Synopsis: About your tree of life; love well to live well in every
way; a few important definitions; why love research is hard to research;
different kinds of love give different results; and a love prescription
for nourishing your tree of life.
How Is Your Tree of Life Growing?
Let’s say you have a tree of life on which grow many
fruits. There are the fruits of your labors, the fruits of your
learning, the fruits of your relationships, the fruits of your very
nature, the fruits of your appreciations, your fun and your joys, and
all the other fruits of your involvements and of your being.
As you
partake of the fruits of your tree of life your spirit is nourished.
But there is a question. What nourishes your tree of life?
Consider this. Healthy, real love nourishes your tree of life like
nothing else. Abundantly given and received, healthy real love is the
most important of all things that bring forth life’s high order
thriving. Arguably, all of life’s ever increasing, enriching variety
and all of life’s most important enhancements and improvements
have been and
are love related and love nourished
in one way or another. As sundry philosophies and religions have
purported love is for life the greatest of all things. Therefore, it
follows that love may be for you and those you care about the most
important of all things. So, are you giving love due regard?
Love Well to Live Well in Every Way
The better you are at love the better you function,
the healthier and happier your life is, and the longer you are likely to
live. Love poorly and you live less well functioning, less happy, less
healthy and less long. That is what a growing preponderance of
worldwide research from a wide variety of fields is telling us.
Mounting evidence shows that people who are in well-loving couples
relationships, families, friendship networks and love-oriented
communities live the best lives, by every way of measuring quality of
life.
A Few Important Definitions
Love, or more accurately – healthy, real love – as used here is simply defined thus:
Healthy,
Real Love Is a Powerful, Vital, Natural, Process of Highly Valuing,
Desiring for, Often Acting for, and Taking Pleasure in the Well Being of
the Loved (see the column at the left of this page “
Definition of Love Series” for further and more full definitions and discussions).
Love can be viewed as a biological reality having largely to do with
the brain’s limbic system and various neurochemical, and biochemical,
and perhaps neuro-electrical phenomena in at least higher order
species. Love also can be viewed as a psychological reality having to
do with the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with love. This
especially involves the eight groups of behavior which have been found
to convey love and trigger different, healthy, neurological and
biological processes in both the giving and receiving of love (see the
entry “
A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love).
Love can be seen as a relational reality because it is in
relationships that love’s biological and psychological phenomena occur,
as has been found by various individually focused and socially oriented
scientific research disciplines.
Loving well is defined as consistently acting toward others and
toward yourself in all matters of high value in ways consistent with the
eight groups of direct, love behaviors known to convey, receive and
trigger bio-psycho-social love reactions. Loving well can be described
as consistently practicing and developing one’s love skills until, more
often than not, one is successful at love efforts, love relationships
and love thriving.
Why Love Research Is Hard to Research
With some disappointment we must note that
the word love
often is avoided by some but not all researchers. This seems to be
because “love” is used as a synonym for sex, and perhaps because of its
often confusing, contradictory and sometimes pathological use in poetic
and romantic literature. Researchers who try to avoid the use of the
word love often use substitutes like “affectionate attachment”, “warm
positive regard”, “intimate personal ties”, “close-knit connection”,
“emotionally bonded relationship” and a host of similar terms, all of
which might easily be translated as “love” by learned readers.
Interestingly researchers in the older, more established disciplines
don’t seem to mind using the word love at all. The word and the topic
love show up in the professional literature of the several
neurosciences, medicine, biology, primatology, experimental psychology
and even in economics.
It seems only in the newer social sciences and
the helper-fields (like the several forms of counseling) that there
appears to be a squeamishness about using the word love. This avoidance
of the word love and the resulting plethora of substitute terms does
make it considerably harder to look up research results related to
love. Nevertheless, with some prodigious effort it can be done. So,
here are a few of the overall trends from that research.
Different Kinds of Love Give Different Kinds of Benefit
Committed-couple love relationships have been found
to help people avoid disease, have a general higher level of overall
health, and assist people in dealing more successfully with most of
life’s difficulties. In some studies “marrieds” do a little better than
co-habitating couples, but with other factors the reverse is true.
Co-habiting couples have been found to have better, all-over,
psychological well-being than do the legally married and those living
single without a committed relationship. However, “marrieds” have been
measured as having somewhat better physical health.
Men tend to be a
bit healthier in marriages but women in cohabitation, according to some
studies.
The one, big drawback to couple’s love occurs when one of the couple
dies. The surviving partner is more likely to fall ill and die within a
two-year period of the loss unless friends, family, altruistic causes
and/or unless another romantic love comes strongly into their life
during that time.
Families in a number of nations who frequently act to love well often
produce far happier, healthier people who are better able to cope with
stress and, therefore, don’t tend to suffer from stress-related
illnesses nearly as much as the less loving.
Friendship love which occurs in close-knit, interpersonal networks
produces considerably lower mortality rates at all age levels in
international comparisons studies. With friendship love there is a much
reduced likelihood of self-destructive behavior, fewer heart attacks,
less cancer, less arthritis, fewer gastrointestinal upsets, fewer skin
problems, fewer headaches and fewer complications from pregnancy.
Humanitarian and altruistic love also produce excellent health and longevity
results, as does living in love-oriented communities. The evidence
suggests all of these love sources act as a protective shield against
toxic and stressful environments. A lowering of bad cholesterol and a
raising of immunity functioning especially is common with those who love
altruistically. Much lower use of mood affecting drugs, legal and
illegal, is another result according to various researchers.
Spiritual love and well loving people active in spiritually-based
communities have been shown to have healthier behaviors, less substance
abuse and healthy sleep and appetite habits. This seems to hold true
for people from ‘Austria to Australia’ and across all major ethnic and
religious groups.
The well loving who also are quite sexually loving measure as happier, more vitally alive, more productive and more creative.
Healthy, real self-love is a very important factor in living well.
Some hold that it is the single most important type of love for having a
happy, healthy, long life because it is viewed as central for excelling
at all other types of healthy, real love.
A Love Prescription for Nourishing Your Tree of Life
Living by way of the thoughts, feelings and
behaviors of healthy, real love has been found to be more important to
happy, healthy living than a good diet, exercise, low stress
environments, education, wealth, ethnicity and a host of other similar
factors – not that these factors are unimportant. So, if you desire the
good life get into love every way you can. To do this I suggest you
study this site’s love’s definition and its major functions, and also
take a look at the various forms of false love along with the different
kinds of love, and everything else you can discover about what love
really means and how it’s done.
Especially learn and practice the
behaviors of love and the skills of love. Learn to give love, think
love, feel the many emotions and physical sensations of love, and learn
to receive love well. To do all that obviously is what this site is all
about, so you might want to visit it often, and tell friends family,
and maybe even enemies about it.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love Success Question What will your life
be like if you devote a fair amount of time and energy to learning and
practicing healthy, real love – and what will it be like if you don’t
?
