What is LOVE, Dr. Cookerly?: cultural

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For Longer Life - Love That Which Is Greater Than Yourself

Mini love lesson #192

Synopsis: Four major candidate categories of greater than yourself love and their quantity and quality of life benefits backed by research are covered in this mini-love-lesson that might just result in you adding more and better years to your life and the lives of those you love.

Want to Add More and Better Years to Your Life?

The research results are in and they are very clear. The major way to a longer life that is healthier and happier can involve loving that which you understand to be larger, grander and greater than yourself. That is what we conclude drawn from a host of longevity, quality of life and love relational studies done in a wide variety of universities and medical centers.

Things “Greater Than Yourself”

In the lives of those people considered to make a positive difference in their world, it often is found that they truly loved and gave much of their life to something they considered to be far larger and more important than themselves. Sometimes it was altruistic – helping the disabled, the disadvantaged, the needy. Sometimes it was political – helping the cause of freedom, democracy, oppressed minorities and those politically misused and abused. Often it was medical – administering to the sick, searching for the cure of a dreaded disease, preventing or limiting the spread of illnesses, building health care facilities.

Education in its many forms has been the greater than yourself cause of many. Nature is another cause – the environment and assisting the survival of many other species we share the planet with. For many others it is been one form or another of what we call the arts and humanities. A caring religion, devotion to a compassionate deity or a positive philosophy and set of principles frequently has been involved as has a general sense of loving in its broadest meaning.

Almost invariably the people who have given themselves to something they saw as greater than themselves have experienced a great many positive effects in their lives for doing so. May you also! Let us look at four main candidates for this life extending and life improving type of love.

Love of Life

Do You love life? Do you love living, experiencing the many awesome marvels and wonders of life itself ? Do you know how to be awesomely affected by this incredible gift you are given to feel, think, be aware of and to be a part of existence and its endless mysteries and miracles. Most things in the universe can not do that, so far as we know. In fact, of the many living creatures on our planet we are the ones blessed with being able to do that best, so far as we know.
There are people so enamored of life they truly love it and experience it much more fully than most. So, it is understandable that research shows those are the ones that tend to live life longer and healthier.

Those who more frequently experience awe and who find life wondrous (as in marveling at gorgeous scenery, being deeply moved by great music, being inspired by the astonishing phenomena of nature or heart-touched by viewing a newborn infant of almost any species) are aware at a high level. Then there is marveling at the world of different life forms seen via the microscope or the vast universe seen via the telescope; those may be the ones who have the greatest life experiences. Frequently the same life-appreciating people are the ones doing the most to affirm, preserve, defend, protect, improve and advance the causes of life itself.

Unknowingly for most, there is a great payback for loving life. These life-affirming and life-appreciative activists significantly benefit from greater production of cytokines in their biological systems. Cytokines are super important to all sorts of cellular health, growth and replacement in just about every part of the body. Without them serious deterioration and increased susceptibility to diseases of all sorts exists in the body and the brain. One recent source of research about this is from the University of California at Berkeley. You might want to check on what Dr. Dacher Keltner has to say about this and related health and longevity issues.

Love with a Higher Purpose or Cause

Closely related to the love of life people are those that have discovered a greater than themselves cause or purpose in life. There are so many examples of people who just had to find and give their lives to something that mattered. Something it was to improve life conditions, advance or enrich our world or some portion thereof. Sometimes a life purpose has to do with the actualization of a talent as often occurs in the worlds of art but also for gifted intellects in science.

Sometimes it is labeled a calling and involves a passionate curiosity, interest or inner drive to create something of use, meaning, inspiration, etc.. Also, a calling to a cause can be to provide a service, defend against a threat, achieve a worthy goal or to maintain, conserve or restore something of impactful quality. Whatever it was, having a positive and constructive higher-purpose-love tended to make healthier, happier and longer living people who had a greater than self purpose.

Do you want to live at least seven good years longer than you probably otherwise would? If so, find and get busy with your purpose in life. Find something more important than yourself and love it (or who and what it helps) and you might extend your life quality and quantity for up to seven years. It has to be beneficial, constructive and positive for those it effects. Causes that are basically centered in avarice, negativism, the inconsequential, regressiveness, negation, entropy or are life harming do not tend to work. In fact, they often work in reverse harming their adherents. That is what the preponderance of research and clinical opinion points to.

Looking forward to what you can do for your cause every morning as you get up can make everyday feel worthwhile, more exciting, more enjoyable and considerably healthier. According to a study in the esteemed British medical journal, the Lancet, a strong sense of life purpose makes you 30% less likely to die of any and all causes (including accidents). That may hold true for every year you are actively involved in your life’s purpose.

Spiritual Love

Having an active, spiritual, love relationship with whatever you perceive to be your metaphysical something greater (higher power, the force, the life force, nature, the universe, universal love, the great mystery, your deity, spiritual entity or energy or more simply God) probably will add between 4 and 14 years to your life depending on which study you read.

This longevity also appears to be rather dependent on how active you are in your spiritual life. Regular meditation and a sense of communicating with your greater something, plus doing various spiritual rituals and spiritually motivated acts of service, along with meeting with like-minded others all seem to contribute to longer and healthier life according to a passel of related research.

Love of People and Other Living Creatures

If your love of something greater than yourself has to do with people in general, the human race or any other large group (i.e. children, the elderly, your country, identity group, etc.) and you are actively involved in what you are doing about that love, your life likely will be better for it. Furthermore, health benefits also accrue to those who actively love other species. This especially is true of the species who are good at loving back and those good at demonstrating behaviors exemplifying love toward each other. Dogs, great apes, horses, parrots, cats, elephants, dolphins and a host of others are all candidates demonstrating at least some of the behaviors and the brain chemistry that goes with love.

Love of people in general, various groups of people and other living species gets very similar positive results to loving particular people like spouses and family members and also having healthy self-love. Such love helps your immune system get stronger, makes for blood pressure improvements, lowers risk of heart attacks and strokes and has a wide range of other health benefits. Adding to your love of particular people, the broad scale greater than yourself aspect diminishes the risk of early death by about 45% according to a study in the PLOS Medicine Journal.

Love of smaller groups such as one’s family counts too but in somewhat different ways. Having strong, healthy, love connections with family and dear friends also can lower your chances of dying early unless those relationships are too often highly stressful and highly problematic. Adding a life purpose, greater cause or love of larger human or animal groups can add quite a bit to life expectancy and quality of life both, so long as other anti-health and anti-love factors are not overwhelmingly strong.

So, ask yourself how is your love of humanity, the human race or any big part of it? Check out your love of our creature cousins and how active you might be on their behalf. If you are doing well here, your quality of life mentally, physically, emotionally, and just about in every other way is likely to be better. You also are likely to have less illness, quicker recovery from illness, live more joyfully and have a far greater sense of life fulfillment. That is what the preponderance of research is showing.

As you can see, the above categories overlap and integrate, are expandable and are in no way exclusive of one another. Those who actively live their love for something they see as greater than themselves has given millions a better and longer life. Emulate them and you may do likewise.
Help us spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Would it perhaps be good for you to write out a completion of this sentence stem?

Success At Life & Your Diet Of Life And Love

Synopsis: The three main things to succeed at, introduces our mini-love-lesson; followed by a look at balanced living; and then what is and is not successful living, including where you got your ideas from; and where you are headed.

Is It True That to Succeed at Life You Need to Succeed at Three Big Things?

Quite some time ago, after a lot of study and research into the human condition, different groups of scholars came to the same conclusion. Several times later, others also came to that same conclusion. They concluded that to have success at life one must succeed at three big things. Do you know what they are? Before we go on to tell you what they are, can you guess?

Put simply, to succeed in life you must succeed at love, work and play. If you succeed at only one or two of these, by that way of looking at it, you are not succeeding at life. There are lots of types of love, many kinds of work and a whole lot of ways to play that a person may need to learn how to succeed at. There is love of a child, parents, family, a spouse or love mate, very close friends, pets, self, country, causes, deity, life itself and a whole lot more to think about in the love category. In the work category, there is work for survival, money, fulfillment, education, health, relationship, lifestyle, home, self discovery and self development, not to mention cleaning, housework, yard work, kitchen work, plus a lot more.

Before we talk about play, we have to mention play and its other word ‘recreation’ which used to be thought of as frivolous, unneeded, a luxury, childish, at best a fringe benefit and at worst a corrupting influence. In fact, many people still teach and preach that this is true. However, the truth about play is in that other word for play, recreation or ‘re-creation’. It turns out that largely through play we often are psychologically re-created. This is true not only for individuals but for couples, families, friendships and a host of other interacting networks of people.

It is through play that children learn about the world, and themselves and why it is often said ‘play is the work of children’. Not only is play re-creational, it often is what precedes the best of creative effort. Play at its highest level leads us into the art forms and their enjoyment, travel and its many enrichments, sports and a host of other ways that people become more than they were. Play also is something that many people find integrates well with many forms of work. Of course play often is usefully wonderful when it is intertwined with love. Play also can be tremendous for health. Spirited physical play for exercise, relaxing play for stress relief, intelligent play for mental acuity and distracting play for cognitive clarity – all help us be more healthful.

Balanced Living

For healthy self-love, healthy couples love and healthy family love, it is best to shape your life-styling toward a balance of love, work and play, such as you might create a healthful, balanced diet. That is what the research recommends. We all know that when the work does not get done, successful living is not likely. That also turns out to be true for love and play. Deficient, reduced or nonexistent actions and expressions conveying and receiving love, turn out to be the number one reason for love relationship failures according to some research.

This especially is subtly destructive because it involves non-action which is so much harder to notice than things like blatant abuse, or demeaning and devaluing words and acts. Those negative actions, by the way, are the number two reason for love relationship failure. Concerning play, the continual re-creation effect of play brings health, happiness and the spirit maintenance we all need. For couples, the axiom “date your mate or lose your mate” applies (see mini-love-lesson “Date Your Mate – Always!”). Couples who do not have enough recreational time together tend to become much more irritable, displeased, stressed, drained, combative and unhappy. This same thing also tends to be true for a great many families.

From this understanding, successful living is living a life diet balanced between love, work and play. If every day you have at least a little of each, you are likely to do well at life. If you are a couple or a family and every week you manage to do a dose of love, work and play together, you are likely to do well. In our busy lives this often is hard to achieve. Things come along and make us live ‘out of balance’ for a time but then the job is to get back to the balance.

What Is and Is Not Successful Living

What is your idea of success? Is it mostly about how much money you pile up? Is it about beating everybody you know in the status achievement game? Could it be about having more enviable toys or just more envy producing stuff. Might it have something to do with raising fine children? Has it been about popularity or fame? Does it have to do with how many you have bedded? Could it be about trophies and honors? Maybe it is about how much fun you had. Then again, maybe it is about how much love you have given and received, how much good you have done, and how well you enjoyed your journey of life.

Where Did Your Ideas about Success Come From?

It is a good idea to look at where your ideas of success came from. Many of them may have originated in your social, cultural and certainly in your earlier family environments. A lot of people get new ideas about success in college or in early career settings. It has been found that lots of people’s ‘model’ for success and successful living comes from people who have had an especially strong impression on them. That turns out quite well for some, useless for others, and disastrous for still others.

Do You Need a Success Ideas Overhaul?

Will your ideas about success cause you to fail at life? Do your ideas about success need an overhaul? Do you need to add some new ideas or standards? There are a lot of people who have succeeded, perhaps even greatly succeeded in one way or another, but who actually have failed at life. There are a surprising number of rich and famous people, and others regarded as highly successful, who are living miserable, tortured lives because their success is not balanced.

Usually their diet of life not only is out of balance but it also is toxic. Maybe they are at the top in their work but they are driven and have little fun, and they are not by any means well loved. There also are those who are great at playing, having fun, recreation, etc. but fail at work and love. And there are those who love and are well loved but whose work and play life leaves much to be desired. Can you say “I truly love my work, I love the many ways I know how to enjoy playful living, and I love well and am well loved”? If you can, wow, you’re doing great!

According to the way we are looking at it in this mini-love-lesson, your success in life has to include success having to do with love, work and play. After each birthday or New Year, you might want to ask yourself these questions. Have I worked well, loved well and played well in this last year? Are you doing so now? A life without meaningful, productive work (which includes volunteering, unpaid contribution work, serious avocations, etc.), perhaps of several kinds, would not be considered successful.

A life without love, probably of several kinds, also would not be successful. A life without experiencing many different enjoyments that can occur while recreationally involved, also can be seen as less than fully successful, no matter what one’s other successes are. A life without mixing your love, work and play together also might be seen as less than fully successful.

So, now what do you think? And what might you be going to do about what you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you succeed at most – work, play or love and the many forms of each?

Monogamy for Love & Monogamy for Sex

Synopsis: Two real-life, sex and love faithfulness dilemmas starts this mini-love-lesson; followed by the question ‘why monogamy’; ends with concepts and information about how monogamy dilemmas get resolved; and more.

Faithfulness in One and Not the Other

“I keep having this struggle,” Lacey said with an anguished look.

She continued, “I sincerely love my husband and I certainly don’t want to do anything to mess up our really good marriage. However, every so often I have to have sex with somebody new and different. My sex life with my husband is good and I know he deeply loves me, and not only that, but he always turns me on. I wouldn’t change any of that for the world. But then I get really attracted to other guys and sometimes gals, and I end up in bed with them.

“Sometimes I go back to the same person if we develop a real friendship, but usually the sex part slowly fades out and then we’re just friends, even good friends. I don’t want my husband to find out because he would be really hurt and I never want to hurt him. I’m still in love with him and think I always will be. Outside of sex, he definitely is the one and only for me. I mean as a life partner he is definitely the one I want to spend my whole life with.

“I struggle and keep trying to become sexually faithful and sometimes I manage it for maybe six months. In my work I get to go and come as I please, and make my own schedule, and meet a lot of interesting people. Some of those I bed and have a really erotic, passionate, exciting and very different experiences with. It’s different from what happens with my husband. With him it’s more about love with sex. With the others it’s just about sex but it is usually great sex. I guess my heart is monogamous but my body is not. What’s wrong with me? What am I to do? This has been going on this way for years.”

It was rather the opposite for Lowell. He came into counseling saying, “I’m in love with two women and I can’t break it off with either one. Both of them say I’ve got to choose one of them and let go of the other. I’ve tried that with each of them, more than once, and it never lasts. One way or another we just get back into the same three-way thing. It’s not a sex thing. Sex with both of them is good. A few times all three of us tried sex together but neither of them wanted to keep doing that. I am really in love with both of them. I am told I can’t really love two women at the same time so it must not be real, but I think it is.

“After all, I love my two parents, and my two children by a former marriage, and both my brother and my sister, so why can’t I love two women at the same time? They both have tried breaking up with me but then they both have come back, and we start up again. What am I to do? I hate to see both of them hurt. I tried breaking up with both of them at the same time so I wouldn’t hurt them anymore, but that didn’t work for any of us either. Is there something wrong with me because I can’t choose? I so don’t want to keep hurting them”.

Why Monogamy?

For ages in many cultures marriage was about the four P’s: procreation, progeny, privilege and property. Custom ruled at first, and later religion, and then the law. At certain times in history, love in marriage was even considered embarrassingly wrong and sinful. In many places and times, monogamy was something married women had to do but not husbands. That was to ensure progeny or that the man’s official offspring was actually the man’s offspring and not some other man’s.

Love had nothing to do with it. It was with the rise of the democracies that monogamous love, sex and marriage began to get intertwined and eventually melded together in the minds of many. Since then more and more, the idea of having a special, monogamous, life partner for love and sex and maybe for offspring has been becoming the desirable way to do things.

Around the world and throughout history that has and is, by no means, the only way. Nor has monogamy proven to be all that successful a way. There are those that argue that especially ‘sexual monogamy’ is anti-natural, and attempting it causes more personal and societal harm than health. There also is evidence that the ‘monogamy of the heart’ tends to work better than the monogamy of the genitals. In this day and age, many, perhaps most, people have to deal with the issues of monogamy or non-monogamy of sex and/or of love.

The Two Monogamies, Apart and Together

Of course, the two monogamies do get very mixed up together and are seen as inseparable in a fair number of people’s minds. Making love is not just having sex but is doing both love and sex simultaneously and, therefore, is one thing as many see it. It is hard, or nearly impossible, for some to separate the two. Therefore, to them monogamy means both marital loving and having sex with just each other. However, it seems for a great many people, they may be monogamous in their spouse-type love but not in their sexuality.

For a large group of others, they come to have romantic or spousal love for more than one person but they remain sexually monogamous with their official spouse. They have ‘affairs of the heart’ but not of the body. In those social spheres, countries and cultures where love and sex is supposed to be only with a spouse, this presents many heart wrenching conflicts and dilemmas. Those dilemmas frequently destroy relationships and even lives.

These dilemmas and their destructive outcomes don’t happen all that much or all that severely everywhere. Monogamy related dilemmas, to a fair extent, have been resolve in a number of social spheres, cultures and countries. Historically, polygamy, polyandry and other ‘poly’ approaches have prevailed and worked rather well for at least a sizable percentage of people.

Some cultures or sub-cultures developed a system where a person has a main life partner who is dearly loved but there are also other lovers and even in some places ‘sub-spouses’, or people who also are loved and in which sex relationships occur in an ongoing manner without there being much conflict about it. Of course, in the monogamy-emphasizing societies, people are not raised to think or operate that way, and so most live either in faithful love and sexual monogamy or in deceit, deception, angst, ongoing conflict and guilt. A small percentage go ‘outside the cultural box’ and make alternate life styles like polyamour and swinging succeed.

How Do Monogamy Versus Non-Monogamy Conflicts Get Resolved?

For a great many people in the monogamy stressing cultures, resolution comes at great cost. Heart ache, agony, anxiety, depression, anger and a host of other bad feelings occur, along with breakups, divorces and fractured families. The final resolution also frequently comes with very emotionally wounded survivors of all that. For others they go through the same agonies but come out stronger and wiser. Sometimes those people are much more able to discern how to create and grow real love while avoiding the traps of false love. Still others just repeat the same, unsuccessful pattern again and again. For those who go to a good counselor or therapist, there can be repair and improvement along with quicker resolution.

Let’s look at what Lacey and Lowell managed to do for the resolution of their monogamy dilemmas. Lacey got interested in going back to college which she had never finished. In doing so, she got really interested in a new career, got fascinated with advanced learning, finished her degree, went on for a Masters and entered her new field. As she accomplished these achievements she did have sex with several men and a woman but her interest in doing so faded.

Her interest in living honestly and doing love with self-disclosure grew, and with it, a desire to risk her husband knowing a more complete truth about her. Still, she did not want to hurt him so she remained quiet about her sexual involvement with others. Then on a trip to Sweden where they met a number of people who practiced what might be called ‘open marriage’ he got a little drunk and let it be known that he knew about her affairs or at least some of them.

He also told her he had known for some time that she had to have others occasionally, and if that is what it took for her to be happy, and their marriage to continue being good, he decided long ago to accept it. He did wish that she had trusted him enough to open up and tell him about the affairs ages ago. He then confessed that he had a few involvements with other women of his own but had not wanted to hurt her or risk disrupting their marriage by telling her about them, because those involvements were quite unimportant. In reaction to that knowledge, Lacey experienced a great, tumultuous, bundle of mixed feelings.

Relief mixed with jealousy, irony mingled with anger, confusion was contradicted by a long desired, beginning sense of closure. Most surprising was a greater sense of intimate closeness with her husband. All these feelings went up and down, and around and around like a merry-go-round in her heart and gut. That was followed by long, emotion-filled talks, lots of hugging, crying, laughter and tenderness, finally ending with a fine sense of mutual serenity.

They both made the agreement with one another that if they got a strong desire to have sex with anybody else, they would talk with each other first and figure it out, sort of on a case-by-case basis. Most importantly they would not hide anything from each other anymore. Then together they got very involved as volunteers teaching English to disadvantaged immigrants. The whole thing about sex with others became a sort of ‘been there done that’ and ‘might do it again, but probably not’ resolved dilemma.

Lowell came to a very different solution. In counseling, he came to view his problem as one of ‘giving his power away’ to both women. Like a good ‘male hero’ is supposed to do, he was automatically thinking he had to do what his two ‘damsels in distress’ wanted him to do to alleviate their pain. He came to the point of view that ‘the difficulty’ actually belonged to ‘those who owned the hurt’. He could be empathetic, sympathetic and even more loving to them both, but it would be acting against himself to quit either relationship.

Since the women had the pain, they owned the pain and, therefore, owned the responsibility of doing something about their own hurt and dissatisfaction. He saw that with this approach, one or perhaps both of them eventually might go away, or they might just go on in this three-way relationship for, heaven only knows, how long. However, as he now thought he didn’t have to sacrifice himself and what he wanted, to solve what was essentially their problem, not his; his resolution was to do nothing different.

Kindly and tenderly he talked all this over with each of them. Both women got extremely upset, furious, threatening, crying and emotionally thrashed about hysterically, at first. Then when that didn’t change anything, they both calmed down and they all went on as before since they both were getting some good things from the relationships. Eventually one of the women became involved with another man, and that led to some very sad goodbyes. Lowell and the remaining lady then went on lovingly together.

Lacey and Lowell found resolutions, perhaps different than you might want to find if you were in their place. What I have seen in dealing with a great many of these kinds of situations, is that each individual, or couple, or threesome, with heartfelt love and careful work can find their own, unique, healthy solution. Those solutions vary greatly but they are solutions. Being open to multiple outcome possibilities helps tremendously. Avoiding ‘my way, or no way’ approaches, being pressured into cookie-cutter solutions, making anybody the enemy, doing guilt trips, blaming and judgmental-ism, getting lost in feeling negative, or inadequate, inferior or at fault, clears the way for constructive and sometimes surprisingly creative solutions.

As always – Go and Grow with Love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Which is more important to you, monogamous love or monogamous sex, or perhaps non-monogamy for either or both?

Murder and False Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins with “an event all too common”; it then presents ‘is it really love or false love’; ‘is passionate love a murder motivator’; ‘love against harm’; how you can help; and ends with the question “Can passionate, false lovers be helped?”

An Event All Too Common

You Can Help!
I’m angry and I’m sad. Once again, I have been referred the children of a parent who has been murdered by the children’s other parent; in this case a teenage step-daughter and her two younger, half siblings whose father murdered their mother.

He has been arrested, and the police say he has confessed, and the case is airtight. The parents were separated and the father said he did it because she would not reconcile with him, and if he couldn’t have her no one else could, because he loved her so much.

The agony of the children is heartbreaking to see. The hate and desire for vengeance on the part of the adolescent may ruin that child’s chance at all future love relationships. If the courts for some reason let the murderer off, the victim’s brother vows to capture and torture him to death, even if it ruins his own life. The victim’s mother has been psychiatrically hospitalized and the murderer’s father has had a heart attack. These kinds of secondary outcomes also are all too common in this type of all too common murder.

This kind of referral has happened too many times in my practice, and in the practices of many of my colleagues. Time and again we hear statements like, “I did it because I love” him or her. In this case the husband robbed from his own children, his and her parents, siblings and friends, someone they dearly and truly loved – but this abhorrent act was not motivated by love by the perpetrator. I maintain that healthy, real love never motivates the violent harming of someone truly loved. Only false love and a great lack of real love does that.

Such murders are all too common in many parts of both the developed and lesser developed parts of the world. Justification that the murder had something to do with love is also all too common. Sometimes it is children who are murdered, sometimes the father/husband or some other friend or family member. Almost always in these kind of situations the murderer voices that it was love that drove them to kill. “I loved her so much I could not stand to lose her”, “I could not bear to see him with someone else because I loved him so much”, “ I loved him too much to let him live after what he did to me”. These also are the all too common kind of statements made by love relationship murderers justifying what they did.

Is It Really Love or Is It False Love?

I maintain that healthy, real love causes people to always protect the ones they love, to consistently be constructive not destructive, and to want for and work for the health and well-being of the loved. It primarily is false love that motivates the murderer to kill those they supposedly love. (A ‘possible’ exception is mercy killing) Murdering someone you think you love is an act of profound, loveless, perverse self-serving. It is in truth an anti-love action. It actually gives proof that no real love existed, and only a huge, needy, sick, demanding desire to be loved was in the place of love.

It also gives evidence that the murderer was sorely lacking in healthy self-love, and probably subconsciously had regressed to an infantile, demanding, controlling, possessive, immense sense of insecurity and inadequacy coupled with hurt and rage. Such people in that state usually are considered incapable of having or giving healthy, real love.

I further suggest that it actually is those who are intensely love-starved who commit murder when they hurt badly because their major love relationship does not go as they would wish. They long to find some person willing to give them some love, or positive attention, and feed their secretly infantile, insecure, needy, love-starved selves. They don’t really love. They only have their hungry neediness disguised as love. When they do get what they think will be their saving source of love, things in the relationship improve for a while and then deteriorate.

In their lack of self-love, deep insecurity and lack of belief that anyone could truly love them, they become possessive, controlling, authoritarian, demanding, often more needy, frustrated, angry and they destroy the very relationship they so depend on. Sometimes they do this in very sneaky, manipulative ways and sometimes blatantly. If alcohol or other addictive substances are involved, their neediness escalates and exacerbates the danger potential. A number of several syndromes of false love frequently involve these dynamics (See “Fatal Attraction Syndrome”).

Is Passionate Love a Murder Motivator?

What about the many people who say passionate love, gone awry, is a major motivator for murder? Homicide detectives, criminologists and detective story writers seem to commonly hold this view. By doing so, they promote this idea and give a large number of people a false excuse and, in a sense, permission for doing violence to those they supposedly love.

It is true, many murders are committed in the name of love but think about it, could that be real love? I’m of the opinion that it definitely is not. I suggest those who murder their lovers, spouses and others are the outcome of three things. The first is the presence of one form or another of a false love syndrome. (see False Forms of Love Series). The second is a severe absence of healthy, real love in the murderer’s development. The third is the cultural teaching that presents passionate love as jealous, possessive, obsessive, desperately needy, controlling, and an insane phenomenon.

That cultural teaching promotes the idea that one is justified in harming and even killing those they love if the person they love severely emotionally hurts and betrays them, or wants to leave them for any reason. This cultural teaching basically helps people think that ‘if I love you, you are mine’ and, therefore, I own you. It is not much of a cognitive jump from there to thinking ‘if I own you’ I can do what I want with you, even destroy you’.

I once consulted on a sentencing hearing of a mother who attempted murdering one of her children. She argued the child belonged to her and, therefore, she had every right to kill the child after it became too disobedient and rebellious. The fact is that that viewpoint was once upon a time a standard belief, and in some places was well supported by law. It was similar to the law that said if a husband found his wife having sex with another, it was grounds for justifiable homicide and case dismissal. Remnants of those very anti-love positions still exist in the minds of many, and still are in effect in some parts of the world.

I maintain that none of that has anything to do with healthy, real love. No, it’s the kind of thinking that once grew out of various forms of false love and the under-valuing and lack of understanding of how healthy, real love works.

Love Against Harm

I counseled a daughter who shot and killed her father. The father had on four separate occasions beaten the daughter’s mother to the point she had to be hospitalized with broken bones and other serious injuries. Though they had moved to escape him, the father had found them and was once again breaking through the front door vowing to beat the mother and the daughter unless they came back to him because ‘they belonged’ to him. That was when the daughter emptied a revolver into his chest.

This and mercy killing are the only types of protective, real love that I know of which can lead to violent killing. It is the kind of love that can go to extremes to protect a loved one from harm. Healthy, real love can cause people to go to great lengths to protect a truly loved one from harm. And hopefully an effective intervention can be applied before it comes to these extremes. One also has to be careful here because over-protection can be a detriment to the well-being of the loved. Basically, healthy, real love is the enemy of harm.

How You Can Help

Do you agree that healthy, real love is a constructive and not a destructive force in the world, and that it is not real love, passionate love or other mis-guided substitutes that ever motivate the violent harming or murdering of the truly loved? Do you also agree that a society which accepts the idea that love can sometimes cause people to do violence, even to the extent of killing those they love, is in effect unknowingly excusing, supporting and promoting love relationship violence and murder? Do you further agree that society will be healthier and safer if we rid ourselves of the teaching that promotes the idea that love sometimes causes people to justifiably harm and destroy those they purport to love?

If you agree or tend to agree with these propositions here is what you can do. You can search for and find opportunities to bring up these concepts. Wherever you can, you can work to promote the constructive view of love with anyone and everyone you have contact with. By doing this you will be promoting healthy, real love in our world, as you also act to work against love ignorance, sick false love and all the harm it does. So, I urge you, do your bit and help change the ethos that presents love as a motivator for harm and death.

You also can help if you know a family member or friend who continues to accept escalating physical violence, by lovingly sharing some of these concepts and relating to them the very real danger they may be in, and starkly telling them many people are killed in those situations. You might help them explore options to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. And if you find some of the examples ‘a little too familiar’ please don’t think “It can’t happen to me” – that is what many of those murdered by a supposed loved one said to themselves. Get help! Get safe!

Can Passionate False Lovers Be Helped?

Those who suffer (and they do suffer greatly) from the fixations of false love, can indeed be helped. They can go on to healthy, real love although it usually takes a fair amount of therapeutic work. Those trapped in false love syndromes can learn healthy self-love and then healthy, other love. They usually have to unlearn a great deal in the process, reprogram their anti-love and non-love approaches to love relationships, and practice what they learn for quite a while before they become fully love successful. Often in their fear of seeing their own immense love starvation, and feeling it’s pain more acutely, they dodge the very help that would save them and those they addictively endanger. But if they do seek help from a love knowledgeable therapist things can go wonderfully well.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you believed that real love could turn to hate, and what do you think of that idea now?

Age Differences and Romantic Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson discusses what is too much age difference; should age matter in love; loves many battles and many victories; why some get so upset and others don’t; love against age prejudice; love theory and age difference.

What Is Too Much Age Difference?

What do you think about a 30-year-old man marrying a 15-year-old girl? Did you know that for many years marrying at those ages, and with that age difference, used to be considered quite proper and highly desirable. A man at 30 had had time to establish himself financially and then could properly take care of a ‘sweet young thing’ and their subsequent children. She was freshly ready for pregnancy. Even a 20 year difference, if the man was wealthy enough, was seen as quite acceptable. In those days if he and she were close to each other’s age it was seen as indecent and problematic.

Also, age differences where the woman is older and independently wealthy made it quite acceptable for her to take a younger man as her protégée and lover. Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, can be said to have ‘set the standard’ for this by having a string of young, officer lovers. Royalty all over Europe followed suit, as did wealthy courtesans and the wealthier members of the rising middle class. Twenty, thirty and even forty-year differences in people having affairs with one another and/or marrying was not infrequent.

In the developed nations of the world, the acceptance of wide, age range difference varies greatly. Nowadays, big differences in age cause many couples to be met with disapproval and condemnation in some social spheres, societies and countries. To this day in various other parts of the world, romantic love relationships and marriages between people of surprisingly large age difference occur and meet with local acceptance and approval. Such unions also quite often are seen in those places as working quite well. I once worked with a Superior Court judge who on following a US supreme court judge’s example, came to love and wed his law clerk, a woman 31 years his junior. Years later both reported being ideal for one another and their union extremely happy. Of course, this is not always the case.

Should Age Difference Matter in Love?

Some argue that any two, single adults who profess love for one another, no matter what their age difference, should be treated with acceptance and respect as they carry out their relationship with one another. Others argue that there is something unseemly, indecent or pathological about people of greatly varying age trying to romantically love each other. There are those who hold a five-year difference to be questionable, an eight year difference to be dubious and anything more than a ten year difference to be reprehensible. Still others think we should celebrate any two people trying to do real love with one another, no matter what their age or other differences are.

I once counseled a couple in which she was a vivacious 60 and he a very mature 32. Their big problem was that their families were not able to accept the age disparity. With love, time, work, plus a lot of family therapy they got most, but not all, of their respective family members acceptance. I have seen other families expel and reject a family member because of who they wanted to wed and the age disparity issue. I also have dealt with a few families in which the adult children were horrified that their widower father wanted to marry a woman younger than the father’s oldest child. Eventually those situations also turned out okay for all concerned, with a lot of therapeutic help.

Love’s Many Battles and Many Victories

In the history of love, time and again love has battled social norms, changed customs, overcome prohibitions and altered or abolished laws aimed at restricting love relationships. Often at great cost, love usually eventually wins. In a great many different places and times, it has been deemed wrong and even unlawful for people to attempt to love one another and get married if they were of different social classes, religions, ethnic backgrounds, races, clans, casts, political ranks, handedness, types of disability and just about every other kind of classification you can think of. Getting married to a redhead or someone who had too many freckles was even once considered a ‘big no-no’ and, Heaven forbid, if they should also be left-handed – all signs of Satanic involvement you see.

Royals could not marry commoners, mulattos, octoroons and quadroons could only marry others of their same or lesser classification, and Roman Catholics should never get romantically involved with Eastern Orthodox Catholics or, even worse, with Protestants. And until quite recently, homosexuals should not marry anyone unless it was a heterosexual and part of their attempt to change into the same. Still to this day, in some places around the world marrying someone who has a prohibited difference can get you jailed or even killed. Age differences have been one of the few prohibitive factors to have more recently developed in certain areas of the world in the last hundred years.

Why Some Get Upset and Others Don’t

In some parts of the world a lot of people get very upset and even nauseated seeing or hearing about people of large age differences loving each other. In other parts of the world no one thinks anything about it except “how nice, they love each other”. What makes the difference? There are the Freudian theorists who talk about Oedipal conflicts and mommy and daddy fixation. Some think it is just social conditioning. Here is another concept that seems to have considerable merit for answering this question.

Some cultures are very age integrated and others much more age segregated. Generally the more a society or nation operates to keep its people age group segregated from each other, the more people in those age groups do not understand or do well with people in the other age groups. In such places, age group prejudice grows, misconceptions abound, and it is more likely that differing age group cooperation and coordination becomes much more problematic. Wherever elders are not frequently mixed with adolescents and children, conflicts between these classifications are seen as much more likely. The reverse also is seen to be true. The more people of different ages mingle the more they do well together, come to respect, like and love people in other age categories. People in age integrated societies are thought to tolerate and accept age differences in romance far more readily.

Love Against Age Prejudice

If you romantically love someone considerably older or younger than the norms of those you associate with, you likely will meet with at least some disapproval, rejection, possibly ostracization, and in some instances even hate. What can you do? Well, actually you can do a lot. First, you can work to understand that ‘rejection usually is a form of self protection, brought on by fear’. Fear of change, difference, the unknown, being wrong, and a fear of deep, unacceptable forces emerging from within the self, all are possible

Next, you can love your enemies, rejecters, nay-sayers and doubters, knowing they probably somehow feel threatened by your love choices. Then, you can seek out and ally yourself with those who are more openhearted and open-minded. Another thing to do is to really work hard to learn and practice the skills of love and use them to really succeed at your major, love relationship. After that, and with love, keep showing your detractors how happy and successful you and your chosen are with one another.

In cases of family dissonance about age differences, a proficient, well trained and experienced family therapist has been known to make all the difference.

Love Theory and Age Difference

Among adults, love is not seen as being bound by age. Once people have attained sufficient maturation, any two people can healthfully and romantically love each other. There always are special drawbacks and challenges to every kind of difference in a love relationship. However, that also is true for couples with many similarities. With sufficient healthy, real love, skillfully given and received, handling age and every other kind of difference can be managed and accomplished significantly well. When loving couples custom tailor their relationship, instead of trying over-hard to fit themselves to outside, social norms, they can do especially well if they work at it. It does seem true that the greater the difference, the greater the need for love to be done well. At least that is a postulated love theory position (see also “Elder Love”).
Now what do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Could you romantically come to love someone a good bit older or younger than yourself, and might that actually work better than someone closer to your own age?

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?

Love Against Bigotry

Mini-Love-Lesson #233

Synopsis: The dangers of bigotry for its targets, practitioners and those who fight it; personal questions to face; bigotry more deeply defined with a deeper psychological understanding of its dynamics and causes; Adamant Love as bigotry’s best enemy; the survival necessity of fighting bigotry and three major ways to fight bigotry with love are well and succinctly presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Tough Love May Be Required

Bigotry is dangerous! Not only does bigotry cause harm to others but eventually it becomes self-destructive to those who obsessively practice it. It works much like a dangerous, contagious disease often subtly spreading and becoming more virulent and resistant to cure as it infects more and more of the vulnerable. That is when the hate and fear-based core of toxic bigotry can come to dominate the entire life of the bigot destroying everything even connection to other bigots which is thought to be the last thing to go. Family life, social life, physical and mental health, self-care and everything constructive usually eventually suffers due to bigotry’s pathological effects. Physical disease susceptibility tends to grow and bring about a final demise of the profoundly bigoted. That is part of what research into bigotry is revealing. Research also gives evidence to bigotry being a serious and dangerous, pathological psychodynamic for all concerned (Check out The Violence of Hate, 3ed. by Jack Levine and Jim Nolan).

Of course, in many people bigotry appears in milder and more restricted forms. Even there, research suggests it has a corrosive effect on its practitioners, on their healthier relationships and on the people they effect. Even in its milder forms, bigotry retards progress and advancement by merit, and thus, it works to limit societal improvement.

There is one good thing about bigotry. Paradoxically throughout history, bigotry has been a great help to the countries who welcome the refugees of bigotry. Many countries’s best and highest achievers in countless fields were once escapees from persecutory bigotry.

Combating bigotry can also can be quite dangerous at times. Done unwisely and without sufficient self-care, bigotry can get you and yours hurt, harmed and, although rarely, may even get you or yours killed. However, not fighting bigotry can arrive at very similar results, but perhaps for different victims. Often it is the innocent, uninformed and the unaware who fall victim to bigotry’s most dangerous acting-out manifestations.

Love (not reason or facts) is bigotry’s most successful enemy. But because of bigotry’s considerable danger, opposition is best accomplished through tough love, or more accurately, love’s strongest most powerful form known as Adamant Love (see “Adamant Love – and How It Wins for Us All”). Softer forms of love, such as compassionate love, usually are treated by bigots as only contemptible weakness. Reason and facts have their place but they only treat, if at all, the surface symptoms of bigotry (fallacious thinking) not even touching the profound hate-undergirding fear and bigotry’s deep roots in personal love deprivation.

Know Your Enemy

What exactly is bigotry? What causes bigotry? Who becomes a bigot? Are you or those you care about perhaps unknowingly infected with the seeds of pathological bigotry? Most importantly what can be done that works to prevent and defeat bigotry? To effectively go against bigotry, it helps to have good answers to these and similar questions. For all that, here is a bit of assistance.

Bigotry More Deeply Defined

Overtly and at the surface symptom level, bigotry simply can be defined as stubborn and intense intolerance of any opinion, belief, creed, policy, tenant or lifestyle differing from one’s own. More completely, bigotry is also obstinate intolerant, blind devotion to one’s own opinions, prejudice, viewpoints, lifestyle and one’s own identity tribe’s myths, mores, customs, values, hatreds, conceptualized enemies and hierarchies done to the defensive exclusion of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of outside other identity groups or tribes.

A Psychological Understanding of Bigotry

A deeper more psychological understanding suggests that bigotry is a deep-seated, unconscious fear and insecurity about being replaced and reduced in importance, and not having the qualities and attributes necessary to maintain one’s level of importance, status and general sense of okayness. Hate-filled bigotry seems to be most strongly activated when the bigoted perceive or sense they are in danger of having their own inadequacies exposed and social standing reduced. This is especially onerous to bigots when it involves being compared to what they consider to be lower status identity groups which might gain higher status over their own.

Such inadequacy fears activate the brain’s defensive emergency power systems of anger, hatred, rejection and tendencies for exclusionary and/or destructive action taking. Cognitively, the resulting symptomatic thought process is one of self-justifying rationalization rather than real reasoning, dodging, denial and distortion of facts coupled with irrational protective blaming.

This is well revealed in the white nationalist’s marching chant, “Jews will not take our jobs”. Exposed in this chant is the secret, underlying fear that jews have what it takes to take their jobs away from them. Furthermore, the secret fear is the white nationalists do not have sufficient adequacy to hold on to their jobs in the face of the Jewish competition which is seen as unfair and perverse.

What Causes Bigotry

“You have to teach them to hate before they are six, or seven or eight” so goes, the once banned, line from the musical South Pacific. This expresses the simple truth that in many families children are raised to be hate-filled and secretly fear-filled offspring of their likewise-minded parents and relatives. Add exclusionary hate-filled religion, authoritarian sociopolitical thinking, autocratic charismatic leaders and a simple lack of education delineating the superior advantages of healthy, real love and democracy and you have the social milieu ethos that breeds bigotry.

Another cause seems to have to do with erratic and inefficient love in infancy and childhood. Research indicates certain patterns of erratic and inconsistent love behaviors occurring in the raising of infants and children cause long-lasting insecurities as well as certain deficiencies in normal physical growth. Both human children and laboratory animals raised with these love deprivation behavioral patterns develop larger fear-based reactions to new and different things and others entering their environment. In children, this sometimes takes the form of obvious bigotry type reactions. In laboratory animals especially monkeys, more primitive withdrawal, fear and angry attack behaviors toward the new and different occur. Behaviorally, consistently well loved lab animals show mostly friendly curiosity toward the new and different.

Some developmental researchers suspect that in the above situation of inconsistent, reassuring love which occurs during certain critical periods of brain development, the amygdala (a brain part having to do with processing fear) may be damaged and become lifelong prone to producing stronger and more frequent fear feelings, interpretations and resulting fear-based behaviors. Such children are suspected of becoming more highly susceptible to developing bigotry-filled outlooks on life and especially toward anything or anyone new and different.

Similarly, certain research results in the neurosciences and genetics suggests some people inherit amygdalas that easily overproduce, and too frequently produce, strong fear and resulting defensive anger reactions when encountering new and different others. Other brains, especially those of children securely loved in their infancy, tend to produce happy curiosity on encountering the same new and different others. The genetic neuroscience results posit that between 10% and 40% of bigotry may be attributable to genetics.

The highly healthfully, self loving and those who live in happy, healthful, love-interactive, inclusive and not isolationistic networks tend to be those least prone to developing bigotry.

Likewise, those who have the most frequent personal contact with people of varying identity groups tend to be the most comfortable and appreciative of people differing from themselves. Those who have the least contact with people of identity groups different than their own tend to exhibit the most fear of differing others. Basically, more contact equals more comfort and less bigotry.

Adamant Love Can Defeat Bigotry

Love naturally opposes bigotry. Healthy, real love is kind, compassionate, not easily threatened, inclusive not exclusive, prone to seek the well-being of all, brave and much more – just as Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Rumi and the Scriptures of the major religions of the world have taught us. Bigotry is fear-based, hate empowered, exclusionary, unkind, easily threatened, defensively aggressive and prone to seek only the well-being of the similarly bigoted.

Adamant love is the type of love which is strong, determined, steadfast, powerful in face of adversity and in the service of the well-being of the loved (see “Adamant Love – and How It Wins for Us All”). It, therefore, is likely the form of love best able to powerfully combat the fear and hate of militant bigotry. Other forms of love such as compassionate love and serene love also have a roles to play.

Working and Fighting for Love Victories Is the Best Option!
Let me suggest, it is good but not enough to be against bigotry, hate, prejudice, inequality, etc. It works better to also be for what needs to go in place of those things, or in other words, fill the vacuum that defeating bigotry leaves. Otherwise, like weeds, they return. Growing evidence points to humanitarian, altruistic and inclusive, healthy, real love being the best, strongest and most positive vacuum filler.

Wherever love loses, and bigotry, hate and/or indifference wins, history shows disintegration, destruction and demise become the eventual outcome. This proves true for couples, families, societies, nations, cultures and even empires. You can read all about that in A New Reality by Drs Jonas and Jonathan Salk and in several of Jonas Salk’s previous works. This is also well backed by the work of Dr. Reuben Fine in The Meaning of Love in Human Experience and also in Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

Three Ways to Fight Bigotry with Love!

First arm yourself with knowledge about the behaviors that convey healthy, real love. That knowledge and those behaviors become your primary tools or, if you prefer, weapons by which you can fight for and with love and against bigotry (see “Behaviors that Give Love – The Basic Core Four” and Link “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”).

Now for a little personal example. At an interfaith conference, I once had the privilege of seeing the theologian, Nels Ferre, lovingly handle being confronted by two very angry and accusatory Palestinian graduate students. Through the sincere use of love listening techniques, friendly facial expressions, kind tones of voice, open arm gestures and non-combative questions, he literally loved them into receptiveness. The next day they were all walking to breakfast together laughing and acting like long-standing comrades. Best of all, the Palestinians were now very interested in listening to Dr. Ferre’s input, where before, interruptive attack statements were all they seemed capable of.

You might want to review what your own religious tradition teaches about love. Most major religions have very important, healthy, positive things to say about how we are to love one another – which turns out to be in surprising agreement with each other.

If and when you encounter anyone talking or acting in bigoted ways, think about not arguing with them or being silent but rather with kind, expressional love (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”) asking them a few questions and perhaps later getting around to a short, positive, personal testimony, laudatory statement about the people they seem to be against. Imagine saying something like “what you’re saying about them could be true, I suppose, but my own personal experience with them has been mostly quite positive. Why do you suppose that is?” In this way you use some of your behaviors of love tools, usually avoid the wasted energy of combativeness, and just possibly get your positive message actually heard a bit.

Second, Live Social Diversity! The research is clear. The more people personally experience those of other identity groups the more bigotry, negative bias and prejudice diminish and feelings of fraternity grow. There are exceptions but not nearly as many as researchers once thought likely. Those people who have the least contact with any outside identity group tend to exhibit the most fear, disapproval, intolerance, and bigotry toward that group. It has long been noted that, for the most part, it is not the people who live along a peaceful border who are intolerant of those on the other side but those who live further in-land away from that border, and out of contact with those people across the border.

So, though it is sometimes complicated and difficult work to seek contact with those who are different and diverse from yourself and your own identity group, I bet it will prove well worth it. In your own environment, ponder who are the most likely targets of bigotry, exclusionary treatment, negative bias and derogatory opinions. Seek some of them out. Start with the concept that if you get to know some of them you probably will be considerably enriched by interacting with them. And you probably have a lot to learn from them that will be ever so good for you to learn. Not only that, you will increasingly enjoy it and, who knows, you may make a truly loving friendship or two.

Almost everywhere there are both informal and organized groups of people made up of those who interact with and/or support people who are more different from you but who are open to your inclusion. It takes a little social bravery and doing a bit of homework but you can find and start befriending some of them. They may be a little protectively standoffish at first but keep being friendly and you can put them in your life and be better for it and likely so will they.

Third, join and become active in one or more groups that actively fight for or work for positive social diversity interaction and democratic equality/inclusiveness. You also can join and be active in groups that fight against hate, bigotry and various forms of destructive prejudice and authoritarian anti-democratic movements (Check out the prevention programs of the International Network for Hate Studies and the Counter Bigotry Action Report of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee).

You can do these things both locally and in much wider ways. For instance, both globally and locally and also for an easy start you might want to join up with Friendship Force International where you get to fairly inexpensively travel to and live briefly with people in other countries all over the world. Then you get to host some of them in your home if you wish. Remember, Mark Twain told us “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness”.

So, the challenge is be a part of those who fight for the ways of healthy, real love and against the anti-love forces of bigotry, hatred, prejudice, etc. Part of that challenge is to not live inactive or indifferent about love. Both inaction and indifference assist the anti-love forces which would and could destroy us all.

One More Little Thing. How about talking all this over with somebody and in the process tell them about our FREE mini-love-lessons and our FREE subscriptions. We would appreciate that.

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

Quotable Question: Could the human race lose the race for human survival because enough humans didn’t fight hard enough for treating one another with the ways of love?

Over 300 FREE mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries worldwide!

Mini love lesson #192

Synopsis: Four major candidate categories of greater than yourself love and their quantity and quality of life benefits backed by research are covered in this mini-love-lesson that might just result in you adding more and better years to your life and the lives of those you love.

Want to Add More and Better Years to Your Life?

Things “Greater Than Yourself”

Love of Life

Love with a Higher Purpose or Cause

Spiritual Love

Love of People and Other Living Creatures

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Synopsis: The three main things to succeed at, introduces our mini-love-lesson; followed by a look at balanced living; and then what is and is not successful living, including where you got your ideas from; and where you are headed.

Is It True That to Succeed at Life You Need to Succeed at Three Big Things?

Balanced Living

What Is and Is Not Successful Living

Where Did Your Ideas about Success Come From?

Do You Need a Success Ideas Overhaul?

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Synopsis: Two real-life, sex and love faithfulness dilemmas starts this mini-love-lesson; followed by the question ‘why monogamy’; ends with concepts and information about how monogamy dilemmas get resolved; and more.

Faithfulness in One and Not the Other

Why Monogamy?

The Two Monogamies, Apart and Together

How Do Monogamy Versus Non-Monogamy Conflicts Get Resolved?

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins with “an event all too common”; it then presents ‘is it really love or false love’; ‘is passionate love a murder motivator’; ‘love against harm’; how you can help; and ends with the question “Can passionate, false lovers be helped?”

An Event All Too Common

Is It Really Love or Is It False Love?

Is Passionate Love a Murder Motivator?

Love Against Harm

How You Can Help

Can Passionate False Lovers Be Helped?

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson discusses what is too much age difference; should age matter in love; loves many battles and many victories; why some get so upset and others don’t; love against age prejudice; love theory and age difference.

What Is Too Much Age Difference?

Should Age Difference Matter in Love?

Love’s Many Battles and Many Victories

Why Some Get Upset and Others Don’t

Love Against Age Prejudice

Love Theory and Age Difference

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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 !

Proof positive!

Search For Better Sources

Don't Overdose on Negative News

Warnings

Getting on the Love Victory Bandwagon

Mini-Love-Lesson #233

Tough Love May Be Required

Know Your Enemy

Bigotry More Deeply Defined

A Psychological Understanding of Bigotry

What Causes Bigotry

Adamant Love Can Defeat Bigotry

Three Ways to Fight Bigotry with Love!