What is LOVE, Dr. Cookerly?: cultural

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Understanding Friendship: From Mild Geniality to Profound Love

Mini-Love–Lesson # 203

Synopsis: How friendship is defined, understood and valued differently in different countries, cultures, the importance of your own valuing of friendship and doing more about it are presented here and more.

Friendship Seen Differently Here and There and Elsewhere

Internationally friendship is understood in a number of rather different ways in different countries, cultures and societies.

There also are quite a few different definitions and connotations to the words friend and friendship in its various translations. Not only that but in different social classes, strata, diverse subcultures and societal spheres, friendship is viewed and valued quite divergently. All of these variations of meaning can be seen as contributing to an all-over enriched understanding of friendship. These differences, however, also suggest it is best to be careful when dealing with the subject of or engaged in the activities of friendship, or trying to comprehend exactly what other people mean when they use the words friend or friendship.

Defining Friendship Differently

It is kind of amazing how differently various sources have defined friendship. One source says it’s just “a mutual association of those who like each other”, another says it’s people who feel attached to one another by feelings of personal regard and fondness” and still another says it’s “a relationship of those who grow emotionally close to one another and who have a mostly positive mutual appreciation and therefore feel attached, linked or at least somewhat bonded and in union with each other”.

Other definitions use terms and phrases like “mutuality of affinity”, “ having ongoing rapport”, “enjoy each other’s company”, “repeatedly interacting pleasurably” “people you feel more good than bad about”, “those who treat you nice”, “people who you hope like you”, “those acting in mutually beneficial alliance” and more cynically and hopefully as a joke “anyone who doesn’t want you dead”.

I have heard it taught among the Sufis who have been emphasizing friendship since the year 900 or so that “a friend is someone who helps you know yourself with love”. Aristotle, who had a fair amount to say about friendship, noted that “a true friend is one who likes who we are and wants what is good for us”.

A Three Level Understanding of Friendship

Concepts about friendship can be analyzed as indicating it is a phenomenon occurring on at least three different levels. Here they are called Mild, Significant and Profound and are explained as follows:

Mild Friendship: a relationship between those who at least mildly like each other, who at least mildly enjoy being in each other’s company and mildly but pleasurably have at least some ongoing, occasional interactions with each other.

Significant Friendship: a relationship between those who mutually emotionally feel fairly closely and positively connected, are mutually trusting, have a fair degree of shared values and interests, have some mutual intimate and personal knowledge of each other, are mutually concerned about each other’s well-being and who mutually have a mostly positive effect on each other and who find importance in their relationship continuing.

Profound Friendship: a relationship of healthy and usually sibling or familial like real love. In addition, those whose relationship manifests a sense of mutual, deeply felt, meaningfulness along with intimately personal and privately shared knowledge, a sense of being strongly bonded with attitudes of unconditional acceptance, non-condemning, all forgiving, intense loyalty, mutual appreciation, respect, and affirmation, dependability especially in troubled situations and involving people who are solidly committed to each other’s well-being and their relationships continuation.

These three levels can be seen as a existing on a continuum of sequential degrees going from more or less mild to more or less profound. Some analysis suggests it would be appropriate to add a fourth category of Friendly Acquaintance mostly for those who have briefer or only occasional friendly interactions with each other. In analyzing friendship, others suggest additional situational categories are useful like “work buddy”, “good neighbor”, “school chum”, “comrade-at-arms” “internet pal”, “Facebook friend”, etc.. Additional terms like best friend, fast friend, bosom friend, confidant, crony, sidekick, etc. also may be useful in seeking a full understanding of friendship.

The Varying Valuing of Friendship

In some parts of the world, you would not use the word friend for someone you had known less than two years nor would you invite them to your house before then. In other parts of the world, one can hear oxymoronic statements like “hello, old friend, what’s your name?” probably stated by someone being artificial with something to sell. Among still others, ending a friendship is commonly more significant and impactful than ending a marriage. Then there are those for whom the word friendship privately means a relationship conducted for selfish benefit and easily ended for the same reason.

Among health professionals and psychological researchers, friendship is increasingly being seen as highly contributory to health, well-being, happiness and especially to longevity. Of course, this means friendship closer to the Significant and Profound levels. Rehabilitation and recovery specialists count real and deep friendships among the most important factors effecting their patient’s return to health. Even Mild friendships, as described above, have been found to contribute substantially to the physical and psychological repair of the wounded, injured and otherwise impaired.

Research also is showing that those who do not value friendship and friendship love significantly or sufficiently enough are much less engaged in friendship actions and consequently are more susceptible to killer stress illnesses, substance abuse problems, severe love-life difficulties and workplace non-cooperation and passive/aggressive resistance.

Intriguingly there also is foreign affairs research showing that the more international friendships citizens of a country have the more a country tends toward peaceful and cooperative relations with other nations. The reverse also turns out to be true. The more people of a country do not cross borders and befriend dissimilar people the more suspicion, hostility, non-cooperation and international dysfunction there is likely to be with that country.

Likewise, and contrary to much of the past, there has been a recent joint call from major leaders of six of the world’s great religions for developing worldwide, cross-faith friendships. This worldwide call is aimed at producing a reduction in cross-faith religious bigotry, hostility and violence. Those inter-faith and internationally minded clerics ask us all to escape our insular provinciality and work at befriending those not only different from us religiously but also socially and culturally. They postulate doing so will lead to joyfully discovering more about our positive similarities than our disharmonious differences.

How Is Your Own Personal Valuing of Friendship?

Generally, the more you value friendship at all three levels but especially the deeper Significant and Profound levels of friendship, the more you will do about it at all three levels. Because of that, the better off you likely will live and probably the longer you will live, the healthier you will live and the more enriched your life will be. So, how are you doing that at all three friendship levels? Do you think you do enough about your friendships, making new friendships, developing friendships further and what about your friendship with yourself?

One of the things a person runs into when studying friendship and friendship love is this. Again and again from lots of different places lots of different scientists, authorities, experts, sears, sages, teachers and wisdom masters cry out for people to see how important friendship is to individuals, families, societies and the well-being of our whole world. They all urge us all to study, think about, talk about, more highly value and then do more about friendship.

So, the challenge is for you to do some more about friendship in your own life. You, of course, can continue studying friendship as you are doing right now and then you can add your own friendship actions. Whether it is locally, refreshing current and old friendships, connecting on the Internet, reaching into different communities, reaching out internationally or becoming a part of answering that call for creating interfaith friendships across the world, you can do some things you perhaps have not done yet, but could. Remember also, that doing more about friendship is a great, healthy, self-love action because you are one of the ones who gets enriched along with the others you connect with in friendship.

Want More to Help You with Your Friendship Life?

To learn more about what you can do for more and better friendship in your life, you may wish to consult the following Mini-Love-Lessons “Friendship Love and Its Extraordinary Importance” and “Friendship “Like” to Friendship “Love”.

For making new international friends, check out Friendship Force International which has local groups in over 300 communities in 60 countries around the world, headquartered in Atlanta Georgia USA and also you might look into the International Friendship League with members on five continents, headquartered and quite active in the UK but also around Europe, Africa, India and Asia where they also have contact centers.

For a more in-depth understanding of friendship, here are some books you might want to consult: Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom, Friends As Family by Karen Lindsey, Friendship: How to Give It, How to Get It by Dr. Joel D. Block, The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis and Friendship by Martin E. Marty.

Maybe make a better friend by telling them about this mini-love-lesson and this mini-love-lessons site?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: What are just 2 acts you could do before 2 days pass that likely would benefit another’s and your friendship life?

Equality Quality in Love - a Super-Good Love Skill

Mini-love-lesson #201

Synopsis: The values, payoffs and subtleties of treating others as uniquely different but equal, and how it is best for that to be a part of a healthy, good, love relationship is presented here with a few author’s self disclosures.

My Unseen Flaw

My bad! I was so unaware until an intern of mine pointed out a flaw in the way I was treating some of my patients. Unknowingly, mostly in group therapy and in lots of very small subtle ways, she pointed out that I was acting in ways that favored males over females. And I thought I was so democratically equal in the treatment of everyone but she was right. It was right there on the tapes. I interrupted females more often than males, I nodded approvingly more often at males than females. I dealt with the guy’s issues longer and maybe even better especially in group therapy. And in a host of other tiny ways I did not exemplify my own value of loving equality.

Group therapy can be pretty much like a family and I was doing about the same as the family males I grew up around, and I did not want to be like them. But there it was and so I had to go to work on me and change. I asked my patients and other interns and they all agreed that I seemed a bit differential in favor of males. Ouch! I did change, and sure enough, my work with females got even better results. I also became a lot more aware of the subtleties of treating people more lovingly by way of equality. What a good gift that excellent intern gave me!

The Quality of Equality

I learned a lot in the poor, slum neighborhood where I spent my young childhood. There was an old, Irish gentleman that used to singsong-speak to us kids in ditties. Here is one that went more or less like this.

“There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it behooves the most of us to treat the rest of us with all the love that’s really there for all of us.”
(Yes, there are other versions of this but that was his version)

See if you agree with this idea. People are so incredibly different from one another that the only sensible way of seeing them is as unique equals. It is my contention that treating each person with the respect of an equal who is wonderfully and intriguingly different from all the rest usually tends to get the best results. Of course, I don’t always live up to that ideal and I sometimes let my prejudice programming of old still have influence. But now I catch myself sooner and put more energy into my personal, always growing programming of equality.

I also suspect most prejudicial disrespect is just a big “I’m okay but you’re not” psychological game. It is likely based in an attempt to hide from one’s own personal fears of being inadequate by looking down on others instead of on oneself.

Loving others by treating them democratically and as equals, I suggest, is a superior trait in a person. Though that is a bit of a paradox, like a lot of paradoxes it turns out to have a lot of truth in it. This especially is important in close relationships. Inequality treatment seldom, if ever, leads to closeness, or much of anything else that can help a love relationship. It can lead those treated unequally to keep secrets from you, to resist what you want, to make sneaky passive-aggressive attacks on you, to secretly sabotage you and may lead to out and out rebellion. It also can get you hated and distrusted or at least disliked.

Treating children slowly and in small steps, increasingly more and more democratically, with doses of growing equality until they are functioning as equal adults usually works well. Children nurtured like this also tend to feel quite well love-bonded with those who treated them this way.
That is part of a larger truth. Minorities, the disadvantaged and those with less than equal power who are treated more equally and more democratically tend to work more cooperatively and productively. They also tend to make contributions that they otherwise might not. The prejudicially ignored, suppressed and repressed often tend to react secretly against the prejudicial, one way or another.

Historically this likely was true of a great many of the wives of old, and currently is true for a growing number of today’s wives living in situations of inequality found all around the globe.
So, you might want to consider the question “how well are you doing at loving others by treating them as true equals who in many ways may be different i.e. unique one-of-a-kind people. If you do a good job of that, you may be seen as a bit superior.

What Anti-Equality Prejudice Are You Programmed to Have?

In the Chicago slum neighborhood of my early childhood, it was seen as appropriate to disrespect and look down upon the people of 11 national backgrounds, 5 ethnic groups, 3 religions, 4 of 6 social classes, 4 racial groups, 3 political persuasions, those of weird sexuality, all females and sundry others.

Whatever your experience and training in being prejudiced might be, I suggest you discover it and work to eliminate it. That will help you be more loving, lovable, happy and superior to who you were before you did so.

Romantic Love and Equality

If you are in love with somebody and you do not treat them with democratic equality, are you loving them as well as you might? Some might even question whether you have healthy or real love for them. If they do not treat you with democratic equality, appreciating your unique differences, are you being well loved? If the two of you together do not establish your relationship as one of unique equals, what will happen to your teamwork when you face the difficulties life frequently brings?

Singles as well as couples hoping for good, romantic love do well to be aware of the issues of equality involved in interacting and doing love-relating. This especially is important for the increasing number of people getting into love relationships with people of differing social and cultural heritages.

I worked with a lot of the singles who were frustrated and longing for more love than they had. They did better when they changed one big factor. They broadened their horizons, so to speak, and started mixing with new but very different groups of people than they were used to. Some joined co-ed sports teams. Others explored different spiritual and religious groups, still others got into the art or music of another culture. More and different education experiences were quite helpful to many. A lot of them got active in good causes. With the different people they met, they risked being very friendly, assertive, and then flirting, and a bit later even seductive.

People of different cultures, nationalities, ethnicities, races, religions, political history, avocations, vocations, educational backgrounds, recreational involvements, sexualities, travel preferences and anything else they could think of that might be different from themselves were considered and explored. The results almost always were at first discouraging but then, if they kept at it positive, good things started happening. Many had to put away their prejudices and learn how to be enriched by the very differences they at first had thought too odd, distasteful or worse.

Purposefully putting the quality of meeting and treating new people with equality and as uniquely worthwhile paid off in the form of new adventures, new enrichments, new friendships and, yes, new romances resulted and new love grew. Of course, it did not always go well, and even when things went well sometimes new, undreamed of problems arose. Frequently these new romances did not fit the previously held “happily ever after/no problems dreams” of the participants but then again how many great loves do? The good news is, real love often prevailed.

A lot of internationally mixed couples come to counseling when one of the couple insists on having a modern relationship of loving equality. When there is a fair abundance of healthy, real love, that usually is achieved but not without work. Overcoming a cultural heritage of gender inequality can be a very tall order but it is what more and more couples are choosing to do and to do with love.

Equality and Healthy Self-Love

Feeling and treating people as equals, I suggest, is a gift of self-love. That is because it opens you up to what others have to offer which usually is quite a lot when you look for it. It also gets you treated better by those people and by the high-quality people who respect equality-oriented others. Disrespect and putting others down and treating them as inferior just cuts you off from the many goodies people of diversity have to offer.

Some say, treat others as equals because it is the golden rule right thing to do. Others say it is the charitable way to be toward those who are disadvantaged. Still others remark, it promotes democracy and peace. Then there is the group testifying that treating others is just practical because it works far better than not treating others with equality. I say, yes, to all that and there is another great reason. Treating others as equal is an excellent way to do some enriching, healthy self-love. Embrace the differences and the people who are different and you will be enriched in ways more than you can imagine. See everybody as a unique, multifaceted, work of art and give yourself the reward of appreciating and enjoying that creation. It really is the self-love thing to do.

Equality As a Quality Gift of Love

Isn’t having an inner mindset or attitude that all people are to be viewed essentially as equal but intriguingly and uniquely different, a pretty fine way to think and act? Isn’t viewing those people who are very equality-prone in the way they treat and deal with others, something you can admire and respect? Isn’t striving to be more like them a worthy goal and one you will feel good about achieving? If you become good or better at the skill of treating your loved ones with the quality of equality, might not everybody benefit? Won’t each of your love relationships, including the one with yourself, flow smoother and grow stronger by way of relating in equality as opposed to inequality?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

How about you tell somebody about this mini-love-lesson and this site so you help spread knowledge about love and so you have somebody new to talk all this over with.

Gender Diversity Love

Mini-Love-Lesson #194

FREE – Over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: How a lot of people are a wide variety of something other than strictly male or female; the big problems that diversity presents; what that can have to do with several kinds of love and how those kinds of love can help are presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Whose What And What Difference Does It Make?

Transgender, transsexual, intersexual, gender dysphoric, omni-sexual, bisexual, homosexual, androgyny and other not strictly or primarily straight female or straight male gender variations have been scientifically identified as existing in the human race. Both psychology and biology offer confirmation of these different gender diversity states being part of natural reality. Neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology and other brain sciences in particular yield evidence that gender is much more in the brain as well as much more diverse than previously thought.

What is not very different in all gender variations including heterosexuality is the natural need for love, the ways of giving love and the many beneficial effects of being healthfully well loved. There are some larger differences in the area of love problems but even in that area there is not as much difference as you might at first think.

But for the gender diverse there are extra confounding complications, conflicts, confusions, stressors as well as some very puzzling romantic and heart-mate dilemmas. Also there can be some hard to cope with biological concerns.

Perhaps worst of all for many are the very dangerous social and religious value clashes that occur in many cultures and subcultures around the world. For all too long and for far too many, being gender different has been deadly. To this day in many parts of the world having certain types of gender diversity can get you physically assaulted, jailed and even killed.

Especially dangerous has been the area of who you love and who loves you. Romantic and spousal love, family love, friendship love, parent-child love, spiritual love and healthy self-love all have been fraught with stressors and serious problems for those whose gender is other than standard heterosexual. Children, youth and young adults having gender diversity issues have suffered especially. Embarrassment, shaming, bullying and religious guilt-tripping push many to suicide. In pockets of the world, it is getting better but certainly not everywhere.

We suggest all this means the people of gender diversity can use extra acceptance, extra understanding and extra love. So, let’s look at three very important, different kinds of love and what they can mean for the gender diverse.

Healthy, Real Self-Love

Healthy, real self-love is so often extremely important, hugely needed and so very often hard to come by for the people of prevalent and strong gender variation. The problem is worse wherever there are prevailing anti-gender variation biases, fears, social norms, teachings and laws. As perhaps you know, some societies, religious groups and families are much more loving and positive toward the gender variant. Others are very condemning, anti-loving, rejecting, hateful and even murderous.

The gender diverse are so often confronted with overt and covert hate, rejection, exclusion and severe social disapproval. Sometimes even worse is this. Whether it is in a family or a whole culture, there frequently is a prevalent teaching something like “you should hate yourself for being anything but straight male or straight female”. When that teaching becomes an internalized mindset in an individual, the results can be devastatingly self-destructive.

Doing the hard work of finding and growing enough healthy self-love to survive all that can be the best defense. That is because healthy self-love is something you can carry with you and always have available. Without sufficient self-love and its strengthen effects, it is very hard to stay okay when hearing “you’re wrong, you’re sinful, you’re sick, you’re not right, etc. for being the way you are”.

Whether you hear that sort of message internally, externally or both it is destructive. Depression, anxiety, self rejection, lonely isolation, escape into addiction, breakdowns and suicide all may result. The good news is all that can be prevented, blocked and reversed with enough healthy self-love. The bad news is self-love is taught against just as much as gender diversity is taught against and often by the same people.

Gender diverse youth especially are vulnerable to becoming victims of diversity negation coming from culture, society, family, religion, governments and elsewhere. As gender identity and preference begins to emerge, insecurity and hormonal based confusions tend to mount. Furthermore, the development of strong, healthy self-love frequently is quite tentative at best among the young.

If you are not strictly heterosexual, go to work on your self-love. Learn, know and own the fact that you have a lot to offer and certainly are at least just as worthy as any other human being. Then find out how your variance from standard is a blessing if you use it smartly, bravely and productively. Most of all, learn and own the following: The core, real you is lovable just the way you are. Also own that you have healthy, real love to give and that, all by itself, makes you of high value.
If you care about and/or love someone struggling with gender diversity issues, love them by assisting them toward healthy, real self-love. See this site’s Subject Index concerning healthy self-love for more mini-love-lessons on how to do just that.

Family Love

Those families that offer accepting and affirming love to a gender diverse family member tend to have and keep better cohesiveness, be more resilient and generally function more healthfully and happily. Those families who try to force or manipulate a family member into a conformist, gender role that the person is not comfortable with, tend to experience severe family disruption and family dysfunction. Families that reject, shame, personally attack, expel, condemn, guilt trip and are judgmental against someone showing A gender diversity can and are so often ripped apart by these anti-love ways of behaving.

On the other hand, if family members have ongoing clashes about gender issues but they handle disagreements with loving tolerance and democratic acceptance of each other, they can be quite functional and successful. Likewise, families wounded by gender issue disputes can be healed by activated family love, whether or not they come to agreement on the disputed issues. Love focused family therapy can be wonderful for this healing process.

Best of all are the loving families that accept, expect and encourage their individual members to develop themselves in whatever way they want to, so long as it is sufficiently healthy. Love is not dependent on conformity in such families but rather is given freely for whatever variations come about. Then those variations become enrichments to the family bonded together by family love rather than restricted by compliance.

Friendship Love

Friendship love has been known to save the lives of those suffering conflicts concerning gender. Friendship love also is known to greatly help lives to be lived well in spite of discrimination, misunderstanding, prejudice, bias, fact free opinions and the other negatives that commonly beset those who are a bit different in gender. Friendship love also has been known to counterbalance the anti-love effects of hateful, abusive and indifferent families when they cease giving nurturing love to a family member of a diverse gender orientation.

Friendship love is so often a vital element in the development of healthy self-love among the more isolated individual struggling with gender issues.

A big problem arises when a person of gender variation fears peer rejection and, therefore, hides their gender differences, pretending to be someone they are not in regard to gender preference. They tend not to do the required self-disclosure needed for the development of deep, real, friendship love. If they do reveal their gender truth about themselves and they receive loving acceptance from a friend or friends, they then may blossom and their social whole world can change for the better.

If they meet with rejection it can be very dangerous unless they have sufficient self-love or other loving friends. I do understand the fear and self-protectiveness and I suggest careful patience when deciding who might be a worthy friend to share your true self with. Observe over time who appears open to differences and start with small revelations to test the water before jumping in the deep end.

Those who publicly show openness and acceptance to all gender variations do a great love-positive service. They give to those struggling to figure out who and what they are gender-wise and to the self rejecting, the chance to know acceptance, inclusion and real friendship is possible for them. From such demonstrations of open-heartedness, great and enduring friendships have been known to result.
In the next mini-love-lesson, “Gender Diversity – Romantic, Heart-mate Love” we will cover romantic and mated love issues among those of gender diversity.

Help spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How much do your ideas and feelings about gender influence who and how you love?

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?

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

Mini-Love–Lesson # 203

Synopsis: How friendship is defined, understood and valued differently in different countries, cultures, the importance of your own valuing of friendship and doing more about it are presented here and more.

Friendship Seen Differently Here and There and Elsewhere

Defining Friendship Differently

A Three Level Understanding of Friendship

The Varying Valuing of Friendship

How Is Your Own Personal Valuing of Friendship?

Want More to Help You with Your Friendship Life?

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Mini-love-lesson #201

Synopsis: The values, payoffs and subtleties of treating others as uniquely different but equal, and how it is best for that to be a part of a healthy, good, love relationship is presented here with a few author’s self disclosures.

My Unseen Flaw

The Quality of Equality

What Anti-Equality Prejudice Are You Programmed to Have?

Romantic Love and Equality

Equality and Healthy Self-Love

Equality As a Quality Gift of Love

Mini-Love-Lesson #194

FREE – Over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: How a lot of people are a wide variety of something other than strictly male or female; the big problems that diversity presents; what that can have to do with several kinds of love and how those kinds of love can help are presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Whose What And What Difference Does It Make?

Healthy, Real Self-Love

Family Love

Friendship Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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