What is LOVE, Dr. Cookerly?: cultural

Showing posts with label cultural. Show all posts

Could You Be a LAT Lover and Succeed at It?

Synopsis: How and why Georgia and Harrison do togetherness better apart; LAT– the new coupleness category; Far apart and next door apart closeness examples; Challenges; 10 ways to do LAT well; Plus the ‘not single and not married’ lifestyle look; The big, new question or solution for troubled couples.

Georgia and Harrison loved each other a lot but they weren’t even close to becoming compatible at living together. They had married with high hopes but Harrison was a jumpy night person, a neat-nick who always had to have loud Jazz playing, and his decorator tastes were decidedly industrial. Georgia was a calm, slow-moving, morning person, an admitted slob, and quietness is what she liked to listen to most, while frills, doilies and doodads cluttered up her living space.

After several unsuccessful attempts at weaving their lives together under the same roof they came to couples counseling. They both were positively shocked when the idea came up that they could live apart and still be a successful couple. It took some getting used to, a fair amount of counseling work, coordination, and tolerating their family and friends thinking they were really odd. But now they live about a mile apart and call their way of relating a “very compatible, romantic arrangement” which Georgia says “is kind of like being perpetually engaged and married at the same time”.

More couples for all sorts of different reasons are working at their adult love relationships while living apart. So many in fact that demographers with the US Census Bureau have invented the new category called “LAT” which stands for “Living Apart Together”. Consider Marvin, who lives in Vancouver B.C. on the Pacific, who loves Marion, who lives in Charleston near the Atlantic, with almost a whole continent between them. They have a home in Dallas where their pet iguana gets taken care of by a housekeeper, except when they get together for a weekend about once a month.

Then there is Sergei who gets home to Terri about once every three months from his ocean liner job. Ella and Frank won’t even consider living together until they get their children, by former relationships, raised separately because it works better that way, although they are very much a committed couple who love each other. And then there’s Deb and Don who occupy different sides of a duplex. They say they find that their duplex living provides just the right degree of closeness and apartness for their relationship to succeed.

Living apart together, sometimes at great distances apart and sometimes closer, presents a fair number of the special challenges. However, remember all love relationships have challenges but if the relationship does not work out it’s usually not so much because of the challenges. It’s more often because the love in the relationship wasn’t strong enough or being done well enough. LAT love relationships though sometimes do present very different and puzzling challenges needing close study and creative solutions.

LAT relating frequently is quite difficult even to think about for those raised on the standard ‘under the same roof’ couples lifestyle programmed into so many of us. Yet, a fair number of people are doing LAT and learning to succeed at it, and some like it even better than living together. Others do LAT out of necessity and plan to live together eventually, but in the meantime they still need to learn LAT skills. So, here are some of the actions a number of LAT couples are taking to ensure their LAT love is successful.

1. Calendarize everything. LAT lovers often discover they have to write just about everything on the calendar or in their PDA pertaining to their relationship – way more than do most couples. They have to work at putting the exact times they will be contacting and connecting with each other, and exactly how that connection will be made, and what they exactly will be doing for how long during that time of connecting. Ending times for various activities are often as important as start times.

2. Make contact daily. LAT couples, especially those who live a great distance from one another, make great frequent use of all methods of electronically relating. Skype connecting so they can see as well as hear each other is especially useful, but e-mail, texting, phoning each other and even being surprised with snail mail cards, packages and love letters are also to be considered.

3. Make psychologically intimate contact. LAT couples, especially those living long distances from one another, can have many romantic and erotic encounters with one another electronically. A Skype facilitated, candle light dinner shared over the Internet, phone sex, when talking on the phone using pet names and terms of endearment, ‘sexting’, romantic and even poetic e-mails and e-cards, shared Skype sex experiences, etc. can be common with LAT couples. Some LAT couples even are having their “avatars” make love with each other in Second Life and other cyber locations.

4. Use pictures. LAT couples are thought to keep more pictures of each other around, send each other more pictures including sexy ones (properly secured), and create or acquire more things that pictorially symbolized their love relationship.

5. Read together. LAT couples often are reading the same books and articles, and then call each other up and talk about what they think and feel about what they’ve been reading. Knowing that your beloved is reading the same thing you are can have its own special good feelings.

6. Mini vacation together. LAT couples can add to their success by planning more vacation-like, short experiences together. Of course, longer times also count. A weekend at a Bed and Breakfast, meeting together in a different location, an overnight or a day long car trip together, even at one home or the other disconnecting electronics – ordering dinner delivered – putting on special music – and enjoying each other like you’re on vacation, and things like that can work wonders.

7. Take a course together. Take an online course together or actually meet somewhere for a conference or seminar is another thing some LAT couples do together and sort of cover two bases with the same action.

8. Engage in “I.T.” counseling. LAT couples who are having relationship troubles can by phone conference call, Skype, etc. engage in couples counseling together and the counselor or therapist can join you in cyberspace. This doesn’t seem to work as well as face-to-face counseling but it will do tolerably well if mutual face-to-face work is too difficult to arrange.

9. Prioritize dating. LAT couples living close, or at a distance from one another, do best if they give the highest priority to their dating times and other joint activity times together.

10. Send lots of love messages. All couples, but especially LAT couples, can benefit from lots of different kinds of love messages frequently sent. Naturally, it’s very important to respond with love to love messages which creates “love cycling”.

One of the big questions some troubled couples are learning to ask each other is “would we be better living as an LAT couple?”. Along with that goes questions like: “would we do our love more healthfully, constructively and enjoyably if we didn’t live under the same roof”? For troubled couples it’s helpful to know there’s another option to the age-old dilemma of either to get divorced or to stay married. A surprising number of couples have gotten a divorce and then slowly gotten back together, followed by successfully becoming LAT couples, but not living as ‘under the same roof’ standard lifestyle, married couples.

It comes as something of a surprise for some people to learn there are whole societies in which couples don’t live together, though they are regarded as married and quite committed to their relationship. In the Western world culture it seems that a number of people are choosing to be ongoing, committed to the relationship, but not living together couples. Some are sort of forced into this arrangement such as military couples or those who have jobs in different locations. But sometimes even after being discharged or finding jobs in the same city, a few decide to continue in a more LAT style. A great many couples where one of them has a job with a lot of traveling live at least partially as LAT couples. Health problems, old age infirmities, and sundry legal problems sometimes force loving couples into LAT living. Whatever the reason, it is important to know people can succeed at a LAT lifestyle.

The biggest issue for LAT couples actually is the same one that exists for all couples, though for LAT lovers it may be bigger. That issue is ‘how well will you actually do your love’ as a couple. Love must be demonstrated, received and enacted, not just felt or thought about for it to succeed. Insufficiently done love results in unsuccessful love and that is ruinous to love relationships.

Corollary questions are: ‘how well and how often will you show your love in each of the eight major groups of behavior by which love can be demonstrated’ (see the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” and the other related entries); ‘how well will you receive the love shown to you and be nurtured by that love’; ‘how well will you learn and practice the ways of love and how much work will you put into doing love well’? For all those questions and more, let me suggest checking out all the entries at this site – especially ones about communicating love.

Now, I have a request. If you know of anyone who is in or may be facing the issue of being in a LAT lifestyle, please refer them to this site and especially this entry so they have at least a little help in dealing with all this.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Have you ever given serious thought to how well you might live and love in different lifestyles and could a LAT lifestyle suit you well?

Is Love Winning?

Mini-Love Lesson #265

Synopsis: Introduction to the unheralded and poorly heralded positive, world trends of adamant and compassionate love; criticism of the news media's imbalanced negativity and how you may be letting it affect you negatively; and benefiting yourself by joining those on the love causes bandwagon.

Take heart !

Has the news media convinced you that just about everything everywhere is getting worse and worse? Have they gotten you used to thinking that the world's corruptions, crises and conflicts far outweigh and outnumber the advances, achievements and progress? Have the naysayers and fear mongers got you wondering if humans largely may be a declining, mean, stupid, selfish and destructive lot with far too few exceptions?

Well take heart! There is a preponderance of growing evidence that it is a lot better than the news media and the doom and gloom folk would have you believe. Certainly, there are big problems and frightening challenges in abundance. However, the good, the positive, the healthful and the improvement trends of the human condition all far outweigh the negative. Let's glance at just some of the evidence that this is the accurate, reliable truth.

Proof positive!

A huge collection of scientific evidence gathered from the world's leading social scientists, contemporary historians, behavioral economists and behavioral neuroscientists shows most, but not all, of the bad stuff is in decline and the good stuff is on the rise. All long-term measurements of the world’s violence, starvation, poverty, active warfare, major crime, illness and a host of other maladies and negatives are slowly and erratically reducing. That has been true since World War II ended. Actually some of the worldwide reduction in negatives trends goes back to at least the early 1700s.

Of course, there are major setbacks from time to time and the data graphs show serious peaks and valleys. However, the trend lines are all in the desired direction with only a few rare exceptions. The evidence is mounting that the human race culturally and perhaps even biologically slowly is becoming less cruel, more kind, more empathetic, less indifferent to other’s suffering, less conflict prone, more cooperative, less selfish and more compassionate.

Just a short 300 hundred years ago we still were burning witches at the stake, crucifying heretics, hanging minor crime offenders like pickpockets and starving bread thieves, and it was okay to beat your slave to death for just about any reason. Much more recently, circa mid to late 1800s+, over 90% of the infants placed in orphanages died of absence of love behavior treatment/failure to thrive causes, hundreds more children suffered death or became maimed in mines and factories during six days a week 14+ hour work days, it was legal for husbands to beat and rape a wife regularly, you could spend years in jail for having not paid your debts, and offending a person of royal privilege might get you publicly flogged and deported to a colony.

It is with the rise of the humanitarian revolution and various subsequent rights movements that all that began to change for the better. Still today because of corporate greed and anti-democratic politicians, people are made ill or die, poor children are breathing and drinking pollution, government-sponsored child separation trauma is causing brain damage, the elderly are being cheated out of retirement savings, pockets of starvation and abject poverty continue to exist, the mentally ill are imprisoned rather than treated, weaponized violent acts are common, minorities are discriminated against -- and on and on goes the list of grievances that need the champions of humanitarian and altruistic adamant love. Nevertheless, victories are being won, new and better trends established and the human condition in area after area made better, or at least, less bad (see “Adamant Love – And How It Wins For All of Us All”).

Search For Better Sources

While you can't much trust the regular media to cover the positive news very well or very much, there are a number of books, Internet sites and other sources giving more accurate and more balanced accounts on how the human race is really doing. Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a great place to start. It gives a massive array of research results, from a host of valid and reliable sources accompanied by some pretty fascinating reading. It also can lead you to other good sources for the more positive side of things.

Don't Overdose on Negative News

Do you know that a number of counselors, therapists and personal improvement coaches advise against watching much TV news. That is because so much of that news is so negatively focused. After watching the news, clinical reports abound telling of people becoming more depressed, more anxiety ridden, more defeatist in attitude, more afraid of going out, traveling into new areas and even just going shopping locally.

Why is so much of the news media biased toward reporting mostly the negative? Some suggest they mostly are largely mystified and muddled about how to report the positive. Another reason seems to be that it always has been this way in journalism. It is almost a religious doctrine that it is bad news that sells, draws interest and captivates while good news does not. There also is the idea that news people lag far behind in the knowledge of how to even think about the positive let alone on how to report it and make it exciting. Bad news focus has been practiced and perfected repeatedly so that is what reporters know how to do. It follows that reporters want crises, conflicts, crime and disasters to report on. Without those they might not know what to do. The thinking is all good news days are slow news days. For good news to make it into the headlines, it has to be spectacular, not just good, or so it seems.

Another thing is to get to the top, in the news reporters and commentators world, you have to be lucky enough to get stories of the really awful stuff first. They want to get a scoop of the breaking (the latest tragedy, crime, crisis or conflict). Their training is to apply as many aggression and destruction descriptive adjectives as possible. Have you ever noticed how news givers like to talk with words like fight, hostilities, battle, combat, attack, feud, punch, hit, strike, aggression, assault, etc. This usage especially is common when reporting about politics.

Local news programs especially are bad about mostly reporting murders, auto accidents, burning houses and other news you really cannot use in your regular life except, perhaps for getting you used to staying home and being afraid or upset.

Now, to be an appropriately informed citizen, a certain amount of ongoing news is required. Due to the growth of fake and biased, or one-sided news, it is important to listen to opposing sources. Also, since the world at large increasingly influences everyone's local life, world news, good and bad, is important. Actually, there usually are some pretty positive, funny and exciting things going on out in the world you may want to seek out and enjoy if you do not already.

Warnings

If after watching or reading the news, you notice you feel vaguely or decidedly worse, cutback on the news and see if that helps. If you notice family disagreements and all-over level of family positive interactions are diminishing, cutback on your news consumption. If you notice a tendency to increasingly stay home and not go out into your outside world, cutback. If you notice you more easily are angered, irritated, anxious, annoyed and frustrated, cutback. Then as you make a news cutback, you might seek out some positive, funny and/or inspiring things on the Internet or you might talk more with upbeat friends and family.

Getting on the Love Victory Bandwagon

Love, healthy real love that is, is about highly valuing and when possible benefiting the health and well-being of the loved. While the indicators of love winning in more and more places and ways, the enemies of love (hate, indifference, greed, bigotry, authoritarianism, cruelty, parochialism, destructive addictions, false love, proneness to violence, etc.) are all too active in our world today. Those destructive forces work to defeat the valuing, the benefiting, the health and the well-being of the loved and potentially of the yet to be loved. Only the perpetrators of those forces are benefiting.

Although the evidence is that love is more and more winning, the anti-love forces in the world still can win and destroy us all. So, if you already are not, I urge you to join the forces of adamant and compassionate love. The way you do that is to love everybody you love as well as you can and keep learning how to do that even more. Then expand your range, if you already have not, by joining with those wonderful people involved in the many causes of love. There are at least a 1000 of those, all with many marvelous people involved, all working to advance love-based goals, causes, efforts and movements all over the world.

That will very likely and perhaps profoundly benefit your own personal world of healthy, real love in both surprising and fulfilling ways.

One more thing: Think about getting in a good, friendly argument with someone over whether or not love is winning in the world. Be sure to keep it lovingly friendly and see where it leads. If you do that, please be sure to mention this site and its many mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable questions: If I only act with love toward those who already love me, am I not drastically limiting my life experience? AND, If I only act with love toward those who are quite similar to me, might I not be drastically reducing my possibilities for life enrichment as well as my life’s adventures of love?

Work With and Without Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always – Grow and Go in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Virginity Surpassed and Parental Love

Synopsis: A daughter’s startling declaration and loving request; Parent readiness; Big questions; A different example; Handling it all with the power of love.

“Mother, father, I would like you to just sit and really work at hearing me with love because I have what I think is a good thing to share with you.

Last night I did something really special. I surpassed my virginity. That’s what my group calls it instead of seeing it as something lost.”

This shy and gently stated declaration came from a beautiful, super smart, nearly perfect, not quite 17-year-old daughter, as her mother reported it. She continued, “At first neither my husband nor I understood so my daughter repeated herself, ‘Surpassed my virginity, not lost my virginity’. Suddenly I was flooded with cascading, conflicting and confusing emotions washing over me – chaos, disbelief, shock, fear, sadness, empathy, guilt, worry, and a strange sense of pride that she was able to tell us this startling fact.

"Then I heard my husband stammering, ‘What the hell! You mean you’ve already had…, already …, you mean …, you’re telling me, my little girl’s not a virgin anymore? Is that what you mean?’ Our daughter calmly and kindly replied, ‘Yes, Daddy, and we did it the safe way with a condom and spermicide, and we did it with lots of love so I want you to be happy for me’."

This mother admitted her next words were a tearful, “But you’re only 16." Her daughter’s well researched response was, “Mom, do you know around the world 16 is the average age where most girls ‘surpass their virginity’ so I’m just being normal. Please don’t cry unless those are tears of happiness for me. It was a really good experience and besides I think I’m the last girl in my group to do this.”

She said her husband, somewhat angrily, replied, “That doesn’t make it right, safe, healthy, or good. Their daughter’s further response was, “Daddy did you know that in ancient Egypt, whose civilization lasted longer than anybody else’s and whose family life stability was legendary, girls commonly surpassed their virginity between the ages of 12 and 14 and were married by 15. Not only that but sometimes marriage was to one of their brothers”.

“That’s not what we are talking about,” was this frustrated father’s reply. This mom reported she then said, “Well, Sweetheart, you have shocked and amazed us, and you are going to have to give your father and I some time to process this because we certainly weren’t ready for it, like we probably should have been. I do want to thank you for telling us and not keeping it secret like we had to do when we were growing up. Let’s take a break while you’re father and I talk and then we’ll all talk some more”.

Their daughter replied in a very adult and kind tone, “I know this is hard for you given the way you were brought up so, yes, let’s take a break but first can we all hug?” She said they did hug and they said they loved each other; then she and her husband shared their confusion and many different feelings. All this is what the mother of a rather precocious adolescent reported to me in a quickly scheduled parent/guidance counseling session before asking, “Now what do we do?”.

Well, dear parents, are you ready for the day you find out an offspring of yours has “surpassed their virginity”? Do you think you will be able to handle it with wisdom and love? Maybe you will try to stay in denial and act like it hasn’t happened. If that is so it may lead your youngster to feel and think that they shouldn’t or can’t share this kind of big, important fact with you. If that’s the case they perhaps will try to handle the health, relational and psychological issues without your input, support and guidance. Please consider that.

Perhaps you feel sure your teenagers will stay virginal until after marriage, and they may. However, the majority of adolescents in a majority of cultures around the world do not. As you probably know all around our planet both biology and modern world, cultural influences seem to be pressing youth toward becoming sexually interactive in middle or younger adolescence. I think it is wise for parents not to be in denial and to prepare ahead of time for dealing with this bio-social ‘pressure’.

Let’s look at this: Concerning sex, especially virginity, do you have different hopes and standards for the males and females you are raising? I have counseled no small number of parents, mostly fathers but some mothers also, who are secretly or openly proud of their sons but upset with their daughters when they first start having sex. In this day and age ‘double standards’ more and more lead to destructive family conflict. This especially seems to be a hard problem for families moving into the modern, westernized world from other cultures. It also frequently is a devastating difficulty for religious conservative parents of many faiths who find their offspring gravitating toward more contemporary, secularly influenced lifestyles.

The big question for parents, from this family therapist’s point of view, is this. Are you going to deal with the ‘surpassing virginity’ issue with sufficient healthy, real love? No matter what your belief system is regarding ethics, morals, mores, propriety, etc., I suggest a powerful love-centered approach will work best. From my experience with so many parents discovering that their offspring have become sexually interactive, ‘well expressed love’ is the primary thing that makes the outcome constructive. Without love your mind seems closed and destructive dissonance grows. Anger, condemnation, guilt tripping, manipulation, disgust, rejection, control efforts, abandonment, expulsion, lack of care, being overly nonchalant and indulgent, punishment, reasoning without compassion, hyper-religiosity etc. usually lead to far less than desirable results.

Let me suggest that the parents who handle this issue best are also the ones who, with love and some study, prepare for it ahead of time. Some years ago I worked with a couple who was attempting to deal with this issue responsibly and sanely. They talked with each other saying, “It is likely our children will become sexually active in their teenage years, because we did, and that’s the way the world seems to work these days. So, how do we want to prepare for that?”

After some research they decided to follow a parenting approach popular in certain circles in northern Europe, parts of South America and very recently urban China. They gave their children a far better than average sex education involving not only the biology but also the psychology of sexuality. There were those in their extended family who said they were just setting up their children for promiscuity and tragedy, but they rejected that after looking at the good results data from various other countries.

When their youngsters were in their early adolescence they openly discussed how and when they might choose to enter into sexual relations. Each of their children became able to talk quite frankly about all this with their parents. Both their boys and girls chose ages later than their parents had worried they would. Healthy self-love and others were a major focus in their discussions. When older each of their offspring carried out their plans similar to those they had designed with reasoned modifications when needed. A loving acceptance and even a family celebratory atmosphere prevailed as the plans came to fruition.

Recently I learned that their children, who are now entering adulthood, plan to do much the same thing when they have children because the results have been far better than the bad and chaotic experiences of many others. No one got pregnant, no one got any sexually transmitted diseases and no one experienced any great emotional upheaval. All of them agree that because love was made so much more important than sex the sexual issues got dealt with quite fully and constructively.

It is important to know that following this pattern might not lead to such good results for you.
Because of all sorts of individual differences and possible other intervening variables disasters might yet occur. There are no guarantees but the above example is, at least, a different example than many parents have been exposed to. I suggest you study many examples and possible ways to go about facing this issue. Then as parents you might want to make your plans regarding ‘virginity surpassed’, preferably with a ‘ big, powerful, love focus’ as a big part of them.

For a start on these deliberations let me remind you what that fellow we call Paul said about love over 2000 years ago: Love is patient, kind, not jealous, overbearing, arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, is not mean-spirited or resentful, and love bears all things, for real love never ends.

As always Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question How similar or different from your parents do you want to be concerning your dealing lovingly with your children’s sexuality?

Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking

Is your way of talking to your loved ones (mate, children, siblings, etc.) more pro-love or more anti-love?

Have you ever examined your habits of speech and speech style for their effect on your loved ones? Do you know the three big factors determining pro-love and anti-love talking effects?

Factor I    Love Destroyer Words versus Love Builder Words
Below you will find 25 examples of words and phrases which tend to have an anti-love effect. Following each of these is an example of a pro-love effective way to state a similar thing. Check your speech habits against these to determine if perhaps you are using love destroyer words and phrases and might need to practice a more pro-love style to have a love building effect through words and phrases.

1.    You should …
You could …
2.    You shouldn’t …
I would like you not to …
3.    You always …
I’d like that to happen less …
4.    You never …
Really soon I really would like you to …
5.    Why don’t you ever …
I want you to ………………, maybe by tomorrow if that’s OK?
6.    You’re wrong.
I see that differently.
7.    You’re lying. That’s absolutely not the way it happened.
We remember that differently.
8.    How could you have been so stupid!
In the future I really want you to do that better.
9.    Don’t ever let me catch you doing that again!
How can I help you not to do that again?
10. You’re terrible!
You can improve!
11. I hate you!
Right now I’m really mad at you.
12. You’re an idiot!
Part of me would really like to call you a lot of names right now.
13. I can’t stand you!
I’m having trouble dealing with you right now, so let’s take a break.
14. Why did you do such an awful thing?
Let’s look at what we can do to improve that.
15. I can’t love you when you act that way.
I always love you, and what you’re doing really upsets me.
16. But …
And …
17. Never say that again!
I don’t want to censor you so can we talk about that later and nicer?
18. I’ve asked you time and again, so when are you going do what I say!
Honey, so that you’re clear, this is not a request, it’s something I have to insist on.
19. You crazy freak! Don’t you know any better than that!
In some ways we are really different.
20. Can’t you ever get it right!
Sweetheart, we don’t seem to be making progress in this area.
21. That’s all your fault!
Honey, how can we learn to go about that differently?
22. I blame you for that, and you know you deserve it!
The critical part of me really wants to lay a guilt trip on you for that.
23. No, not ever, and that’s final!
Sweetheart, right now I am firmly against that so please bear with me and be tolerant.
24. We are never going to …
So far we haven’t and I really want us to, so this time how can we get to it?
25. If you really loved me you’d know what I need and you would have done it already!
I probably have not made a clear enough request so let me see if I can be specific
and tell you more exactly what I want.

Factor II    Destroyer Voice Tones versus Love Builder Voice Tones
Did you know that 35 to 37% of what you are communicating in a personal interaction is delivered by your voice tones? Have you given much thought to what your voice sounds are telling your loved ones when you talk to them? Below are 10 words describing voice tones which frequently tend to have an anti-love effect and 10 words describing voice sounds that might have a more love positive effect.

Check and see which you think are most common to your own voice tone expressions:
1. Indifferent    2. Businesslike    3. Bored    4. Harsh    5. Unfriendly
     Interested         Personal              Intrigued    Gentle        Friendly
6. Hard    7. Mean    8. Condescending    9.Condemning     10. Angry
     Soft          Kind           Respectful               Forgiving          Understanding

Factor III    Pro Love and Anti-Love Face and Body Communication
Did you know that in person-to-person talk it is not unusual for as much as 55% of the value of what is being communicated to be carried by face and body language factors? Did you know that in a person-to-person talk your subconscious mind may be interpreting as much as 300 bits of information per minute having to do with face and body language communication? Have you given much thought to what you’re face and body language messages are to your loved ones? Here are 10 words that can be used to describe face and body language expressions which can have an anti-love effect. Under each of these words is another word for a face and body language expression which might have a more pro-love effect.

1. Uncaring       2. Judgmental    3. Rejecting       4. Bland        5. Egotistical
     Caring               Forgiving             Accepting            Involved        Sharing
6. Tough    7. Superior    8. Irritated    9. Impatient     10. Prudish              Tender            Democratic      Tranquil         Patient                Flirtatious

Now we suggest you examine what your own, more frequent face and body communications are when you are talking with your loved ones. Then examine your voice tone communications and see how you might improve them. After that take a look at the words you are commonly using and see if you want to make some changes so that you can have a greater love-positive effect. You also might want to lovingly ask a loved one to follow your example and do the same.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Will you ask one, two or three people who know you pretty well what is the best and the worst or how you come across in regard to the above 3 Factors?

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Image credits: “[last remnants of autumn]” image by Flickr user lempel_ziv (Tanya Zagumenov) .
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Power or Love or Both

Synopsis: Raising into awareness our common confusions about power and love; power and love gender issues; the Warrior Princess and her love and power problem; looking at growing your powers and integrating your powers with love; and more.

A Common Confusion

“I don’t want love. I want power. Love is for the weak. It makes you soft and vulnerable. I don’t ever want to be vulnerable. The strong don’t care about love. They care about dominance, and control and getting their own way. Love makes you surrender and do what other people want. I will never surrender to anybody, for any reason, about anything. When you love somebody it just gives them a way to control you. Love turns people into other people’s slaves. I am always the one in control. No one controls me. You can be my slave but I won’t be yours. Do everything my way and I’ll keep you around for a while but don’t be surprised when I dump you. I’d rather make people fear me than love me because that way they know I have the power and they don’t. That’s the way I like it! Power is everything. Love is nothing compared to power.”

The person who said this was confronted by several people saying different things about love being the greatest power there is. That sparked a vigorous debate. Some agreed with the speaker, some disagreed and some just were confused. Some who agreed with the speaker said they keep that secret, around others. They admitted they say all the ‘socially correct things’ about love being great but they really believe power is more important and love is a wimpy thing. Some said being vulnerable, becoming powerless and surrendering is a good thing about love, unless perhaps it gets you destroyed. There were those who argued that love gave you the power to survive and conquer all manner of things, and others who said to truly love and be loved you must give up all power. So where are you on the issue of power versus love?

Gender Issues

Here is a gender question for you. When you read the opening statement from the person wanting power instead of love do you think it was a statement made by a male or female? The gender was not indicated. You can check to make sure. Whichever gender you thought, what do you suspect that says about you when it comes to your mind-set about power, love and gender?

Males are supposed to be all about power and females all about love. That’s nature’s way according to some. And then others can see that the idea that males are power-oriented and females love-oriented could be seen as paradoxical. That’s because if love is the greatest of all powers, as is religiously attested, love is what males should be all about. Then what about the ideas that ‘men are afraid of love’ and ‘women can’t handle power’ so they have to turn to love? Of course, there are a good many who hold that all these gender ideas are just cultural teachings and have nothing to do with innate female or male nature.

Fathers, husbands and male lovers who primarily are focused on power may make good protectors and providers, but otherwise lousy parents and spouses. Mothers, wives and female lovers who focus on love without enough concern for power and its use are suspected of mating with losers and raising weaklings, or so some think.

When it comes to males and females what do you think the differences are in regard to love and power? Do you think differences exist between heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals regarding love and power? How much does your own gender influence your mind-set regarding the uses of power and the uses of love? How much does your culture’s teachings on what is feminine and what is masculine guide your thinking about love and power and what you should do with both. Does your religion, or your ethnicity, or the socioeconomic status you were raised in guide you to think differently concerning how men and women are to go about love and go about dealing with powerfulness?

As you can see there are many gender issues affecting our mind-sets concerning love and power. How powerful you are in your own life and how powerfully you succeed at love may be affected by these issues, so raising them into conscious awareness may prove quite freeing and advantageous to you.

The Warrior Princess

“I was so powerful they called me Xena, the Warrior Princess, you never want to cross. In our multimillion dollar school system I rose to be the number two, most important ‘go to’ person in the administration when you wanted to get something done. I made really big things happen for the betterment of kids, teachers, staff – everybody actually. The way huge sums of money got spent, how careers fared and how public policies were made road on what I decided. The trouble was that all that power went to my head and I neglected love. You see power intoxicated me. I believed myself to be invincible.

“I had a passionate, erotic affair with one of our district’s sexiest coaches just because I could. Not only that, I manipulated myself into having all sorts of special perks and privileges, and got away with it. I out-maneuvered my competitors and gloated over defeating my rivals. It all came crashing down when my much neglected husband left me for another, much more loving woman, and my kids told me they wanted to live with their dad and her. It was then that I discovered I had no real friends but only ‘power pals’ who would disappear the minute I lost power.

“It was my loving brother and sister who saved me in spite of all the times I had ignored and discounted them. They got me to come to counseling where I learned the real significance of love and its incredible, and far more important kind of power. Now I’m rebuilding my life and doing it with love as the number one priority because that’s what’s really working for me now. The other day my daughter asked if she could spend the summer with me. I never was so happy as when I heard her say that.”

Consider this. Power devoid of love tends toward destruction. To be constructive all human powers are best mixed with compassionate love, and without love all human powers bend toward evil. Whether it is in a single individual’s life or in a whole society, culture or civilization, ‘power must be mixed with love’ and ‘love with power’ if good is to be achieved. Do you disagree? Do you agree? If you do, how will you apply this to your life?

Power Positive or Power Negative

The mere mention of the word ‘power’ is off-putting to some. They see power only in light of its misuse for destruction and dictatorial dominance over others. Some people exist who seem to want power just to have it without any concept of power’s positive or negative usage. Many want power because they were once powerless and much pain and suffering resulted. People who lack sufficient, healthy self-love sometimes want power so they can ‘get even’, ‘wreak vengeance’, or just see themselves as better than others. Still others want power so that people will envy and fear them. No small number of people want power so they can acquire money, status and have various advantages. The question here is, will they do this in a constructive ‘I win, you win, nobody loses’ fashion or will they disadvantage others and be more destructive than constructive?

More healthful are those who want power so they can affect positive change. That’s where love comes into play. A passionate, altruistic love of people is the motivation behind so many of the world’s improvements. The invention of hospitals, the abolition of legalized slavery, freedom movements of many kinds, democracy itself, medicines, cures and treatment methods galore, and so much more has come into existence because love was wed with power and a significant advancement was the result.

At the more personal level, parental love of offspring finds the power to send them to college, friendship love powerfully rescues comrades in distress, family love grows the power to bring relatives out of harms way, and mate love creates the powerful team it takes to cope with and surmount life’s challenges and obstacles, to name but a few ways that power and love work together for human improvement.

There are powers we can see as negative. The powers of hate and greed are examples. They are seen mostly as causing destruction even though once in a while they may actually do some good. Some people have kept themselves alive and surviving by hating an enemy. Greed occasionally starts a business empire which employs many people in some sort of constructive endeavor. Powerful and much maligned ‘Lust’ has helped some couples have a really excellent sex life (see the entry “Sexual Love Laces”), and almost no one questions ‘lust for life’ being a good thing.

Some powers are questionable. A powerful religion may bring about feeding starving children or it can bring us an inquisition or a jihad that slaughters innocents. A powerful political party can bring needed reform or it can negate the rights of minorities and suppress justice. Once again the trick is to put ‘power with healthy, real love’ and ‘healthy, real love with power’. That way the chances of a primarily, healthful, constructive result is not guaranteed but is much more likely.

Neutral Power

Most power can be seen as neutral, not good or bad. Electric power can light our world but also can electrocute someone. Economic power can be used to achieve higher standards of living for some while bankrupting others. Charismatic power can lead armies in both just and unjust causes. Power may be used for the health and well-being of people, animals and our whole planet but it can be used for death and destruction as well. Also it can be used for exceedingly useless endeavors.

How you use your power is up to you. By the way, you have power whether you know it or not. You have the power to influence, at least a minor way, everyone you encounter. Your frown, or your smile or your neutral look influences everyone who sees you. You register in the subconscious of everyone passing by and at least in a tiny way you have your influence.

Grow Your Power, Integrate Your Power

Do you know how you are powerful? Do you have a powerful personality, powerful charm, powerful leadership ability, powerful kindness, economic power, organizational power, powerful empathy, powerful reasoning ability, powerful friendship, high-quality teaching ability, potent emotional energy, strong listening ability, business acumen, competency in the arts, music, etc., talent for guiding your family, ability to make people laugh and be happy, or any one of at least a thousand other power possibilities? You do have power, and you do have the power to develop your power. You also have the power to integrate your power with love. Examine this thought, “All good things can be said and done with love and be better for it” (see the entry “Say it with Love”.

I like to recommend that if you’re going to make healthy, real love a high priority in your life you might as well also learn to be quite powerful. That way you will empower your love and likely will be much more effective in your own life and the lives you touch. Integrate your love with your power and your power with your love and a lot of good things are likely. Some people don’t do that. All day at work they are trying to be powerful. Then they come home and try to be about love. Why not be about love done powerfully all day long? You can work to grow your power integrated with your love to affect positive change every, healthy way you can.

To do that means you’re probably going to have to think about power and how you mix it with love. It seems we have an awful lot of people on the planet who are thinking about growing their power but not in connection with love. Others are thinking about how they hunger for love but not about being powerful in the giving of it. Whatever ways you can be a love-empowered force for the health and well-being of anyone, including yourself, I suggest, is a very good thing.

Hopefully this mini-lesson will start you thinking about your own power, how to integrate it with your love and grow both together. There’s lots more to be said about power and love, and in future entries more will be covered. Until then, do yourself a favor and give some thought to how you go about dealing with love and power – okay?

As always, Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you list the ways you are and can become more powerful, and can you imagine yourself doing those ways with love?

Multiple Sex Partners and Love

With dismay in his voice Vince blurted out, “Doesn’t everyone feel awful if their main squeeze has sex with someone else?

“Isn’t it natural to feel jealous or bad or something terrible if you really love someone? So what’s wrong with me and my wife? When I found out she had sex with a guy on a cruise she went on with her girlfriends it just turned me on. That night, after she told me, we had the greatest sex ever! Now she says she wants me to have sex with her friend, Sheila — so we’re even. Are we both crazy?”

Vince’s bewilderment and similar variations of his confusing situation are not all that uncommon in my couples counseling practice. The truth is no small number of couples who really do love each other get quite sexually aroused about their spouse having sex with someone else before, during or after it happens, or in fantasy. Others keep circulating around a confusing mix of strongly opposing feelings and thoughts, while still others begin in agony only to later embraced and enjoy the very sexual behaviors they were first shocked and horrified by.

Another group seems to like it at first but not later. For most people raised in a culture that condemns this sort of thing and promotes sexual monogamy as ‘the only way to go’ dealing with this issue usually is excruciating. A great many breakdowns and breakups, along with all sorts of life chaos are the more usual experiences. Even suicide and/or murder sometimes are known to happen when a spouse or love mate has had sex outside their primary relationship.

What some people find strange is the fact that an increasing majority of couples in the developed world don’t break up or breakdown when one or both of them has sex outside their relationship. That doesn’t mean it is easy for all these couples to sort out. Some find it a relatively important but still a lesser significant event in their lives, while no small number of others actually enjoy what is so devastating to others. A surprising minority report that sex with others is actually good for their primary union, which is so totally opposite to what the majority of Western world couples experience.

What makes the difference between couples who are destroyed, couples who struggle through it and stay together, couples who take it in stride and are not much affected, and couples who enjoy and look forward to having multiple sex partners in their lives? Before we go after answers let’s get a little perspective and some background.

Down through the ages men and women have lived rather successfully with all sorts of different standards regarding sex. In all civilizations there have existed sexual standards which have at times included sanctioned and socially honored paramours, inamoratos, concubines, temporary travel spouses, concurrent secondary and tertiary husbands and wives, polygamist mates, and especially for the rich and the Royals various high status official positions for extramarital lovers of all sexual persuasions. There also have existed official holidays from monogamy, religious ceremonies involving sex with priests and nuns, sanctioned orgies, broadly approved of incestuous assignments and a whole lot more you didn’t get to hear about in World History 101. All major religions and major cultures have had extramarital, multi-person sex accepted and approved of in their history at times and in certain circumstances.

It is to be noted that traditionally matrilineal societies have had a whole lot less trouble with sex outside marriage than have patrilineal societies. Also in quite a few male dominant, agrarian societies having multi-person sex partners has been much more OK for males and often not at all OK for females. However, in certain hunter/gatherer tribes where male/female equality is greater, having multi-person sex outside a pair bond relationship, for both males and females, has been and in some areas still is highly approved of and is the norm.

Today around the world people in different cultures and societies react very differently concerning having multiple sex partners outside of pair bonded relationships. In some tribal cultures to refuse to have sex with a visitor or an important personage could be grounds for divorce and it might even get a person thrown out of the village. In other cultural groups multi-person sex can condemn a female to so called “honor murder” possibly by beheading or stoning. In contrast there are, and have been, sub-societies where the more people a woman has sex with the higher her social standing and desirability. And there have been the rare religious groups where even monogamous, marital sex has been deemed evil and equal to the sin of sex outside of marriage for both men and women.

You might say, “But all that’s ancient history”. Not so. In reviewing our current so-called civilized world I have seen a poll which showed that 67% of young, modern adult Peruvian women think sex with someone other than a spouse is quite justifiable. This number falls to 59% for young adult Brazilian women, and 50% among female Argentinians under 35 years of age. In a somewhat similar poll the UK number was 28% and the USA number was 38%, with various countries in the EU registering numbers similar to the South Americans. Urban dwellers in China score similar to the Peruvian women but measurements in rural China result in scores more similar to the English.

Modern world customs vary greatly in regard to multiple sex partners. The French have their custom of ‘separate vacations’ allowing for sex with another, and the Germans have Oktoberfest during which extra marital sex is not grounds for divorce. There is research that shows every year more married people have sex with someone other than their spouse, but the percentage of people divorcing because of infidelity continues to decline. Other research suggests that an increasing number of couples are jointly agreeing to engage in sex with other couples or a third-party. An increasing number of prostitutes offer their services to couples. Swingers’ clubs exclusively for couples are on the increase, and polyamore relationships where couples work to both grow and share real love along with sex with others are receiving increased attention.

No one is sure how many couples engage in Internet sex with others, or phone sex, or Second Life avatar sex, and the debate rages about whether or not any of that is adulterous. Sexual robots and three-dimensional cyber sex with electrodes to provide the physical sensations are in the works, and meanwhile couples rent and buy more explicit, erotic videos than do single individuals, and married women are the primary purchasers of sexual fantasy and erotic romance books according to some researchers. There’s a lot going on out there, and knowledge usually serves us better than ignorance.

So, with all that in mind let’s get back to what Vince asked. “Doesn’t everyone feel awful if their main squeeze has sex with someone else?” The answer obviously is “no” and reactions actually are quite varied. I want to acknowledge that many are deeply hurt in these situations, I see them in my practice and help them through very painful emotions. However, in this entry I want to relate that there are other responses that couples have. There is a minority in our culture who are erotically aroused and generally quite positive, others are only moderately disturbed, while some actually are fairly indifferent about the whole thing. This probably means your reaction to your mate having sex with someone else is probably not genetic or biologically ‘natural’ and ‘universal’, as some have argued. That’s good news because it also means that with work (psychological, ethical, relational, etc. work) you have emotional and behavioral choice.

Let’s look at the love factor for those who do get hurt because their spouse, or committed lover, had sex with someone else. There are those who argue that the more healthy, real, broad love you have the less you will see a spouse having sex with someone else as ‘vitally’ important. Therefore, the more you both have real love for each other the more you will be able to successfully stay together, even when great hurt and disturbance occurs. A supporting thesis goes like this. Only those who are markedly insecure and inadequate at both love and sex have to break up over a mate having sex with someone else. This might be because they can’t tolerate the idea that someone else might be better than they are at both love and/or sex. Secretly they suspect they themselves are inadequate and other people will outperform them. About that they are profoundly but secretly ashamed. The truly loving and self secure do not breakup or break down, they work it through with and for love. At least that’s some of the theory posited for this complicated issue.

We also must look at the healthy self-love factor. With enough healthy self-love and healing love for a spouse forgiveness, healing and relational improvement becomes more possible. Splitting up over anything sexual acts to make sex more important than love, and indicates it is likely self-love is deficient. Some religious leaders have taught that successfully staying together after infidelity is a special application of the great admonition “love others as you love yourself”. It seems like more and more couples are coming to new psychosexual understandings and with those understandings are working toward staying together. They do that with growing love for themselves and for each other. Also they jointly work against the common, cultural training to divorce over ‘going sexually astray’. This cultural training makes sex so incredibly important that it can, and by these societal standards, should outweigh healthy, real love. Fortunately for many couples, children and families real love often does prevail, and the problems our culture gives us concerning multiple sex partners are overcome and defeated.

It must be fully recognized that millions have been heavily programmed to give sex great importance, and some argue far more importance than it logically deserves. This is especially true for those living in the modern world where the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy can be responsibly guarded against. It also must be fully recognized that how much one hurts in a multi-person sexual situation may be heavily influenced by how one has been subconsciously programmed to feel and think about sex with someone other than a primary mate. How one has been programmed to behave about all this also is of great import. Acts against one’s self or against others almost always are counterproductive and they often negate the healing power of love.

Healthy, real love is protective (see the entry “A Functional Definition of Love") so those acting from healthy, real love take appropriate precautions for both sexual and emotional health. All persons in a multi-person sexual involvement are best treated with love, in fact the more love the better because that will produce the most health and healing when needed. Love between all participants also will assist in the healthiest resolution of difficulties. Making an enemy of one person usually just makes everything take longer and be much more difficult.

For the hurting couple grappling with their many difficult emotions here are a number of things to look at so that healing can occur. Everyone’s sexual background programming and beliefs, along with each person’s own sexual experience history, along with everyone’s religious training are well worth examining – but examining with love and with a loving attitude. The trick is to be very love-oriented and to combine that with being extremely truthful. It is love-centeredness mixed with truth that wins the day for most couples and for anyone else involved. Healing self-love, mate love and love for all concerned is the medicine that makes the difference.

Truth with love can defeat the problems while deception, lies, half lies and attempts at manipulation just make everything worse in the long run. Being not love-centered but fear-centered, or centered in authoritarian/judgmental controlling, or in victimhood, revenge, self-pity, judgmentalism or anything else can prevent love and truth from doing their healing work. Blame, accusation, condemnation, rage and other negativity aimed at yourself or others just helps you get a negative outcome. Be as loving as you can be to yourself and all concerned, be as truthful as you can to yourself and all concerned and you are much more likely to come out better than before.

Again and again that is the result I see in counseling with people dealing with these difficulties. I have worked with hundreds of couples hurting, struggling and battling their way through these issues. Those who do love mixed with truth are the ones who come out OK and often even better than they were. Seek the help of a loving, nonjudgmental counselor or therapist who only ‘takes the side of healthy resolution for all concerned’ and your journey to well-being will be both better and quicker. At least that is my experience and the experience of those therapists and counselors I have supervised.

Now, let’s look at the love factor for those who don’t get markedly hurt, upset, etc. about their love mate having sex with someone else. Swingers, polyamores, sex sharers, sex surrogates, erotic communalists, cyber sex aficionados and everyone else engaging in some form of sexuality with multiple people who really do a good job of showing their love-mate lots of healthy, real love usually are the ones who do best.

The general guideline is ‘do lots of love toward everybody involved’ or trouble will probably start and grow. Lots of truthfulness mixed with lots of love actions keep sex with each other more emotionally safe and nonthreatening. The couples who are less loving, less truthful and generally less successful at life tend to fail at having multiple sex partners in their lives. At least, in my counseling and consulting practice that’s what I have seen. Healthy self-love, mate love, reliance on truth, plus self-disclosure love and protective love (both physical and emotional) help toward a good prognosis. Anything less loving is likely to be much more problematic.

As in so many things those who do best at multi-person sexuality are those who are highly loving of self and others.

Again, the aim of this entry is to inform about diversity in the human condition. What we may have been taught is usual, normal, regular, etc. may be different for others, may be changing, and may have much more variation. What I promote is not a particular relational style but rather health and love in all things.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
How do you know the ways you think about love and sex are not just the result of your family’s and your society’s programming and not necessarily about what is natural or best for you?

Men: Doing Well at Love !

There are men who do very well at love and there are men who could do well but don’t – yet. Love of a special other, love of children, family, friends, comrades, love of a cause, one’s higher power, love of country, the weave of sex and love, love of the arts, love of knowledge, healthy real love of self – they all count. They all can be the focus of men doing well at love.

More and more research shows that men typically go about some things rather differently than most women. These differences can be used by men to help them go about love powerfully, competently and quite successfully. A fair percentage of men, along with not a small number of women, rather naturally think in pragmatic, functional terms. This leads a great many men to think in questions like the following: What is it?, What is it for?, How does it work?, How do you use it?, How do you maintain it?, How much is the right amount?, Can you fix it if it breaks?, How do you improve it?, and Can it be fun?. All these questions are very applicable to men doing well with love and with love relationships. In working to love well all these somewhat male oriented cognitions and puzzlements have good workable answers.

The men who focus on love learning can arrive at practical answers to the above questions and then apply themselves to practicing those answers. They then are likely to do well at love. I know this because throughout all of my years of practicing counseling and therapy slightly more males than females have consistently come to me for help in solving their love life problems. Most of the men learn to do quite well at love, be it with a mate, children, family, comrades, spiritual concerns, or self, etc..

Perhaps you are a man needing or wanting to do well at love, or perhaps you know a man who could stand to learn how to do better at love. Vast numbers of women seem to wish their men would learn how to be more love oriented and generally do better at love. However, these same women often do not sufficiently seem to know how to successfully tell a man the ‘how to’s’ of making improvements in their love understanding, skills or actions. Perhaps that has its origins in the neurological and cultural influenced ways men and women operate differently.

Sadly recent Western cultural influences have sort of taught men to think of love as a woman’s thing, and that to be focused on love is somehow unmanly. This is in spite of the fact that many of the world’s great teachers and theoreticians focusing on love have been men. Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, Plato, and Rumi of the ancient world, and Stendhal, Erich Fromm, Kierkegaard, Harry Harlow, Ashley Montagu of more recent times are but a few of the many good male examples available.

For men to get directed and motivated toward doing well or better at love they usually have to see that there are clear advantages and benefits to doing so. They also need to have clear and fairly precise things to learn and practice, ways to think clearly concerning love and its many dynamics, and recognize ‘manly’ things they may feel when working to improve their love ability. Fortunately all this is doable for men who apply themselves to the task of looking into and practicing healthy real love.

The first question a man may ask himself is, “Will I go to the trouble to really look into love as something to do well at?” After that comes the question, “Will I do what it takes to really do well at love?” If both answers are yes incredible benefits are likely! If the answer to either is no, missing out on life’s most important involvements, most useful powers, and most pleasurable adventures is predictable.

As always, Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success questions
Have you read the rather male oriented, scientifically based, and quite practical book Love & Survival by Dean Ornish, M.D., published by Harper Collins? Or have you read the rather couple-oriented, highly practical, and also rather scientifically based book Recovering Love (although comfortable reading for most men, by all means oriented to both men and women) written by, I shall add perhaps egotistically, yours truly, Dr. J. Richard Cookerly, hardback published by McGraw-Hill, paperback by Authors Choice of iUniverse?

Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?

Anna said, “If you love me you will marry me.” Bob replied, “If you really love me you will live with me without marriage”. Anna then declared, “Marriage proves we love each other and we’re committed to one another”. Bob then responded, “Anyone who believes marriage proves love might deserve to be committed”. He sharply added, “If we really love each other we do not need marriage”. Anna responded urgently, “Marriage makes me feel safe”.

With obvious frustration Bob replied “Marriage makes me feel unsafe, trapped and scared”. Anna then firmly said, “Its marriage or its goodbye”. Bob somewhat angrily remarked “Marriage apparently is more important to you than love or than me, so I guess it has to be goodbye”. After a pause Anna rather softly remarked, “Perhaps we might keep discussing this.” Also after a moment of reflection Bob responded in quiet, kind tones with, “Yes indeed, and I suggest we take it up at some later date”, to which Anna nodded agreement.

According to a recent poll almost 40% of Americans suspect legal marriage is becoming obsolete. This percentage is even higher in some European and South American communities. Every year the number of people living together as a couple without legal marriage goes up.

Every year there are more people who see legal marriage as either unneeded or actually detrimental to the process of being a successful couple and to the progress of modern society. Throughout the developed world there seems to be a growing number who find legal marriage as having a destructive effect on psychological marriage and upon love itself. So, we might wonder, will marriage and couple’s love get divorced from one another in the New World society of the future?

Could it be that we are going back to the way marriage and love were once seen long ago. Did you know that in the 1100’s the French Courts of Love officially ruled that real love between a husband and a wife was impossible. That was because they believed the marriage relationship was unable to be one of equals. They vigorously believed equality between participants was required for the existence and success of true, romantic love.

According to a number of historians romantic love and legal marriage did not start to become commonly interwoven until the great experiments in democracy of the 1700’s. Until then legal marriage was primarily for the attainment of progeny, property and political power. For most men and many women True Love and real sexual satisfaction were to be obtained extraneous to marriage. In many times and places formal marriage for the poor did not even exist, and marriage for underlings like slaves, indentured servants, surfs and many minorities was not allowed. For them love occurred but if there was any form of marriage it was kept a secret and was punishable.

Originally it seems marriage and love were just things people did all on their own. People hooked up together by unsanctioned choice, stayed together the same way or not, and their coupleness was entirely taken care of by themselves with some help from friends and family. It is thought that not too long before the dawn of recorded history men invented marriage so that they could own women like they discovered they could own land and cattle, and love had nothing to do with it. Some think that we are headed back to the form of self chosen and self governed marriage, and love relationships free of governmental, religious and societal control.

A surprising number of couples who have successfully lived together for years eventually get legally married and then divorce within about two years of the legalization their union. A good number of them report that they think they would still be together had they not legally married. Thus, it seems legal marriage was bad for what might be called their ‘love marriage’. Have you heard the satirical prediction that eventually only Catholic priests, nuns and homosexual couples will be doing legal marriage. Everyone else will have given up on it except, of course, for divorce attorneys.

It’s not time to give up on marriage and especially not love-based marriage, at least not yet. A vast majority of unmarried people still want to get married; especially the many younger, never married singles who hope and plan to have a marriage in their future. It still is true that most, but not all, of the cultures of the world have one form of marriage or another. Also marriage has a way of evolving into different forms to fit various changing situations and conditions. In lands where war wiped out most of the men and among the aged where there are more women than men women practicing ‘sharing’ husbands has been known to become somewhat popular.

Where women have been scarce marrying multiple men, and in one society marrying sets of brothers, has been the adaptive development. ‘Temporary wives’ abroad for the traveling man, sub-husbands for powerful and wealthy women, official concubines, mistresses, and champion lovers for high-ranking royalty of all genders, arranged marriage, egalitarian marriage, serial marriage, homosexual marriage and bisexual threesome unions are all part of the long history of marriage around the world. You see, marriage has never been the one thing we are sometimes taught to believe it is. Nevertheless, marriage and especially marriage for love remains a very common and popular social institution in today’s world.

For a sizable minority of people intimate mate type love and traditional legal marriage are ‘un-joined’. Amy describes living with her ‘two husbands’ and the children by both as providing all of them with an extraordinarily happy life. Bill rotates between three major successful relationships without deception or emotional dissonance. Celia lives in an artist commune and says she feels outstandingly well loved and would never live otherwise. Don reports that his love and romantic life for decades have been fulfilled by having deep friendship relationships, some of which are ‘with benefits’. Elaine loves and romances both males and females and speaks of abundant love saturating her life.

Ferris says his love relationship with his God takes care of everything. Georgia tells of children, grandchildren, best friends and pets giving her more love fulfillment than she knows what to do with. Harry says he and his love mate have lived happily unmarried together for 35 years. Isis is very active in the polyamore movement and describes living as a polyamore gives her and her two teenage offspring a huge loving family life. Do you think these people are telling the accurate truth? Could people be quietly going about living these ways somewhere near you? Could you be one of them? Are you open to and tolerant of more ways of succeeding at romantic and mate style love than the standard married one?

Every year more people decide they can live and be well loved without legal marriage. Of course, they may be living with someone in a state of psychological marriage and/or spiritual marriage. Every year more people choose to live and love in one form or another of an alternate lifestyle. Every year more couples decide they can glean the parts of legal marriage they want and leave the parts they don’t want behind. That’s because issues concerning children, finances and property now can be taken care of by way of contracts and other legal instruments without anyone becoming legally married.

Couple love, sexual love, parent love and family love for many people function quite well without marital legality. Social, family and religious issues usually can be handled without marriage paperwork being filed at a courthouse. Even the ceremonies of marriage symbolically and socially expressing love sometimes occur without legalization. Especially many of those who have been through a divorce avoid becoming legally married again, while at the same time they often work harder at having enriching, healthy, real love relationships in their life. Growing numbers of younger adults plan to avoid marriage altogether but they certainly don’t plan to avoid love or sex in their future.

Now with all this in mind you may want to ask yourself what is best for you and your loved ones? Would it perhaps be good for you to examine your understanding of the relationship between love and marriage? Could it be that for you or for someone you love marriage and healthy real love may not mix well?

What about children you may ask? Every year more children are being raised by non-legalized couples and by single parents. Recent studies show these children are usually doing just as well or better than the children of the legally married on every standard applied. They also tend to be far healthier mentally than the children of abuse-filled marriages.

Have you pondered if marriage might be bad for the stimulation of healthful real love in your life? There are those that say they are far better loved outside of marriage rather than inside marriage. Could you be one of them? Could some of those near and dear to you be counted in this group? Let me suggest that the important thing here is to find what is healthiest for you and for those you care about. For some people not doing what is standard or what has become common practice works best. Sometimes with love there are those that do better by traveling the roads less traveled, by pioneering new pathways and by exploring virgin territories. There are those for which love grows strongest and greatest in uncommon ground. Might you belong among these?

Of coarse, you may find it healthiest and most workable for you to do couple’s love in the context of legal marriage. In most circles that is, and is likely to stay for quite some time, the majority viewpoint. It seems that for a great many people they have to at least try legal marriage once. In the modern world half of those who attempt legal marriage attain a fair amount of success by doing so. Most of those say they married primarily for love and they stay married because of love. Therefore, for a great many people love and marriage mix together quite well. Also in the societies in which arranged marriages are common many say they grew to love their spouse and it is because of that love that they stay married.

However, it is a modern truth that a growing number of people are taking various non-traditional ‘other’ approaches to love and romantic connection. Some of them may turn out to be members of your family, friendship group or your acquaintances. A question you may want to ponder is are you able to deal with the ‘non-traditionalists’ of love and marriage as well as you do the more traditionalists. If you are a non-traditionalist yourself the question may need to be reversed. Can you deal lovingly, tolerantly and democratically with the traditionalists?

There are naturalists who hold that mother nature insists on variety in all things. This is a truth concerning love and marriage because around the world and throughout history the relationship between love and marriage has taken many forms. There even are whole societies in which there are many thousands of members who have no form of marriage at all such as the Na (also known as Nari or Mosuo), an indigenous people of southern China. By all accounts they have much love, healthy children and highly functional, stable families usually led by a brother and sister in the role of never-incestuous co-parents. They also have a great deal of sex with a great many partners.

There have been cultures in which virtually everyone was married, and societies in which only a special few married. It is not generally acknowledged that all the major religions of the world including Judaism and Christianity historically have sanctioned more than one form of marriage. These same religions also have understood and taught that more than one form of love can occur in relationships. Then there are those who suggest that, as we speak, in our own Western world culture we are on the way to developing new ways of mixing love and our connectedness to special others. So perhaps love and marriage as we have traditionally thought of them might eventually ‘divorce’. However, at the same time love and new forms of marriage probably will emerge, combine and grow. What do you think?

As always, go and grow in love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
How comfortably loving are you able to be toward both alternate lifestyle and traditionalist individuals, couples and others in love unions different than your own?

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Image credits: “Stained Glass Doors, St. Peter’s Oxford” by Flickr user Bridgman Pottery modified for use here (with apologies) by Wade Watson.

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