Mini-love-lesson #199
Synopsis: Here you learn about the incredibly
important differences between having and feeling love and knowing how to
do love relating. Also
included is intriguing info about acquiring good love-relating skills
in this highly significant mini-love-lesson and more.
A Lovely Surprise
Al, Betty, Carl, Dot, Ernie, Fatima, George and Helena were so
surprised about what they had in common, besides joining a group for
breakup and broken heart recovery. Each had checked “yes strongly” to
the survey question “Do you believe, or have you believed, real love
just happens when the time is right and fate makes you meet the right
one”. Seven of the eight also answered “no or seldom” to the question
“In your past, do you think you gave the how’s, ways and whys of love
(not sex) much serious consideration?”
It turned out that, like so many people, these eight participants had
not given love or love-relating the kinds of study, research or thought
that leads to success in every other major area of life and human
endeavor. That is, not until they experienced the intense agony of
breaking up and becoming brokenhearted along with at least
semi-dysfunction in their everyday lives. It was only then that
learning about the how to’s of love success and love-relating became a
major imperative for each of them.
Ernie put it this way; “Breaking up hit me in the gut a lot harder
and got me down a lot longer than I ever would’ve thought possible”.
Helena remarked, “It was the same for me. Now I want to learn
everything I can about love. The more I learn the better I feel and the
better I do with myself and with the people who really count in my
life”.
Learn What Many Never Learn about Love
Love is a naturally occurring process phenomenon, sort of like
metabolism, neuro-cognition, immunity mechanisms, cell regeneration,
etc. It occurs naturally in higher order species and maybe in others
also. Real love has great survival value and is both healthy and
healing. While love is natural and the potential for it is inborn,
love-relating has to be learned. The better you learn and practice
love-relating skills, the better you are likely to do at love. It also
seems that the less you learn about love relating skills, the more
likely you are to have serious love relationship problems. The same is
true if you don’t consistently do deliberate, improvement oriented
practicing of your love-relating skills.
Are You Setup for Love Failure?
Around the world, much of romantic, love mythology sets us up to fail
at love relationships. That is because around the world a very
easy to make common mistake
has been repeatedly made in numerous cultures and societies. It is
kind of like the once super common mistake of thinking the Earth was
flat. You too, like so many of us, may have been trained to make this
common mistake about love.
This is the mistake. To confuse feeling, experiencing and having
natural love with thinking that, therefore, you will naturally know how
to
DO love-relating and, likewise, so will the
person who you hope will love you back. Having love and love-relating
are two, distinctly, different things. Having love for someone emerges
naturally and is part of a natural, vital, life process. Love-relating
takes learning and practicing.
Without Good Love Relating, We Tend to Fail at Life and Love!
If you want your loved ones to succeed at life, learn good
love-relating and regularly dose them with what you learn. If you want
to succeed in life, learn love-relating and do not forget to include
receptional love-relating and healthy self-love. Then practice what you
are learning often. Those are some of the conclusions flowing from
contemporary research in loveology “
Is there really a new field called Loveology?”, the new science of love.
It is love-relating which delivers love to us. Without love we
malfunction psychologically and biologically. More technically,
receiving the behaviors which convey, send and demonstrate love triggers
vital psycho-neurological processes within us which have highly
important health benefits. Doing the behaviors of giving love has
similar benefits for the doer as well as the recipient. To give and get
healthy, real love requires and is the essence of love-relating.
Successful love-relating requires learning and practicing love-relating
skills. Having and feeling love does not teach you the how to’s of
love-relating. That, we all have to learn.
Remember, depending on the natural process to do it all takes to have
a successful love relationship is like a farmer depending on mother
nature to do all the work of farming i.e. planning, tilling, planting,
fertilizing, protecting, nurturing, harvesting, transporting to market,
etc.. Families, which are started with couples relating, are
people farms and love-relating is the prime, necessary work of raising the people farm’s crops.
The Two Ways We Learn Love-Relating Skills
Some people grow up in families in which people practice good
love-relating skills. They do not know they are learning those skills
but subconsciously they are. So, we use terms like learning by osmosis
or non-conscious socialization. The trouble is a lot of people are
learning bad or anti-love relating skills the same way.
Some people are like the laboratory monkeys who got just enough love
behaviors coming their way to keep them alive but that is all. They
grew up in non-loving environments and never learned to share love
actions with other adult monkeys or do loving behaviors toward younger
monkeys.
Consequently, they became depressed, anxiety ridden, unable to
bond or parent well, and were quite socially maladaptive in their
monkey tribe. They also died early. However, a few such
love-malnourished monkeys seem to have watched the more loving monkeys
very carefully and learned some of the love behaviors which then made
their life somewhat better. All that is pretty much just like humans
do. Now we know that the same is true of most higher order species and
maybe others.
The second way to learn love relating is by consciously and purposely
studying and practicing the successful ways to do love relating. It is
important to realize that, like swimming, you really have to get into
the water and practice over and over. Your actions can not just be
repetitious. They have to be actions moving you toward continued
improvement and refinement so that you grow ever more skillful at
love-relating. You can not just think about it, or just do
informational reading and fact absorption, although those actions can be
quite helpful.
Another very important part of this second way is similar to singing
duets or playing doubles tennis. It takes really good practiced,
coordinated teamwork for couples and families, deep friendships, etc. to
do love well together. Without love-relating teamwork, two very loving
people still can seriously dysfunction as a couple. That is like two
really good singers singing different songs at the same time. They just
make noise instead of music. Therefore, practicing love-relating
improvements together is best for getting good love teamwork to develop.
Brand-New Ancient Knowledge
The behavioral sciences just now are beginning to get a really good
handle on what it takes to do good love-relating. It turns out what
they are discovering is not exactly new news. Many sages, seers and
wisdom masters of old tried to teach us what we had to work at for
learning to do love well. Plato, Ovid, St. Paul, Rumi, Lao Tse Tung,
and a host of others had things to say about what we had to learn and
practice for love to work well. A fair amount of what they taught about
love-relating is now being rediscovered, supported and confirmed by
modern research.
What is not much supported is some of our Western, standard, romantic
love conceptions which stem from the 1200’s and the medieval French
Courts of Love but still predominate in many parts of the world.
Love-Relating, What Is That Exactly?
Love-relating has to do with anything and everything effecting the way
creatures in love relationships relate with, for, through, and about
love. Put more simply, love-relating has to do with all the ways we can
relate to each other via love.
More completely, love-relating has to do with the relational actions
of establishing, nurturing, growing, maintaining, healing, improving,
benefiting from and enjoying a love relationship. It also is about
communicating with and for love, emotionally connecting with and for
love, bonding with and for love and mutually enhancing and enriching one
another via a love relationship.
Love-relating also has to do with the behaviors that give (send,
convey, trigger, inspire, deliver, apply, emit, present, etc.) and get
love, as well as with the thoughts and feelings which transpire in the
getting and giving of the love process.
Love-relating can be done excellently, well, mediocre, poorly, badly
or not at all. To do good love-relating requires relating skills and,
therefore, skill development. Good love skills development requires
learning and practicing, honing and perfecting and desiring to always
improve further.
Most importantly, love-relating at its core requires the existence of
healthy, real love. That love motivates the development and practice
of love skills which can lead to high, strong and lasting love
relationship success. Without learned and practiced, deliberate
love-relating actions, we are outer-dependent on things like luck, fate,
etc.. Even if you are extremely lucky, your love life will not be as
good as it could be with well learned, good love-relating skills.
Are You Up for Learning Good, Love-Relating Skills?
Have you hoped that you would be lucky in love and that would take
care of it? Were you one of the lucky ones that grew up in a healthy
love-relating family and by osmosis you absorbed the how to’s of good
love-relating? Or were you like so many of us, in need of doing the
work of deliberately learning good love-relating skills? Either way,
are you going to do what it takes to do love pretty much as well as you
can?
Much of the world we live in is not very loving and certainly not
very good at teaching or motivating us to learn the skills of good
love-relating. Some people in some religions have tried hard to do it
better while others in the same religions were busy at anti-love ways
and doing more harm than good; somewhat similar things can be said about
philosophy and psychology.
Skills of love-based cooperation vie with those of greed-saturated competition. Aggressive
attack and destroy power in many places is extolled over that of assertive, co- constructive mutuality. Seeking
I win, you lose outcomes is portrayed much more often than
I win, you win, nobody loses
outcomes. Nevertheless, the last thousand years of history, or so,
shows humanity in spite of major setbacks, creeping slowly upward toward
a world lit with the light of love and out of the darkness of anti-love
and indifferent, non-love.
In such a world, it is hard to find good,
healthy, real love-relating knowledge but more and more it can be done.
And with that knowledge, you can base your practice of love skills and
make at least your part of the world a bit more love filled. You also
can teach and encourage others to do the same. That is the challenge of
love in our world.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love Success Question:
How much delight and deep enjoyment do you think you can create for
yourself and maybe also for others by exploring and developing your
love-relating skills?
Help spread the word. Knowledge about love helps! So, how
about telling someone about this site and our free mini-love-lessons?