Love Bids and Their Astounding Importance

Synopsis: How pitching and catching love bids makes an enormous difference starts our discussion; followed by what love bids are; and finally ending with the super significance of well caught and well returned bids; more.

Pitching and Catching Love Bids Makes All the Difference

Across the crowded room Michael glanced at Grace, then briefly smiled and nodded ever so slightly in her direction.  Grace coyly smiled back as she gave a slow subtle return nod.  Such a small, quick interaction but it made both Michael and Grace feel slightly elated and a bit more emotionally connected.  Both thought about how good their love relationship was and how glad they were to have it all these many years.

They both then moved through the gathering toward each other and went happily home earlier than they had planned, enjoying each other all the way.  Because Michael had ‘pitched’ Grace a little behavioral “bid” for love connecting and Grace ‘caught’ it well and pitched one back, this couple had one of their many, excellent, loving evenings together, feeling close and intimately connected.
Nan and Buck did not fare nearly as well.  Buck was eating an early lunch at work when Nan called and said, “Let’s go to lunch together”.

Buck, lost in his work, said a rather abrupt, “No, I’m already eating here at my desk.  Is there anything else?”.  Nan feeling discounted and rebuffed mumbled a goodbye and ended the call.  After work, Nan decided to get a drink with some of her fellow workers and went on to spend the evening flirting and dancing, and then got home rather late.  Waiting at home, Buck felt lonely, a bit worried and then a bit angry.

When Nan came in he greeted her with a very critical, parent-like, “Where have you been. You should have called if you were going to be late”.  Feeling criticized like a child, she lied saying she had to work late and she was going to bed because she was really “wiped out”.  Now both of them felt lonely and rebuffed.

Had Nan pitched her bid for love connecting in a much more clear fashion like, “I really want a little personal, close, ‘us’ time together.  Let’s use today’s lunch time for that.  Okay?”.  Had Buck been more aware and ‘caught’ and understood Nan’s ‘love bid’ for what it was, a chance for a love connection experience, they might have done as well as Michael and Grace but sadly they didn’t.
Research is showing that the ‘pitching and catching’ of love bids may be crucial to the success or failure of many love relationships.  This is true not only for couples but also parents and children, family relationships, deep close friends and even with pets.  There even is evidence that love bidding also may occur in the animal world, especially among mammals.

What Are Love Bids?

Simply put, a love bid is any action aimed at initiating an experience of mutual love connection.  It can be as simple as a wink, an intimate tone of voice, a tender touch, a welcoming gesture or an inviting smile.  It can be a bid for love connecting by way of showing and sharing humor, ideas, affection, excitement, fun, silliness, conversation, empathy, affirmation, self-disclosure, caring, support, catharsis or just time together.

Love bids often are subtle but they also can be quite clear and obvious.  They are accomplished by both verbal and expressional (non-verbal) behaviors.  They help fill one of love’s major purposes, that of healthful connection (see mini-love-lessons “A Functional Definition of Love”).  Love bids, well pitched and well caught, and then returned again help us come together, get happy together and help bring about the best and most important of love nurturing and emotionally nourishing experiences.

Love Bids and Love Success

There is research from the pioneering and famed Gottman Institute that shows successful couples tend to connect and interact 86% or more of the time when one partner or the other makes a bid for love relationship connection; success here is defined as a couple being together six or more years.  Failing couples, those who break up or divorce in less than six years, connect after a bid for connection is made, on average, only 33% of the time or less.  That is only one of an increasing number of findings from a growing body of large-scale, long-range, ongoing research efforts in a wide number of fields working to discover what succeeds in love relationships.

A considerable amount of growing evidence points to this conclusion.  Love bids and love connecting experiences are vital for maintaining and growing healthy, real love relationships.  The maintenance of ongoing relationships, the healing of damaged relationships and living balanced and healthfully in active relationships is crucially affected by how well people in these relationships ‘pitch and catch’ their bids for love connecting.

Subtle Bids for Love Connecting

Jennifer looked up and in whispered tones said, “Aren’t the clouds beautiful”?  She was making a small, subtle bid for her husband to briefly connect with her in a sharing appreciation, love experience.  She was purposefully making it small and subtle because, to her, it seemed more intimate and romantic that way.  Perhaps it also seemed safer protecting her from being obviously rejected if he didn’t catch it or reacted somehow negatively.

If Jennifer’s husband made absolutely no response to her bid she might see him as being insensitive, not valuing her, perhaps upset with her, or even evidence of him not loving her.  If Jennifer’s husband responded with something like, “No, I actually don’t like those clouds, they look like a storm is brewing and that’s going to ruin our barbecue plans for tonight”.  That would have been better than no response at all.  Even though it presents disagreement, it involves replying and interacting with her about what she said, and that is more of a love connecting than not responding at all.

If he added to his disagreement statement, terms of endearment like Sweetheart or Darling, along with pleasant tones of voice, it could be considered quite loving.  That might have met Jennifer’s desire to be dealt with, and connected with, as someone who is loved by her husband.  It, therefore, would have been a love nourishment and bonding experience, better by far than silence.

If Jennifer’s husband responded by putting an arm around her, and pulled her closer as he also looked at the clouds and then kissed her on the cheek, that would have given her the love connection that her bid actually was aimed at producing.  If he had added words like, “I feel so close to you when we see beautiful things together”, that might have made for an intimate moment of superb, love connection.
The pitching and catching of subtle love bids sometimes can be something of an art form.  It may involve all sorts of intriguing and enjoyable variations.  It also can be quite spontaneous and even unconsciously done.  Without even knowing it, a sad look can be a bid for supportive, caring, love connecting.

Obvious Bids for Love Connection

While subtle bids for love connection are considered more romantic and safer from embarrassment, obvious bids are much more likely to be clearly understood and successfully enacted.  However, when they are lovelessly rejected, the ‘ouch’ factor usually is much stronger.  So, unless your self-love is quite strong, having your obvious bids for love connection turned down may result in you feeling really hurt.  The healthfully, sufficiently self loving can sincerely think “their loss” and go on feeling okay.  Others, not so much.

Obvious bids usually are accomplished through the use of words requesting specific behaviors.  “Let’s cuddle on the couch for the next half-hour and just be close, okay?” is an example of an obvious bid for love connection.  A well pitched, obvious love bid includes four elements: (1) the behavior desired –  to cuddle, (2) the desired place where the behavior is to occur – on the couch, (3) the desired time – the next half-hour, and (4) the desired emotional mood – closeness.  A good, obvious love bid usually is stated in loving tones of voice with loving facial expressions, gestures and perhaps some loving touch.  If delivered in written form, it usually is good to add some additional words expressing love directly.

It also is good to be careful about making a clear difference between a bid for sex and a bid for love, or a bid for both together.  It is important that you and your intimate love partner both be sure you have the same understanding.  If you say, “I want to hug” and it means “let’s have a raunchy, good time together, miscommunication problems are highly likely.

Well Caught and Returned Love Bids

Responding to love bids is crucial for having ongoing, love success.  When couples, or families, or friends reduce their pitching, catching and return pitching of their bids for love connecting, as one might expect, connection reduces.  Reduced love connecting sets up a love relationship for all manner of problems.  Love malnutrition and love starvation may occur.  This especially is dangerous for the health and well-being of young children.

Vulnerability to couples having affair problems becomes greater.  Friends and family members can grow distant with reductions of love bids.  And all sorts of other maladies become more likely when bids for love connection are markedly reduced or absent.
Frequently and, if possible, artfully pitching your bids for love connection, receiving other’s bids, and responding with a return pitching leads to love cycling.  This in turn tends to grow love and make it stronger, as well as healthier, not to mention more enjoyable.

To do all that requires several things.  It is just like the game called “catch” when the ball is thrown back and forth.  (Notice the game is not called “throw”).  First you have to be aware that something is being thrown or pitched to you.  Otherwise, what is pitched may fly right by you.  Once you notice what is coming, you have to try to catch it.  This requires some understanding of what it really is, or might be, and a receiving response, followed by an awareness of whether you got it or not.

Misinterpreting or misunderstanding is like fumbling the ball.  Next you have to come up with how you are going to make a return pitch, followed by aiming and sending it.  Each of these steps can be handled artfully with practice, clumsily, or not at all.  The research suggests everybody totally misses some of the time, fumbles at other times, but with practice, sometimes with coaching, they can get better and better at this astonishingly important love skill.  So, the more you study and practice both your pitching love bids and catching your loved one’s bids for love connection, the better the relationship likely will be.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What kind of bids for love connecting are you good at making, and what kinds are you likely to miss or misunderstand?

Related posts:

1. Lying to Protect Those You Love ???
2. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
3. Wall and Catapult Love Destruction & How To Avoid It
4. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Love Bears All Things

Mini-Love-Lesson  #249

Synopsis: Here we raise into awareness love’s amazing power for enduring life’s difficulties and destroyers; along with some myths about love’s inadequacy and pathology; a fuller meaning of “bearing”; love relating while bearing all things; possibly wrong and “psycho sick” interpretations and ending with thoughts for developing your own endurance-providing love strength.

Love’s Power for Enduring

Indications of the great and often incredible power of love are able to be perceived as one explores this, the 12th of Paul’s tenants on love.  Think about it.  To be able to bear all things requires monumental strength for empowering stupendous endurance.  Does love really do this?  Countless examples of exactly that are to be found in the history of what people have done with love power.  Risking their own lives, many have saved their loved one’s lives in deadly situations.  Others have ceaselessly searched for and finally discovered their long-lost beloved ones.  Still others have worked for decade upon decade to discover a cure for the disease-afflicted for whom they care deeply.  Millions of others have continued endlessly, supporting and fighting side-by-side for their loved ones who faced overwhelming trials and tribulations.  All these exemplify and offer proof of the endurance power real love gives.

In my own long career as a therapist, I have seen the brave, steadfast power of love empower people to endure seemingly impossible pain, ongoing horrendous stressors, lengthy threatening situations and lifelong heartbreaking occurrences.  Often, but not always, love brought a prevailing ability to survive and often eventually become victorious over monstrous problems.  Without the strength of authentic love, I am quite sure such outcomes would not have been achievable and those involved probably would not have survived.

The Myths That Love Is Weak, Ephemeral Or Bad for You

There are those that have proclaimed love to be a fuzzy, fickle falsehood that makes people weak and powerless.  Some have held that love is an insubstantial, puny, whimsical thing of no lasting consequence.  Still others posit that those involved in love are being entrapped by a seriously de-powering and very detrimental and destructive addiction.

I like to contrast those ideas with the health, psychosocial and animal comparative researchers who have discovered love behaviors to be crucial and powerful for higher life form’s survival and advancement.  Then there are the brain scientists who are discovering more and more about the brain regions and chemistry for processing love and finding them  to be very real and very powerful.  Add to that, the relational scientists who have found the most lasting and healthiest relationships are the ones saturated with the actions that convey love.  Lastly, we also can point to the biblical teaching about love’s power, that no one has greater empowering love than those that lay down their lives for another.  Every day all over the world there are people who, out of love, are risking or sacrificing their own lives for the well-being of others.  Sometimes this is done in a crisis and sometimes in the slow enduring way.

My suspicion is that the nay-sayers of love have not been looking at healthy, real love but rather at various forms of unhealthy, false love (see the “False Forms of Love” series).

The preponderance of evidence points to authentic and well grown love being of enormous power enabling people to survive and thrive, frequently even as they bear all things hurtful and harmful.  Countless love-active parents, comrades, love mates, siblings and strong deep friends have done courageous and long-lasting acts because of their love.  This gives ever mounting evidence to the conclusion that strong, healthy, real love can indeed Bear All Things.

The Fuller Meaning of “Bear” for Your Life

Think about what may be covered by the word Bear.  To bear means to hold up under pressure, endure that which is painful, trying, difficult, hard and/or difficult.  Also to bear is to have the power to withstand while going without adequate support or sustenance.  It can mean not to flinch, break, retreat, surrender, compromise or be crushed.

To Bear also means to carry forward, take on, take to, and deliver unto.  Sometimes to bear can indicate to resist, buck, abide, tolerate, and/or to allow.

Love, healthy real and well-developed love, is seen here as making all the above not only possible but likely when severe and long-lasting difficulties bear down upon you and you remain love-centered (see “Love Centering Yourself”).

Love Relating While Bearing All Things

One of the most important features of love is that it keeps love relationships going as they face hard times.  I saw this most clearly in my work with the parents and families of murdered children striving not to be driven apart and dragged down by this horrendous experience.  I also frequently saw the power of love in helping people endure and co-recover from the anguish of infidelity, the destructive effects of addictions, the miseries of various forms of mental illness and a great deal more.  With enough love and well developed love-relating, all these can be endured and, more often than not, overcome.  This especially is true when receiving some love knowledgeable, caring, professional help.  By the way, you also can apply these concepts to your own self-love relationship.

Interpretation Quandaries

It is always possible we are using a wrong interpretation.  I see that as a good reason to look at a wide variety of translation possibilities as we explore what Paul, in the New Testament, put forth about love.  However, remember finding the one true, right, perfect, translation of anything seems to be beyond human capability.  For constructive cognition, being open to differing ideas of new and ever widening understandings seems to work better.  It also is psychologically more healthful.  As a rule, trying for perfection often tends to block and/or slow progress and can prevent improvement.

In regard to this 12th precept of Paul’s, I explored over 30 translation efforts.  The most numerous of Paul’s Greek “panta stegie” was “love bears or beareeth  all things”.  This interpretation occurred 14 times.  The intriguing variety of other translations included love “never gives up”, “puts up with all things”, “never stops being patient”, “patiently accepts all things”, “puts up with anything”, “always protects” and “she (I like the inclusion of a feminine factor) knows when to be silent” - see my caveat below.

The most different translation I found being considered by some scholars reads something like “love covers the unpleasant in others with quiet” and “love cloaks over what is displeasing in others”.  To this mental health professional, both of those interpretations sound rather pathological and the one about a “she staying silent” quite dubious.

Hebrew issues exist concerning the type or kind of love meant by Paul.  It is suspected that when Paul taught in Hebrew he probably used the form of the word love called Ahava which has to do with very actively giving caring love.  That conveys a meaning somewhat different than using some of the other love words available.  Some of these other love word possibilities suggest Paul could have meant a more maternal type love, or a more brotherly type love, or altruistic love or even chaotic love.  Paul also may have taught in Aramaic that has its own words for love which may possess additional connotations and shades of meaning.

It is interesting that the Hebrew word Ahava sometimes has been interpreted as being similar in meaning to the Greek Agape love and Metta love in Sanskrit.  All these interpretation factors and issues can be used to inform and broaden our understanding of what might be included in the meaning of this 12th tenant of Paul’s.

“Psycho-Sick” Interpretations

Mental health professionals working in the environs of Christendom tend to get rather familiar with psychologically toxic understandings of the Bible.  Here we seem to have a passage that unfortunately lends itself to such psychopathological possibilities.  “Bears all things” has been used to justify needless and useless self-sacrifice, self-flagellation and other forms of self-inflicted bodily harm, destructive self-denial and syndromes in which people experience profound guilt over having not suffered enough.  Other interpretations such as “love puts up with all things” have been used as justification for accepting abuse.  It also can be a prescription for unknowingly rewarding and encouraging seriously abusive and destructive behaviors.

These sorts of interpretations can be seen as teaching people to become docile victims.  They also can be seen as manipulative justifications for sociopaths and psychopaths who use Bible quotes, like “love patiently accepts all things”, for their own ends and against the well-being of others.

Accepting a strict interpretation of  “bears all things” as a Christian duty has helped put no small number of wives into hospitals and/or early graves, not to mention men into jail for wife beating and murder.  It also has been ruinous for children growing up in homes where toxic religiosity, rather than religion, is manipulatively and abusively practiced.

The “she knows when to be silent”, along with the “covers”, “cloaks” or “ throws a cloak of silence” New Testament descriptions, seem perversely useful for curbing free speech, suppressing individuality, encouraging authoritarian relationships and getting away with the criminal use and misuse of the naïve, gullible, trusting and less self assertive of those among us.

It seems to me, though I am of course heavily biased, that most all scriptural passages might do well to have a psychological health commentary available or accompanying them.  Ah, if it were only so.

Developing Your Endurance Love Strength

To grow your love, healthy real love that is, is to grow your courage, your power for positive impact and your cooperation skills; it also means you are likely to grow your love bonds with others and your ability to bear all things.  Also involved here is growing your self love, your other love, your spiritual love and probably your love of life.

What do you do to grow your enduring love strength?  You exercise it!  First you do what you are doing now which is to study love and love relating.  As you continue to do that, find yourself opportunities for doing love action that are not so easy to do.  Maybe you volunteer to work with the disadvantaged or get really involved in a political action group working with or for a cause needed and helpful for the less able.  Maybe you practice giving love via volunteering at a handicapped children’s camp, Red Cross, Good Will stores, library literacy programs, etc.  Then maybe someday you can go on to children’s cancer wards, hospice, campaigns for assistance to the abused elderly or anything you think might be difficult for you.  Yes, your heart may be wrenched in the process but it also may be amazingly enriched and strengthened.

You also can learn and think more about love itself and, as you do so, you can practice giving your love as well as working to receive love and soak it up as much as possible.  In times of trouble, you can get and give caring compassionate love and in times of goodness, you can do joy and happy love as much as you can and in ordinary times, you can give out a countenance of lovingness everyday.  At least, that is how I see it today.  Now, what do you think?

I hope you will not have a great deal to Bear in your future but, if you do, perhaps what you have just read will help some.  It also might help some others you know or encounter.  So, you could tell them about what you have just read and that might help them too.  If you do, please talk a little about this mini-love-lesson and this site.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Is love better seen as something you fall into, or something that falls on you, or as something you give?

The Anti-Love Forces Are Out to Get You

Synopsis: Extreme questions, What the anti-love forces are, Definition, People in your life, A great big example and others, Anti-love’s two major forms, Three ‘right on’ books, and Your anti-love question.

Will the forces of anti-love destroy you and those you love?

Will you be caught, corrupted and controlled by the sinister and insidious evil forces of anti-love?  Are you already in their clutches and don’t know it yet?  Will those you love and care about fall under the domination of the proponents of anti-love ways?  Will anti-love ruin your sex life, steal your friends and make your family cast you out?  Are anti-love’s practitioners destroying your ability to love and be loved as we speak?  Will anti-love destroy civilization as we know it and bring upon us a new dark age?

Sounds a bit extreme you say?  Wondering if we’re practicing fear mongering and unnecessary scare tactics?  Or maybe you think this is just a Halloween message, which it might be.  Or could it be that there are important truths revealed in what might seem like overstatement?

What are the forces of anti-love?  Well, of course, there’s hate and the many horrifying acts of terrible destruction that come from it.  However, love has an even greater enemy than hate.  It is the great enemy called “Indifference”, the true opposite of love.  Time and again it is indifference that defeats love, and sabotages the growth and maintenance of love relationships.  It is indifference to love itself, to existing love relationships, and to the people and creatures of this world which leads to destruction.  This is because indifference leads to insufficient actions demonstrating healthy, real and especially compassionate love.  From insufficient love actions, love malnourishment and love starvation grow, then the death of love relationships occurs.

Indifference, and its offshoot –  taking people and things for granted, leads to not noticing what needs to be noticed and not attending to what needs to be attended to until it is too late.  “Ignorance” of how important love is to our personal and collective health, well-being and survival is another anti-love force in our world.  Greed, intolerance, power for power’s sake alone, fear-based living, worshiping the false gods of authoritarianism, status, control and a dozen other similar things, all can be considered anti-love forces working against our true well-being.  If you think about it I’m sure you can add some others to the list.

Let us ponder the term “anti-love” just a bit.  What might it really mean?  Anti-love is understood to be anything that works against healthy, real love.  Any behaviors, philosophy, teaching or ways of living that work to counter, inhibit, divert, supplant, negate, weaken or destroy healthy, real love is anti-love.  Anything that works against the creation, development, growth and maintenance of healthy, real love is to be regarded as having anti-love elements.  (See the “Definitions of Love” in the left column of this page for a more complete understanding)

If you have people in your life whose thoughts and actions demonstrate a low regard for love, the forces of anti-of love may be subtly and negatively affecting you.  If you have people in your life who live more by hate than love, who are more fear-driven than love-driven, who make money, power, control and status more important than love, or people who just don’t spend much time and energy on love, then anti-love forces may be at work corroding your life.  Of course, if you surround yourself with people of genuine love the opposite can be true.  If you work at being truly love-centered (see entry, “Love Centering Yourself”) and grow your ability to love large and well, you can defeat the forces of anti-love in your own life and perhaps in the love lives of those you hold most dear.

Let’s look at just one, big, broad example of where anti-love forces often prevail in our world.  This example can be called the ‘world of business’.  Many people go about their business life in very unloving and anti-loving ways.  That the ways of business and the ways of love can mix well comes as surprising news to quite a few.  Even more surprising is the concept that mixing these two together can be good for both.  Fair-minded partnership, ongoing mutual benefit, profit through ethics, egalitarian cooperation and shared truth’s collaboration are all concepts that fit well in the context of love mixed with business.  Greed, deceitful practices, unfair dealings, destruction of competition, the ‘only winning’ matters attitude, avarice mindsets, and ‘cheating is okay if you don’t get caught’ are all anti-love and unfortunately far too common in today’s world of business.

If you think applying the common sense of love to the world of business is far-out or pie-in-the-sky thinking please consult Tim Sander’s hard line book for business leaders and managers, Love Is the Killer App.

Love in business is long-range oriented.  Anti-love is short range oriented.  ‘Loving others as you love yourself’ is a strategy for mutual and repeated benefit that works in both personal and business life.  A business attitude involving “the killer instinct” and “dog eat dog” approaches only suggest that one day, perhaps soon, you will come to an end meeting a bigger dog with a stronger killer instinct.  Including a love focus as part of your business strategy can lead to treating your workers and your customers fairly, looking after safety concerns sufficiently, and having a cooperation and harmony milieu in the workplace.  All this has been proven to aid company survival and long-range profitability.  Having a business strategy based in “only the bottom line counts” makes your workers seem like just easily replaced or interchanged cogs in your business machine.

Considering that workers and customers are real people, this approach loses their loyalty and may make them enemies out to destroy you.  If your business strategy is oriented to the idea “do whatever it takes to make your bundle quickly, and get out before they catch you” you are definitely taking an anti-love approach and they will be out to catch you.  A compassionate love for your fellow human beings philosophy in business is ethical.  Every anti-ethical deceit and deception-filled approach is an anti-love approach.  The research finding that college business and MBA students cheat on exams more than students majoring in any other subject tells much about how unethical and anti-love ways have come to infect the business community.

Anti-love forces in business practices really hit home when it’s your child who dies of a poisonous pollutant that a “business person” allowed into the environment because it was cheaper that way.  It also hits home when it’s your spouse that is denied the cancer treatment that works best because your insurance company finds it too expensive and lies by mislabeling it “experimental” and, therefore, not covered.  It’s an anti-love act when the broken parts of your car are replaced with cheap, foreign steel parts that won’t last but will endanger your safety when they fall apart.

Then there is the example of the clever banker who hacked into health records, then foreclosed and called in the loans of his sickest clients to capture quick money before hospital bills got it, or before they died and it was tied up in probate.  Many are the forces of anti-love at work in the world of business.  Of course, there are huge numbers of people who do their work honestly, and fairly and with sufficient and even abundant love for their fellow human beings.  Many are the businessmen and businesswomen who pride themselves in running their businesses ethically, fair mindedly and compassionately, but are their numbers increasing or decreasing?

Lots of other areas of life besides the business world could be used in examples here.  In sports good sportsmanship fits with a pro-love approach, however, these days it seems to receive less and less attention in the sports’ world.  Replacing pro-love approaches is the anti-love saying “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” which, of course, justifies cheating, harming, and corruption of the games.  Medicine in the USA used to be considered a “higher calling” and, therefore, an expression of deity-inspired love.  Now increasingly it’s seen as just an ordinary business which often is controlled by greedy, unscrupulous, loveless health insurance companies.

In religion there are the love-based people working to help and heal wherever they can.  Then there are the “right belief”-based people who compete with and even go to war with those of even slightly varying beliefs than their own.  Take note that in all these examples, and in many more, the behavioral practices of anti-love in the workplace often are carried over into personal relationships with family and friends with ruinous consequences.

Anti-love can be said to come in two major forms, the ‘overt’ and the ‘covert’.  Here is an example of overt anti-love. I once had something to do with a case in which a man murdered his daughter, her boyfriend and almost managed to kill his wife at the same time.  It was argued that he did these things because he loved his wife and daughter but they would not submit to his authority as they should, so he had to take action.  If he had not loved them, so the argument went, he would have been indifferent to them and let them live on in their sinful ways .  Real love always makes us want and strive for the well-being of those we love (see “The Definition of Love” in the left column of this page).  Murdering people you supposedly love is a totally clear example of overt anti-love.

Covert anti-love is insidious, often well disguised, and often quite sneaky.  Here’s an example.  After she was diagnosed HIV-positive she continued to have unprotected sex with the men she dated.  She later explain she did this because using protection interrupted spontaneous romance, and if she insisted on protection the men might think she wasn’t innocent and not want to love her.

In his book, The Meaning of Love In Human Experience, Dr. Rubin Fine, a famous psychoanalyst, spells out with many examples how hate-based, anti-love oriented societies eventually ‘crash and burn’ while the more love-based cultures thrive far longer.  Dr. Dean Ornish in his book, Love and Survival shows the scientific evidence pointing to couples, families and individuals pretty much doing the same thing – thriving with love or crashing and burning with anti-love ways of living.  Then again for the business-minded there is that wonderful, little book by Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo, and Fortune 500 executive’s consultant, Tim Sanders, who wrote Love Is the Killer App.

So, Dear Reader, are you going to let the forces of anti-love get you.  Are you among the indifferent and the susceptible to being ambushed by anti-love?  Have the sinister, anti-love forces been crafty enough already to convert you to their dark-side ways?  Is love so unimportant in your life that you cannot possibly succeed at it?  Or have you joined the pro-love people who science tells us tend to live long and prosper?  Will you be more a person of good heart or a person more heartless?  It’s up to you, is it not?

As always –Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you tend to model yourself more on the people who seem full of being good-hearted or the heartless?

Related posts:

1. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
2. Touch Only with Love: an Anti-Violence Tool
3. Anti-Love Myth # 2: You Will Have Eyes Only for Me
4. Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking
5. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love 

Love Is Patient

Mini-Love-Lesson #237

Synopsis: Loving Patience, what it is, its psychology, many benefits, disadvantages, the dynamics of impatience and ways to develop greater Loving Patience are very helpfully presented here starting with an ancient Indian teaching tale truth.

An Ancient and Crucial Truth!

To journey together in love, we have to walk at the slowest person’s pace.  That is what the Dakota medicine woman’s campfire tale taught one night before we guest scouts retired to our tepees when I was an impulsive youth.  This ancient, tribal wisdom is just as true today as it was then.  It echoes Paul’s first of 16 tenets on love – Love Is Patient.

In Paul’s ancient, biblical Greek it is “He agape makrothumia” which includes the concept that love is repeatedly forbearing of others and their frustrating ways.  Versions of this truth can be found throughout the teachings of various world religions and more positive philosophies.  “Impatience shows no love, “If patience is absent, real love may be absent too” and “With patience, love withers not” are examples of sundry, sage’s precepts I have encountered.

What Is Loving Patience?

Patience is the ability to calmly wait while enduring ongoing, negative stimuli.
Loving Patience is the ability to calmly wait while remaining loving (good-natured, kind, helpful, tolerant, accepting, non-judgmental, etc.) in the face of the slow, tedious, frustrating, annoying, aggravating, disappointing and/or unloving behaviors of others, or even of one’s self.

The Psychology of Patience

I think the best thing psychologists have discovered about patience is that it is obtainable by those who attempt to acquire it.  It also is teachable to trainable pets and children who have reached certain stages of development.  This mostly is accomplished by using positive rewards and reinforcements for incrementally increased waiting.

Studies suggests patience comes in three forms.  The first is Interpersonal Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with others who are unhappy, upset, angry or in other ways exhibiting negative and unwanted behavior.  The second can be called Severe Situational Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with life’s more arduous and ongoing hardships, setbacks and difficult situations.  The third can be termed Annoyance Patience.  This has to do with the ability to take-in-stride life’s more minor annoyances, irritations, delays, diversions, distractions, worries, hurts, hampering events, nuisances, harassments, vexations, etc..

To learn more about all this and the psychology of patience, I recommend checking out the Association for Psychological Science (APS) reports on patience studies.

All three types of patience have to do with what is sometimes called owning one’s power and not giving it away, being proactive more than reactive, and remaining inner and self-directed instead of other and outer directed.  Those, in turn, have a great deal to do with healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions”).

The Many Benefits of Loving Patience

Practicing Loving Patience is an immense help to the health, well-being, improvement and fulfillment of love relationships of every type.  Perhaps that is why Paul put it first in his list of real love’s characteristics.

In a love relationship, practicing patience can build empathy and that, in turn, decreases interpersonal hassles while communicating acceptance and non-judgmentalism of a loved one or one’s self.  Patience often leads to long-range understanding and a fuller comprehension of what to do about disharmony.  Plus, it aids in the development of general positivity.  Patience, well demonstrated, helps block other’s misinterpreting you as angry or upset at them when you actually are being only concentrated, serious, worried, concerned, etc.

Showing loving patience helps others identify you as a person not to fear, avoid, manipulate or keep secrets from.  Therefore, Loving Patience assists people to be authentic and more fully self disclosing in a love relationship.

Demonstrating impatience can greatly harm and even ruin what would otherwise be loving and bonding, interpersonal, good experiences.  Repeated demonstrations of impatience may increasingly turn people against you, exclude you, or subconsciously passive/aggressively attack you.

Showing love through patience when someone is not functioning as you would wish may take longer and reach fulfillment later than you expected.  However that assists in developing higher and greater, mutual, team functioning and achievement along with increased emotional closeness, plus the likelihood of return patience when you need it.

Loving Patience is often wonderful for avoiding intolerant and destructive sudden reactions, incomplete understandings, wrong conclusions, mistaken impressions and impulsive anti-loving habit behaviors.  In every type of love relationship, Loving Patience is much more likely to lead to more constructive, accurate, comprehensive and harmonious interactions than is impatience.

For all concerned, having Loving Patience is far more healthy than impatience and its accompanying stress illness dangers.  Patient people usually live healthier, longer and happier than impatient people.  Most of all, they tend to have much better and longer, lasting, love relationships.  To learn more about love and health, check out Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

The Dynamics of Impatience

In interpersonal impatience, one person wants one or more other people to change to operating at their own rate and/or in their manner of behaving.  It is, therefore, an imposition of one’s own standards on another.  Acting impatient often sends a message of “do things my way, not yours”.  It also can be a communication of “you’re operating in a way that is inferior to mine” and “my ways are more important than yours”.  Relationally, it frequently is disharmonious and can have a strong emotional divisive effect.  None of this is loving, democratic or as pragmatic as simply lovingly requesting someone to change something more to your liking, such as “hurry up a bit please”, “I’d like you to try doing something in an alternate way if that’s okay with you”.

Impatience often has a short-term gain and long-term loss, interpersonal dynamic.  If being impatient gets other people to do what you want more immediately, that is the short-term gain.  If it makes them resent you and act against you when they can, that is the greater and longer-term loss.

The Disadvantages of Patience

Like all things human, even Loving Patience is not perfect.  Having patience at the wrong time or for too long may lead to missed opportunities, too slow a reaction to a crisis and being misidentified as uncaring, indecisive and unassertive.  Worst of all, you may, through patience, accidentally reward and, therefore, reinforce some bad behavior.  Patient people also can be more targeted for deception and manipulation by the sociopathic.

How to Develop Greater Loving Patience

Learning to calm yourself while waiting longer and longer is the essence of practicing and developing patience.  Learning to make patience loving, requires loving thinking and loving self-talk while you practice the behavior of positive waiting.  Positive waiting requires breathing slowly and deeply, purposefully relaxing tense muscles as you also focus on being loving to yourself and whoever else is involved (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”).

If worry or fear has triggered impatience, reassuring self-talk and distraction actions usually are helpful.  Becoming more mindful and self-aware of what you let trigger your impatience also can be quite useful.  Purposefully spotting when, where and why you are impatient and choosing those times to practice more Loving Patience is often hard but necessary.

Talking all this over with those you love (children included) to see if they will reveal their deeper feelings when you are both patient and impatient with them usually helps tremendously.  Remembering that two of the 12 major ways to demonstrate love are supported by developing patience.  Those two are Toleration Love and Self-Disclosure Love.  For more on this, check out Chapter 5 (How Do We Grow Intimate Love) in Recovering Love by yours truly.

One More Thing

Talking all this over with others can help you and them implant the knowledge and develop it further.  When you do that, we would like it if you would mentioned this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

This Week's Quotable Question: If we don’t lovingly ask our loved ones to be more patient with us when we desire that, how can we expect them to ever lovingly respond?

Loneliness and Love Absence

Mini-Love-Lesson  #236

Synopsis: The why’s and good reason for loneliness and it’s pain; wrong things to do that don’t end the pain; our epidemic of killer loneliness; social media and some very good news about what can be done about loneliness and the absence of love are all here.

The Why’s of Loneliness ? 

Why do we get lonely?  Do we need loneliness?  Does it do anything for us?  What is the purpose of the pain we experience when we feel acute loneliness?  Did nature, evolution, a deity or all three put loneliness in our lives for some good reasons?  Will our loneliness go away if we understand the why’s and what for’s of loneliness and act on that understanding?  What are the best things to do about loneliness, lovelessness and their agonies?  Are these the right questions that will get us to the best answers about loneliness and the absence of real love in our lives?

The Purpose of Loneliness and Its Pain

Considerable research shows loneliness works like a hunger for something we need for our psycho-biological well-being.  Ultimately loneliness is a hunger for love and the life connections that can lead to love.  When we satisfy that hunger, our physical brain and systems in our bodies work better.  When we don’t satisfy the hunger of loneliness and love hunger, we move toward brain chemistry malfunction, greater disease susceptibility, we become de-energized, less productive, less creative and less socially adept.  When we satisfy this hunger, we reverse all that and also do better at cooperation, feeling a sense of fulfillment and a long list of the other benefits of positive companionship.

Using  the concept that all emotions give us guidance, we can see that loneliness tells us to seek positive connection and nurturing interactions with others.  This includes being accepted, cared about, liked, affirmed, safeguarded and ultimately loved (see “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).  When we achieve the nourishment of being connected and love-bonded, our brain and body chemistry responds very positively and we definitely are healthier, live happier and longer because of it.  This, by the way, turns out to be true not only for humans but for all mammals so far studied, plus many birds and perhaps some other life forms as well.  In short, to live well, we need each other and loneliness tells us when we need to do something about that.  So, to avoid toxic loneliness, actively seek emotionally meaningful life connections with others.  Then work to grow some of them into real, love relationships (“Behaviors That Make And Grow Friendship Love”).

The pain of loneliness tends to grow stronger when we do not succeed at following the guidance message loneliness is attempting to give us.  In a way, loneliness is like a good friend hounding us to do something positive to end the loneliness and not just suffer it (“Loneliness and Love”).

Doing the Wrong Things to End the Hurt

Some people try to end the pain of loneliness and love hunger in very unhealthy ways.  They turn to drugs, drink, or the destructive distractions of enthralling danger and fascinating dysfunction.  This easily can be done with sex, gambling, several forms of false love and excitement junkie behaviors.  All those things might work but only for a while.  Unless the behavior has healthy, real, love possibilities it is probably not going to pay off well.

Some people try to escape the pain of loneliness and love hunger through quantity instead of quality seeking.  Popularity, mass approval, fame, having high status connections, and the like, can result in ego boosts but very seldom in deep and love-bonded, meaningful, love relationships.  Others try to purchase friendships and love not realizing only false friends and false lovers are for sale.

Then there are those who live in crowded loneliness thinking they have many friends but they still feel lonely.  In truth, what they have are basically only acquaintances.  Acquaintances are better than nothing and they have the potential of becoming more if the right things are done to deepen some of the acquaintance relationships.  Remember, it is not about quantity it is about quality.

Tragically, the ultimate escape from the pain of loneliness and love hunger too often is suicide.  For some, the pain of loneliness and love starvation is just too much for them, or so they think.  Sadly, they may see the efforts required are far too difficult and the likelihood of success much too dismal.  Getting  new friends and growing new love often is hard and slow but with the right know-how and practice, it definitely is doable.

Unfortunately, all too many of the lonely and love malnourished have arrived at the conclusion that no one could or will ever like or love them because they are somehow crucially flawed.  Therefore, their future is one of nothing but painful loneliness and love starvation.  This is not true. Time and again in counseling I have seen people learn the skills of friendship-making and love relating.  When this happens, almost universally they go on to love-filled and friendship-filled living.

Preventively, this is where pets can come to the rescue.  I, and quite a few of the counselors and therapists I have trained, report love of and from a pet dog has made a life-saving difference.  For those living in lonely despair, for those who have lost a major love source and for those stranded in social isolation, for whatever reason, pets can make a huge, real, love difference.  Dogs seem to know how to do love especially well but we see cats, parrots, horses and monkeys do quite well at giving and receiving love too (see “Pet Love”).  Initially after a love bond with a pet has formed, it is not too long until the pet owner usually begins doing better connecting with people and then starts attaining a life of greater health, happiness and general well-being.

Our Epidemic of Killer Loneliness

If too often and too strongly you are lonely, you are more likely to die prematurely.  That is because loneliness does bad things to your brain chemistry and brain functioning and then to your body.  In many places around the Western oriented world, research shows loneliness and its detrimental effects are growing to epidemic proportions.  With this epidemic of loneliness, stress illnesses especially are increasing and related life expectancy is leveling off or beginning to decrease.

The research done by the United Nations, World Health Organization, the US CDC, and a plethora of epidemiologists confirms the veracity of these conclusions.  In England and Scotland, special anti-loneliness programs are being started by the health service, partly modeled on the cultural behaviors in countries in the world where the loneliness epidemic has not taken hold.  So far, they seem to be working well for many.

The Very Good News

The good news is you can hear the guidance message of loneliness which is to push yourself into connecting with others including pets; learn and do what it takes to make and keep real friends and then grow healthy, real, love relationships of several types.  It is likely you will have to overcome both internal and external obstacles, or you would have done it already.  Defeating loneliness is being done successfully by a growing number of people as they work to build their network of liking and loving others.  Do you think you can top and act on that?

Can Social Media Help?

So far, the research results are mixed.  It seems to be that if your connections with others via the Internet are marked by some emotional realness, positivity and backed up with some healthy self-love (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”), healthful sincere connecting may occur.  It also helps if the connections are more face-to-face with the assistance of Skype or similar visual services.  Note: the highly important psychobiological contributions of loving touch still will be missing (see “Love Hugs for Health & Happiness”).

Some of What You Can Do

If you do not have a pet, really consider getting a good loving and lovable one soon ( see “Pet Love”). Next, Look up some how to books on loneliness or friendship making, pick one, read it and do at least some of what it says.  Then start another.  Frequently older books are better than new ones.  For an in-depth approach, I recommend adding to the how-to books Love and Loneliness by the wise and highly readable, existential psychotherapist, Dr. Clark E. Moustakas.

Next you will have to pick an action to take and then risk doing it at least three times, not expecting any success at all.  Learn from what happened and improve the action, then do it again.  After that, add another action and start doing it again and again, not expecting or counting on anything improving whatsoever.  As you go, keep studying the how to’s of healthy, real love and enjoying everything you can about this process.  This is what it takes in experimenting and practicing before success starts to happen unless you are extraordinarily lucky.  Also know it really can help to get the assistance of a good counselor, personal coach or therapist as you tackle loneliness and/or love absence and their life-impacting difficulties.

One Other Thing

Talk about what you have just read with someone and that likely will help to implant these concepts as well as motivate action.  While you do that, we would like it if you would mention this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

Quotable question: is it more our duty, or our privilege to grow our own love giving and getting network?