) (see “Throuple Love, A Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?”).  Still others are glad to leave passionate love behind because it took so much energy, concentration and work that left little time for the rest of life.  Many others bemoan the fading of the passionate and long for its return.  Some of those search for and find ways to bring it back at least temporarily; quite a few others don’t but probably could with some professional counseling or coaching.

Is Passionate Love True Love?

Some think passionate love may not be real love at all but rather a sort of pre-love state testing whether lasting partner love can come into existence or not.  Others insist that passionate love is the real thing and the only kind worth totally surrendering to.  Still others note that several identified forms of false love-- namely Limerence, the IFD and the Fatal Attraction syndromes (see our Real Love False Love e-book)-- are full of passion but by no means do they dependably result in anything like healthy, real and lasting love. (Also see Title Index for each)  There are brain researchers who note how passionate romance and addictive opiates similarly seem to activate certain brain centers.  A difference is that romantic passion eventually fades or evolves naturally while drug addiction and some false love syndromes do not.

Romantic passion in the past has been variously referred to as being smitten, bewitched, spellbound, infatuated, love crazed, blessed out, beguiled, temporarily besotted, lovesick, having a crush and my favorite twitterpatted.  Interestingly none of those terms convey the idea of long lasting love even though those experiencing passionate love frequently pledge everlasting love, to love forever, etc.  The truth seems to be that a very high number of highly passionate, romantic relationships do not stay that way or even continue in any form once the passion fades.  Although, some do and those in them frequently proclaim theirs was real love right from the start.

A Possible Difference between Real and False Passionate Love

It is suspected that false, passionate love is the kind that pushes out and is destructive to other forms of love and love relationships.  Family love, friendship love and parental love and even pet love are all known to suffer, be neglected and even rejected when people are involved in passionate relating.  However, it actually may be that in passionate, real love those other love relationships tend to be enhanced, better appreciated and better taken care of.  The suspected reason is that the selfishness factor increases with false love and decreases with real love.  No one knows for sure.

It is entirely possible that some people have a real love springing up within a highly passionate beginning relationship while others do not.  Some of those who do not probably are experiencing a passion-filled, more temporary, false love syndrome.  Others may be experiencing a natural and healthful, but short term, romantic and passionate involvement which will provide an enriching interlude but not a deep and lasting love.  Terms like shipboard romance, close encounters of the temporary kind and weekend love affairs may have arisen from this kind of passionate, non-real love or only a mini-love experience.

The Pain, Problems and Pleasures of Our Passions

Maybe, more than you might think, there are people who learned to relate in and with love quite well after first having had passionate love’s peak emotional and sexual experiences followed by horrible, heartbreak disasters.  It is interesting what they have to say about their times of passionate love.  Lots of them proclaim they are quite glad for their previous times of passionate love but would not want to go through them again.  It was for them, a great adventure and they grew from it tremendously but it involved far too much chaos, agony and effort.  They also tend to proclaim that the love they have now fits their life far better than the tumult, tortures and tentativeness of their past passionate involvements. link “Adamant Love - and How It Wins for Us All” link “Ebullient Love - Love’s Joyous River” and link “Serene Love - A Gentle Power Flowing”  One of the things they learned was to be very self lovingly careful when it comes to passionate love.

One More Little Thing

Wouldn’t it be good to talk over what you just read with one or more others to see what they might think about passionate love and these ideas?  If you share this with them, we would appreciate it if you mention our many Mini-Love-Lessons, this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

Quotable Question: If you fall into passionate romantic love, will it end like other falls – in a crash?

A Sexy Halloween Love Story

Jack and Jill (not their real names, of course) were both in their 90’s and starting to celebrate their 50th Halloween together.  In their first year together as a couple they hosted a very sexy, Halloween party inviting all their friends to come costumed ‘as their favorite sexy character from history or literature’.

Jill had read about Winston Churchill’s mother, Jenny, shocking Victorian London society by going to a big, Royal, costume affair as the prostitute who rose to become Theodora, Empress of the world’s grandest and most glorious Empire, Byzantium.  So, copying Jenny, Jill created her risqué costume, one made up entirely of strings of fake jewels (glass beads) including a totally glorious crown.  Jack went as a sexy sorcerer from a fantasy novel.  The party was a great success, pictures were taken and, thus, the first entry into their Halloween scrapbook was soon thereafter created.

Now, Jack got out the large, old-fashioned, leather bound, orange and black scrapbook and placed it in front of Jill.  Jill poured a glass of their special celebration wine, and they began to look at the pictures from 50 naughty, intimate and ever so love-bonding experiences which they had so happily experienced and created together over the years.

There were pictures from the Halloween, midnight, Goth wedding and party of their best friend’s child, where almost everyone was dressed in weird, black, Goth garb.  They reminisced about the Wicca ceremony which had been surprisingly spiritual and how everyone had cheered as the couple left for their honeymoon in a hearse.  Jack and Jill laughed and smiled knowingly at each other as they turned the pages and paused at a picture of one Halloween night that showed them so very together in their bedroom, lighted only with five, very saucy, carved jack-o’-lanterns which cast amazing, wanton, leering shadows on the walls turning their skin a mischievous orange color.

Other photos were from a nearby city’s gay pride organization’s costume party for everybody, which had been attended by thousands of gays and straights in costumes both ‘beyond the pale’ and beyond belief.  Some pictures were taken at the restaurant which every year held an after Halloween party, 2 AM breakfast reminded of them of the time they arrived and everyone from other parties stood up and clapped because their costumes and those of their friends were so sexy, elaborate and amazing.
Jack and Jill recalled with sadness as they viewed pictures of costumed close friends they had loved but who had since passed away.  They still were amazed by the New Orleans, French Quarter Halloween party where they had seen a woman dressed only in boots, a cat mask and holding two, live leopards on leashes.

The wildest pictures came from the time friends invited them to a nudist colony, costume party where they both went festooned in ribbons as elves. (Let your imagination work on a ‘nude, costume party’).  Jack and Jill hugged each other remembering the time in New England where they attended the telling of Halloween ghost stories at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Many other pictures showed them dancing into the wee hours at a costume ball; carving jack-o’-lanterns with their grandchildren and the friends of grandchildren; other super sexy times, in super sexy costumes, with dear super sexy friends; the Halloween hospital staff party were a nurse won the best costume prize by wearing only very skimpy orange and black bandages; the Boo-at-the-Zoo Halloween party for disadvantaged children where quite a few little tiny Darth Vaders were observed flashing their light sabers.

Then there was the long ago time they, with other Americans in Germany, gave a Halloween party with hand-made cardboard bats, skulls and skeletons everywhere.  Their European guests were very puzzled about this seemingly macabre holiday celebration; they thought it must all have some strange, religious significance, and couldn’t believe all the fun the Americans were having but joined in once they got past their shock.

Jill and Jack got a big laugh viewing the pictures of a dear friend who had come to their party looking extremely ordinary, until you realized he had three arms, one arm which mechanically stretched out stealthily to pinch bottoms and lift skirts at quite a distance.  Jack, once again, expressed his great appreciation for Jill going to the trouble to make a marvelous wizard’s cloak costume for him and one for herself as Queen of the Autumn fairies.  Even more amazing was the costume she had made for him as the Greek god, Pan, and for herself as a woodland sprite.

Pictures of another party where their blackest, dear friend came in a safari outfit explaining he, of course, was “the great white hunter”.  Then there was the time at a Halloween party where Jack and Jill sneaked into a closet to make out, only to find a unicorn getting it on with a fairy princess already there.  Other times of passion, after the guests left their parties were recalled, and they smiled at each other in the most intimate way.

As Jack and Jill went back through the many pages of their scrapbook, they cried together, they laughed often, they talked seriously, and they shared and re-lived great times of spicy and sweet love with one another and with those most dear to them.  Then they went to their special toy chest — where we will leave them now in this little Halloween story of ours.

So, dear reader, are you and yours doing as well at creating love experiences and using things like Halloween to help in that endeavor?  You can, you know!  You can weave together love, sex, intimacy and fun and in doing so grow your love-bonds and love-memories together most magically.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If your next Halloween was a lover’s Halloween, what would you want it to consist of?

Ebullient Love: Love’s Joyous River

Mini-Love-Lesson  #231

Synopsis: The dynamics of this all too often under-explored form or “River” of Love are presented, clearly explained with quick examples along with an outline for achieving ebullient love and its many upbeat, healthful, positive emotions.

The Champagne Kind of Love

Has your spirit ever seemed to bubble up with happy love?  Has your heart been effervescent with joyous love feelings?  Have you experienced the heady excitement of irrepressible, buoyant love?  If so, you have known ebullient love.

Ebullience is the quality of lively, zestful, high-spirited, effusive positive feelings often spontaneously, animatedly and exuberantly felt and expressed.  Literally it has come to refer to filling up with and bubbling over with  positive emotions.  The word itself has an older meaning, now falling out of use, which has to due with bubbling up and over with any type of feeling.

Ebullient love refers to bubbling up and over with love’s natural joy.  It is the sparkling, bubbly champagne type of love.  This kind of love usually is seen as wholehearted, vitalizing, sometimes rhapsodic, thrilling, ardent, vibrant, blithely elated, extraordinarily cheery and, even at times, spiritually awesome.  Descriptions like overjoyed and overwhelmed with love frequently have been used to describe ebullient love experiences (See “Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!” Link “Pet Love”).

Examples of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love can be seen in the response of natural joy of an infant picked up and lovingly played with, cuddled and snuggled by a similarly effervescently happy, loving parent.  It also is often evident in the joyous greeting and heartfelt interaction of people reuniting after an absence.  Sometimes it is not so obvious but definitely felt in people walking hand-in-hand with a spring in their step and smiles on their faces.  Occasionally it comes more internally with mindful stillness as one person joyously observes deeply and reverently a person they deeply and reverently love.

Couples, deep friends, comrades and whole families simultaneously, mutually can become elated together with their ebullient love as they dance, hug, sing, shout with joy while they celebrate their connecting and uniting love on sundry special occasions.

Lovers fully present with each other in the existential now can repeatedly tap into their ebullient love and be infused with its happiness again and again.  This may lead to the most loving of embraces in the simplest and most ordinary of times, making such times extraordinary and very special (See “Many Good Feelings Brought on by Love”).

Small, Medium and Large Ebullient Love

Sometimes ebullient love is felt in rather small and also medium size amounts.  A sudden flash of momentary joy on observing someone you love just be themselves in some idiosyncratic way can trigger a bit of heartwarming ebullient love.  Receiving a special hand squeeze, a smile, a compliment or even just a nod or a wink may trigger a surprisingly impactful, tiny spark of ebullient love joy.  Sometimes couples dancing together in intimate connection brings on these precious, ebullient feelings.

Engaging together in prayer, mutual meditation, rituals of the spirit and the heart and jointly appreciating the awesome and the grand can bring on a quieter, deeper form of ebullient love.  When that happens, people sometimes describe their love joy as jointly feeling at one with each other and the universe, overwhelmingly awesome, deeply spiritual, exploding with joy and beyond their ability to describe what they are experiencing.  Profound mixtures of love and sex experienced together can do the same thing.  A great sense of total connection and unity also can  be part of the ebullient love experience.

The River of Ebullient Love

Ebullient love flows like a river full of delightful twists and turns, safe but exciting little rapids, eddies, tributary waterfalls with rainbows and endless other precious, elation surprises.  It is the kind of love that keeps you aware of and fully feeling the here and now with little or no attention given to the disturbances of the past or the future.  It is like you might repeatedly feel traveling down a pleasant but exciting river.  Furthermore, it tends to create memories that you can later tap back into and by doing so re-experience a bit of the abiding nurturing which ebullient love often provides (See  “Living Well via Loving Well” and “Quality Love, Quality Life?”).

Reward – Reinforce – Motivate

All the rivers of love - Adamant Love, Compassionate Love, Passionate Love, Serene Love as well as Ebullient Love - have their rewarding functions.  However, nothing rewards us quite like ebullient love.  This form of love often is immediate, obvious, easily experienced, lighthearted, fret free and very delight-full.  It can be seen as providing a great many of feelings which help make living with and in love extremely desirable.

Ebullient love provides strong reinforcement for doing all the other things we do about love.  Its wide variety of various joys and other good feelings reward our learning how to seek love, relate with the love, behave with love, improve with love, bond with love and bask in love.  Not only that, but ebullient love helps make love attractive, intriguing, playful and fun to share.  It, therefore, is a great help in making life feel worthwhile.

Ebullient love plays a major role in helping us celebrate our love connections, strengthen our love bonds, mutually and repeatedly nurture and enrich each other, live happily and feel fulfilled.  Beyond that, it also is a part of letting us experience and appreciate the majestic nature of love itself.  Because of all that, ebullient love is a great motivator to seek and keep doing life in ways that bring and share many of life’s most wonderful experiences.

Infectious Ebullient Love

People usually enjoy being around those experiencing ebullient love.  That is because it tends to be automatically infectious and, therefore, very easily shared.  This makes it great for relationships.  Being part of a mutual, ebullient love event can make for a sort of happy, upbeat bonding.  It is the sincere “I am happy for your happiness” and the “your joy is my joy” type of heart touching, ebullient experience.

An Outline for Growing Ebullient Love

How good are you at being happy?  Lots of people are not nearly as proficient at getting themselves happy as they might be.  Lots of them grew up being unknowingly trained to think that things and events come along to make us happy or not.  Too many grew up in families where they absorbed the non-conscious, antiquated idea that overt happiness is frivolous, suspicious or even sinful.  That is a leftover from the Puritan days when secular happiness was considered Satanically inspired and only the somber were godly.  We now know that usually happiness has much more to do with your mindset and mindfulness than do the things and events which happen to you.  Your mindset and your mindfulness are things you can do something about.  We also know that not making yourself sufficiently happy, frequently enough is a very unhealthy way to live.

If, on an average day, you are good at making yourself happy and you are good at the getting and giving of love you may be able to produce lots of ebullient love experiences.  Perhaps you know someone or are yourself the kind of person who is really proficient at enjoying being loving and loved.  Some of the people who are described as romantics are experts at this.  Their mindset is to enjoy the manifestations and elaborations of romantic love and they do it with relish.

Natural Happiness, it turns out, is extremely healthy.  So is Real Love (See “Wellness: Its Necessity, Healthy Real Love”).  Learn to focus frequently on the things that you can savor, enjoy, appreciate, be inspired by, find enriching and be delighted with as you also learn to deal with and dismiss more quickly unhappy stuff and healthy happiness is likely to come your way quite a lot.  Along with that, become increasingly love centered, love oriented, love mindful, love knowledgeable, love active and love receptive and you are very likely to be quite healthfully often happy.  Do that with others who are doing likewise, and maybe with a super special other, and that is a way to voyage on the river of ebullient love.  So, work on your mindset and your mindfulness habits for love and happiness and ebullient love is likely to become more and more a part of your life.

Now, let me suggest you happily go talk all this over with a perhaps lovable somebody.  In the process, you might tell them that they can regularly receiving our mini-love-lessons via our free subscription system?  That may help put a bit more much-needed love knowledge into our love hungry world.

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

Quotable Question:  Is it “love makes you happy” or “with love you can make yourself happy - or not” ?

Do You Start and Part with Love?

How do you do ‘Hi’s’ and ‘Bye’s’ with those you love?   To keep a love relationship healthy it is best if every (yes every) ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ experience includes at least a brief love connecting and sharing experience.  Every “Hello, I’m home” event is best done with a hug, a pat, a caress, a nuzzle or a kiss.  Going past each other to whatever you want to get to next without any expression of connecting love can be detrimental to your love relationships.  Likewise, every “So long” is better done with similar brief expressions of love.

In some relationships the lack of such love when parting can lead to hours of vague anxiety, worrying “is anything wrong”.  Starting off time together with a little demonstration of love means that the following time is more likely to go well.  Ending a time together with expressed and received love actions makes your next encounter more likely to be a bit sooner, a bit better and a bit more wanted.  People who start and part with love are seen as having better attitudes, better cooperation likelihood, less stress and a host of other small but significant benefits.

Many couples and many families I see in counseling for reasons of deteriorating relationships have not been greeting each other or saying goodbye to each other with any love at all.  Sometimes there is no greeting or saying goodbye what so ever.  Often when I get them to experiment with a little ‘start and part’ love action improvement begins.  This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to start toward the repair, or enhancement, of a love relationship.  Notice that this is the way most pet dogs (who were put in the world to teach us love according to an old Indian legend) do it.  Actually many apparently love- connected mammals greet and part with what looks like shows of affection.  So maybe love starting and parting is natural.

It is not only failing love relationships that often lack this love expression ‘start and part’ behavior. ‘Blah’ and ‘in a rut’ stagnant, and semi-functional relationships frequently exhibit this lack of love ‘start and part’ way of doing things.  So, I would like to suggest you check out how well your love shows in ‘start and part’ situations.  Might you do well to greet your spouse, children, friends, and maybe even yourself with an improved, more love demonstrative ‘start and part’ set of actions?  Would you like to dedicate yourself to starting every encounter with a brief but sincere show of love?

Be sure to do that before you try to take care of anything else each time you encounter a loved one even if you have been away from them only for a brief amount of time.  When coming together after work, going to the store , visiting with others, etc. making some action to lovingly touch, saying words of love followed by asking “How are you feeling” delivered with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions are usual ways to create a pleasant and caring environment.

Coming in from outside while saying a term of endearment like “Hello, Sweetheart”, giving a good morning kiss upon waking, smiling at first sight of one another, and adding a caress or pat are also quite helpful.  Departing with similar sentiments and behaviors works in much the same way.  If you already do these sort of things ask yourself how can you improve?  If you don’t already do this sort of ‘start and part’ love might you want to dedicate yourself to making a plan to do so, and enacting it?

If when coming together you usually begin with some sort of practical ‘what’s to be done’ talk, or ‘what has been done’ inquiry a sense of low grade aggravation is likely to grow.  If the last thing said on departure is something like “Remember to mail the letter, pickup the cleaning, do your homework”, etc. that person’s return to you is less likely to be happy.

If the last thing said is a message of love the reverse is true.  Get the practical messages said but end with an expression of love.  If the first thing said upon coming together is “Did you remember to pay the bills, do your assignment, call so-and-so”, etc. a small dose of subconscious emotional abrasion may occur.  That abrasion experience could later lead to growing difficulty, or at least to fairly strong disappointment.  If instead a happy “Hello, darling, it’s so good to be with you”, or something like that, starts a new encounter with each other it is much more likely to go smoothly.  Usually it only takes 20 seconds or less to start or part lovingly.  The return on your loving effort can yield hours of happier time together.  Of course you can take longer than 20 seconds and do it even better if you want to.

If you are the recipient of loving ‘start and part’ behaviors do you soak them up, reciprocate in kind, and cycle the love being offered?  Ignoring, or quickly moving away from such tokens of love deprives yourself and your loved one from the healthy, positive effects of these small important actions.  Unfortunately, in our fast paced, often goal oriented and impersonal daily lives there is an insufficiency of loving behaviors, so savoring those love actions that do come your way can enrich your life.

A good love relationship takes good love teamwork.  Good teamwork love takes good sending and good receiving.  Being a good receiver and an equal participant when a loved one initiates a ‘start or part’ love action helps the process of good teamwork love quite a lot.  So, if a love ‘start or part’ action comes your way take it in and send some back.

People sometimes say to me things like, “Dr. Cookerly, doesn’t starting and parting with love get to be an empty habit or meaningless activity”?  It can if you let it but it doesn’t have to.  Be creative!  Also all around the world friendly, affectionate greeting and parting rituals make life work better.  It’s healthy for those in all loving relationships to develop their own, informal love rituals.  If you get a sense that your rituals are beginning to feel empty or meaningless that might be a message from your inner wisdom-filled subconscious to do them better.

So, here’s a simple challenge.  Make an experimental ‘start and part’ with more behaviors of love action plan, and carry it out.  Then see if you and those you care about like the results.

As always – grow in love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love

Self-Love - What Is It?

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with the many contradictions and confusions concerning self-love; healthy, real self-love defined; the operational definition of self-love; and ends with the functional definition of self-love, plus a few important questions; more.

Contradictions and Confusions

“I’ve been told again and again I need to learn to love myself but I don’t know what that means.  I also have been told that before I can successfully love somebody else I first have to love myself, and until I love myself no one else will be able to love me enough or right.  Is all that true?  How can I figure all this out?

“As a kid I was told self-love was a bad thing.  It seemed to mean being selfish or self-centered and egotistical, conceited and even narcissistic.  Sometimes it seemed to mean doing something with myself that was sexual and bad but I never figured out what all was included there.  I knew I was supposed to put others first and myself last, and if I loved myself too much no one would like or love me.

“My religion taught me to love others and not myself, then the opposite by quoting Scripture at me telling me to love others as I love myself.  Isn’t that contradictory?  I don’t know what to think.  I’m so confused about ‘self-love’.  What am I to do?  I know I’m supposed figure all this out on my own but I don’t know how.”

This lament is echoed by a large number of people whose mental and emotional health, indeed, will greatly improve if they come to have greater, healthy, real love for themselves.  Not only that personal enrichment, but their relationship life, likewise, probably will show lots of improvement if they learn what healthy, real self-love is all about, how to do it, and practice what they learn.  But how are they to do that if they don’t know what it is?

Loving Those Who Don’t Love Themselves

There is another perplexing problem related to this confusing and contradictory self-love situation.  If you are trying to love someone who doesn’t know what healthy self-love is, who doesn’t know how to practice healthy self-love, and who even may practice anti-self-love, you possibly are going to have a very problem-filled love relationship.

If you’re trying to love someone whose healthy self-love is low, or someone who is indifferent to themselves, or who even hates themselves it is likely you are in big trouble and are going to need help.  Oh, loving these troubled people can be done and it can turn out well but it sure isn’t easy.  However, if you can encourage them to learn about healthy, real self-love, and to practice it, your love relationships with these un-self-loving people can get a lot easier and way more successful.

Getting A Sense of Healthy, Real Self-Love

You might be thinking, so Dr. Cookerly, are you going to tell us what self-love really is?  Yes I am and rather exactly, but first let’s try to get a sense of self-love before we more precisely define it.  Let’s examine several important ways to get a feel for what self-love is really all about.
First, understand that ‘self-love is healthy, real love’ going from the self to the self.  It’s sort of like feeding yourself healthy, tasty, nourishing food.  Next, be aware that loving yourself may involve some psychological actions you may not be used to.  For instance, it may involve your ‘adult self’ talking to your ‘inner child self’ in very loving ways.

The more scientific may prefer thinking of this as your neocortex sending composed messages to your brain’s limbic system in very loving ways.  Brain research shows that this positive internal dialogue accomplishes real neurochemical improvement, which you experience as feeling better and increasingly thinking more positively about yourself.  Some prefer to say it is your ‘cognitive, conscious mind’ choosing to speak lovingly to your subconscious mind.

Then there is a behavioral component.  Healthy self-love involves treating yourself well, taking good care of yourself, doing yourself favors, taking yourself into good experiences and enjoying them, being sure you surround yourself with good people, and a host of other actions which demonstrate you acting with love toward yourself.

People who do the actions of love toward themselves tend to experience the feelings of happy, healthy self-love which usually follow.  At the emotional level healthy self-love can mean feeling really good about yourself, glad to be you, feeling upbeat and positive about and toward yourself, highly honoring and highly valuing yourself without getting into the forms of false self-love like egotism, arrogance, overbearance, insolence, vanity, ostentation, conceit, self-pity, grandiosity, etc.

Awe and Joy

Healthy, real self-love can involve becoming awed, thankful and joyful about the one-of-a-kind, unique bundle of miracles that you are.  Deeply becoming aware that you are a product of a miraculous creation system that got you started, and keeps you going, and is all part of who you really are – and this, I suggest, is truly awesome.  Therefore, it is worth being joyous (occasionally or even often) about these aspects of yourself.

Regrettably, if you have been brought up only on ‘product’ valuing yourself instead of ‘essence’ valuing yourself, in response to these self-love messages you may think something like “But I didn’t do anything to earn that”.  You are much more than what you earn.  You are born with high-value and you maintain your essence-value as a part of your core whether you do anything productive with your essence or not.

Perhaps you have been trained to discount your value by thinking something like “But there are so many humans; I’m just one of the many millions.  There’s nothing special about me”.  Not true!  You are an individual work of art.  No one is exactly like you.  You are unique and, therefore,  special.  No one thinks exactly like you, has exactly the same emotions, or behaves exactly the same way as you do.  We all are just like our fingerprints –  totally one-of-a-kind, though somewhat similar to others.  So, you can value yourself, especially your essence and core self.  Consequently, the experience of awe and joy about yourself, your essence and your core can be part of healthy, real self-love.

Self  Delight

Do you delight in yourself when you figure something out?  Do you get a little spark of happiness when your wonderful, incredible memory system brings to you the memory you have been searching for?  When you appreciate anyone or anything do you appreciate yourself for a few seconds for having an appreciation system which brings you happiness?

When you fix something broken, or make something new, or cause someone to smile, or help someone in any way at all do you also take just a little bit of time to appreciate yourself for being able to accomplish what you just accomplished?  Do you ever look back on the best experiences of your life and think something like “Good for me, I got and let myself experience that, and it was good”.
Do you take joy into yourself when you see, or touch, or smell, or taste or hear something beautiful and then have a good feeling about being able to do that?  When you have a really good time with another person are you also glad about your own ability to have that good time?

All these things and much more are (and can be) part of healthy self-love.  Actually, when you were a young child you did all these sort of things naturally (baring some disabilities).  Young children around the world do ‘self delight’ unless and until they are taught anti-self-love.  Your own natural tendency to do this may be deeply buried but it’s there, and you can resurrect it.  If this ‘self delight’ mechanism is active in you, but a little rusty, you might polish it up with awareness and experience it more.

Self Care

Part of healthy self-love comes from valuing yourself enough to take good care of yourself.  Diet,  exercise,  good medical attention when useful or needed– developing a very positive, mental/emotional attitude about life and yourself with lots of healthy empathy for yourself so that you are really in touch with your inner messages – healthy, positive, strong relationships full of love of many different types (a couple relationship, friends, family, pets to name a few) – and keeping yourself psychologically growing and actualizing your potentials, all are part of the healthy self-love and the self-care picture which you can develop.

Self-Love and Other Love

Self-love involves a lot of ‘loving others’ and this is how it differs from what might be considered selfishness.  A great deal of research shows us that when you love others well you do yourself a lot of favors.  Those who are good at loving others tend to have lowered bad cholesterol, better brain functioning, stronger community connections, greater longevity, get treated better by others, and a host of other benefits.

Those who live by the great commandment “love others as you love yourself’, in fact, do the best at succeeding and being benefited in life.  Those who don’t love themselves, or don’t love others, or don’t love both themselves and others are much less happy and much less benefited in life.

Healthy, Real Self-love Defined

With all the above in mind, I hope you have a sense of what healthy, real self-love actually is.  So, let’s now define it more accurately.  We will use this site’s working definition of love, found in the left column as “The Definition of Love”.

Healthy self-love is defined as:

Healthy, real self-love is a powerful, vital, natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the self.

I will now, with healthy self-love, brag that this site’s definition of love recently has been acclaimed in places as diverse as Egypt and China and the US.

Let’s take a look at the elements in this definition. Powerful, yes, healthy self-love is powerful.  It is something you can greatly change your life with, for the better and it can make you much more powerful in beneficially influencing the lives of others.  Vital, means it is important to life and for enhancing life functioning, and that’s exactly what healthy self-love can do.

Natural, demonstrates that it is part of nature and essential existence biologically, psychologically and relationally.  Process, refers to healthy self-love being an active succession of systemic changing operations, all aimed at natural well-being.  High valuing yourself in a deep, emotional sense is the key factor which leads to desiring for and acting for your own well-being and taking pleasure in your own well-being.  It is by this that healthy self-love brings you to thriving wholeness and joy.

The Operational Definition of Self-Love

One of psychology’s ways to define something psychological is to describe its operations.  This usually means to detail the observable actions or behaviors which bring it about, or which occur when the phenomenon being discussed is occurring.  For example, smiling, laughing, animated movement and other such behaviors are acting in ways called happy.

This gives us the operations or behaviors that occur with happiness.  Therefore, those actions give the operational definition of happiness.  Healthy, real self-love can be operationally defined as doing ‘to or for’ yourself ‘one or more’ of the eight major groups of behavior which operationally define healthy, real love.

These behaviors can include things like talking to yourself out loud or silently with loving words, using loving tones of voice and feeling yourself smile as you do this; lovingly caressing or holding yourself; affirming yourself with praise and compliments and accolades; exploring and, with ‘insight’, self disclosing yourself to yourself with appreciation and acceptance; tolerating your shortcomings, failures, etc.; receiving deeply inside yourself praise, compliments, thanks, etc. from others; giving yourself both ‘object gifts’ and ‘experience gifts’; and a host of similar actions.  To learn more about the operational definition of love consult the “Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in the left column on this site.

The Functional Definition of Self-love

Another way to define something is to give its functions, or describe what it does or what it accomplishes.  There are five major functions accomplished by healthy, real love.  There also are the same functions found in healthy, real self-love.

Healthy, real self-love functions to:

1. Connect you to yourself and, thereby, harmonize all your parts
2. Safeguard yourself

3. Works to improve yourself in many different ways

4. Causes you to act and be self-healing if you become physically, or emotionally, or relationally damaged or ill

5. Rewards you for doing any or all of the above with joy and other highly pleasurable feelings.
To learn more about the major functions of healthy, real love study “A Functional Definition of Love” found in the left column of this site and in “Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”.
Some questions for you to consider: Are you highly valuing yourself in a deep, emotional way?  Are you acting with the behaviors of love toward yourself?  Are you living by the functions of good, healthy self-love?  If not, are you going to learn these things and practice what you learn?  Are you going to inform and maybe teach those you love about healthy self-love?

Special Note: There are many other kinds of definitions of love and self love including poetic, biological, psycho-neurological, phenomenological, recursive, nominal, mathematical, linguistic and a great many more.  Interestingly, the word ‘definition’ in a good dictionary has a very long entry!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you been trained in anti-self-love thinking and acting and, if so, are you practicing those actions and thoughts more than practicing the actions and thoughts that go with healthy, real self-love?

Related posts:

1. A More ‘Ample’ Definition of Love
2. The Definition of Love
3. A Functional Definition Of Love
4. An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly?