Learning About Love - Together

Synopsis: Why learn together and a very positive life case starts this mini-love-lesson. What couples are doing around the world;  followed by five things you can actually do together to develop your love skills and learn more about healthy, real love; this mini-love-lesson then ends with a ‘make it happen’ challenge; more.

Why Learn Together?

Chad was excited!  He said, “the thing that helped Sarah and me the most was when we started to learn about love together.  Sort of reluctantly, I gave in and let Sarah talk me into reading some new stuff on the Internet about how love can be made to grow in a relationship.  Then we got to talking about it, and together we worked on how to apply it to the way we got along with each other.  I got a total, new ‘wow’ experience from that.  I am a factual kind of guy and what we were reading wasn’t the usual fuzzy, mishmash about love.

It was totally fascinating and fact-based, but also, to us at least, it was an inspirational way to see and deal with our relationship.  Best of all it worked, I think mostly because we were doing it together.  We both had read some and worked kind of independently trying to learn about how to do our relationship better, and that did help some but by doing it together, well, that made all the difference.”
When a couple learns together a team synergy can be created which is greater than either of them separately.

Experiencing or reading the same material, and talking about it, can create a cross-fertilization of ideas and understanding.  When both people are working from the same knowledge-base; acquired together it is much more likely that they will work better in coordination and sort of like ‘be on the same page’ together.  Separate learning is much less likely to achieve that easily, although that can be good too.  Even better is that learning together helps create better behaving together.

Every team sport or endeavor requires practicing together.  Doubles tennis, football, two or more people dancing together, etc. all take practicing together for it to work well.  Five good basketball players who never played together are much more likely to lose a game to average players who are really good at teamwork.  Individual learning and practicing can add greatly to the team, but adding the ‘as a team together’ component makes a world of difference and can greatly add to the bonding experience a couple is having with one another.

It is sort of like what was once discovered with couples doing joint counseling.  Counseling together, and learning about love together, seemed to make it much more likely that a couple would stay together than if they were doing the counseling, or the learning, separately.

As Sarah put it, “It’s been a really fine adventure for us; working on our love skills together has been a lot more fun and a lot more meaningful.”

Around the World

Around the world there are couples experiencing what Chad and Sarah discovered.  Working together to learn the new and better information about healthy, real love and developing their love skills together is making a great many love relationships much better relationships.  How do we know this?  Well, we know this because at this sites we get feedback from different people all over the globe. The mini-love-lessons are being viewed in over 150 countries.

While the feedback we get from individuals is great, we also get some wonderful feedback from couples.  Also, there is research going on about what couples are doing to help their relationships, conducted by various universities and sometimes governments.  We tap into that too.  By the way we would love to hear your input also.

It’s Not Only Couples

It is not only couples who are learning together about love and developing love skills.  Sometimes it is two or more friends who get together in a sort of informal study group. Sometimes it is families, or a parent and a child learning together.  Colleges, universities and a wide variety of religious institutions sometimes offer courses and classes, or personal development workgroups for couples focused on learning about love and love improvement.

A fair number of personal growth and retreat centers, as well as Counseling and Therapy clinics do the same thing.  In all these the cross communication, interaction and interchanges that occur add to the learning and improve the practicing.  Part of that is because love gets done to a large degree by interaction, interchange and cross-communicating.  Therefore, it makes sense for love to be learned and practiced in such a way as those actions actually are being done together with one or more others.

What To Do Together

First of all, think about love and share what you think with each other.  Puzzle over what you think and what the other one thinks; question, imagine, fantasize, reason, suspect, doubt, guess, hypothesize, posit, remember, dream and share it all with one another.

Second is what you are doing right now, but do it together.  Read about love and what can be done to grow and improve love in your life together.  Now you are reading one of more than 140 mini-love-lessons (with more on the way) which you can use to make love in your life more real, more complete, more healthy and more wonderful.  Read the same mini-love-lessons together, if possible at the same time, and then talk about them a lot.  You don’t have to agree with what you read, and you don’t have to stay on the topic.

Sometimes the offshoots and side trails are the most important pathways for your talk to go.  Remember to share and show your emotions as well as your thoughts.  That often is the most significant and meaningful part.  (See mini-love-lessons focused on feelings and emotions in the titles and subjects indexes).

Third, together do the same thing with books and other writings about love.  Be sure to include books that are of more than one type.  Be careful not to just read books about love problems and what goes wrong in love relationships, or ones that offer no real solutions or ways to improve.  Unfortunately, there are quite a few of those.  Also be wary of books that have ‘love’ in the title but all they are really about is sex.  To me that is like false advertising.  Then there are those books that have ‘love’ in the title but there isn’t anything much actually in the book about love.  Maybe the publisher just thought it would sell better if love was added to the title.

Most romantic novels are not that much help either.  Most just seem to promulgate falsehoods and destructive myths.  What works for one does not work for another. Different books click for different people and for some people at certain times but not other times.  That makes it hard to recommend but here are four possibilities you might want to consider.  All About Love by Bell Hooks, The Anatomy of Love by Dr. Helen Fisher, The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman, and the e-book Kathleen McClaren and I wrote Real Love or False Love.

Fourth, together go to the movies whose reviews seem to indicate they may have something worthwhile and positive to say about how love is best done.  Schedule at least an hour after the movie to talk about it.  Look for the true and the false messages about love that may be embedded in the movie, and watch out for tear-jerkers that may move you, but not teach you.  For many people a really good movie offers a much more complete experience, well worth sharing together.

Fifth, together go to workshops, retreats, classes, courses and talks that have to do with improving love relationships.  Some colleges, some religious institutions,  a variety of personal growth centers, therapeutic agencies, etc. give worthwhile workshops, classes etc. that have to do with healthy, real love.  Especially the kind of workshop that offer an intensive experience over a weekend or even a week, often can provide you with one of life’s best together experiences.  There also are some great workshops that combine learning about healthy, real love interwoven with great, healthy sexuality.  (Look for workshops that have the word Tantric in the title).

When Not to Learn Together

It probably is not a good idea to learn about love together if one of you uses what you are learning to criticize, control, condemn or be condescending to the other.  It also probably is not a good idea to try learning together if one of you keeps trying to prove the other one is wrong, playing “I’m more okay than you are”, focusing on what’s wrong more than what can become right, or better, and focusing in the extreme on what has happened in the past more than what can be made to happen in the near future.  Remember, the historical, diagnostic analysis of a flat tire doesn’t tell you how to change it, even if the analysis is spot-on and brilliant.

Unless the focus mostly is on how to do, act, behave and put into practice what you are learning together more constructively, productively and healthfully concerning love skills, you may not be using this ‘together’ learning experience in the best way. It is important and okay to think and understand better, more accurately and more fully, anything and everything connected to love but thinking about love without the actions that grow, give and send love will seldom be enough.  It also is important that the actions and the thinking lead to improvements in the many wondrous feelings that come with love.  If that is not happening sufficiently, then learning together may not be working for you.

Make It Happen

Now here is a suggestion.  With a spouse, lover, friend or family member, ask them if they would experiment with you in doing some joint-learning about healthy, real love and developing your love skills together.  You can start by picking a mini-love-lesson for both of you to read, or reading one of the other actions listed above.  You might want to specify a short amount of time for this experiment, and if it is working well you can extend it.

If the person you ask is dubious and reluctant, tell them that is good, and this is only an experiment, so why not try it.  If they positively will not do this, well, that is not a very good indicator for developing love, is it?  Maybe try asking somebody else.  Of course, it’s fine to start on your own, and maybe inviting somebody into the process with you later.

As always – Going and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

What do you suppose you might need to ‘unlearn’ about love, because it could be wrong or false?

Related posts:

1. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
2. Communicating Better With Love: Mini Lessons
3. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
4. Men: Doing Well at Love !
5. Why You Need to Know More About Real Love 

20 Smart Making Love Questions

Mini-Love Lesson #197

Synopsis: These 20 questions are aimed at helping you think smarter and with increasing fascination about the wonders of love and its many mysteries.  Why you will want to do this, why you should do this for your own future good, and how to do this are also addressed.

The New Amazements of Love and Why You Should NOT Learn About Them

Love is even more amazing than most people ever thought.  With the help of science, that is what we are discovering via well conducted research in a wide variety of scientific fields.  New discoveries in everything from (A) anthropology to (Z) zoology and including brain sciences, an assortment of medical fields and even behavioral economics are producing new and sometimes astounding knowledge about love and it’s workings.

To understand and make good use of what is being discovered, you may have to learn how to think about love a lot more than you might be used to.  But wait!  You are not supposed to think about love at all.  You just are supposed to let it happen and trust it will happen if it is meant to be, right?  You certainly are not supposed to try and learn how to think smart about love knowledgeably. “The Anti-Love Forces Are out to Get You” With love, the thing to do is just let nature take its course, correct?

Whether it is falling in love, or love of a newborn or any other love, it will just happen the way it is supposed to according to your destiny, or mother nature, or the stars, divine providence or maybe karma, right?  Trying to actually think smart i.e. informed and knowledgeable about love is not necessary and actually is quite suspect.  Also quite suspect, is learning about any new discoveries or new knowledge concerning love, astounding and useful though that new knowledge may be, right?

Why Should Love Be Any Different?

If you learn to think smarter i.e. with more knowledge, creativity, understanding, wisdom and usability about your health, finances, work, hobbies or any other area of your life, you are more likely to be more successful in dealing with that area of your life, right?  Not only that, but doesn’t remaining ignorant in an important area of your life mean it is more likely there will be major problems and failure in that area?

So, why don’t we teach people to think about love?  Is it because we are afraid it will steal loves magic?  The truth is, that it is a lie.  It is false because the more we learn about any big topic the more amazing and, dare we say, magical it becomes.  Love is no exception.  Science is proving that.

A Way to Get Smarter About Love

Pondering curious and puzzling questions has proven to be an excellent way to learn how to think smarter.  So, here is what I suggest.  Read the following 20 questions and give some thought to each.  Pick the most interesting ones and give them some more thought.  Maybe talk over with someone what those questions bring to mind, and maybe look up stuff and read a bit about them.  Then think this.  How can I improve my thinking about the things I am learning concerning love.  Maybe write out your thoughts and maybe read more?  Maybe talk more to others about love?  Then be sure to work with the more personal instructions given at the end of the 20 questions.  By doing these things, you will be practicing learning to think more and better about love.  That most likely will make your love-functioning better, happier and a lot more interesting (see “Thinking Love to Improve Love”).

The 20 Smart-Making Questions

1. Is love like food, something that comes in many varieties (romantic, parent, pets, self, etc.) and is, at the core, one thing – something that nourishes us, or are all those types of love actually unrelated?
2. Can many people romantically love, or be loved mated, with two people at the same time, like many Mormons, Tibetans and Euro intellectuals have thought, and also why do you think what you think about that?
3. Can real love motivate harming or even killing a loved one, as many police conclude, or is it insecurity, possessiveness and false love misidentified as real love which causes that violence?
4. Who is right, St. Paul who taught love is not jealous or the French courts of love who ruled jealousy was proof of real love?
5. Is love of comrades the same thing as friendship love, or are there distinct differences?
6. Can friendship love include sexuality?
7. Do lovers who forgive adultery have a stronger (better, bigger, healthier, etc.) love, or weaker (insecure, dependent, etc.) love than those who do not forgive adultery?
8. Is love the prime spiritual force in the universe from which all other loves come, as several major religions teach, or is it just one of many feelings we can experience?
9. Is love just an emotion, or is it a vital natural process which triggers many different emotions?
10. Who’s right, some social scientists who said love is an invention of culture having no basis in natural fact, or the behavioral scientists who trace love back to the dinosaurs and the development of the brain’s limbic system?
11. Do animals actually love or can only humans love?
12. Can the lack of healthy, real love in one’s life cause serious physical and psychological health problems?
13. Was Ovid right when, in the year one, he taught that lasting love requires skill and, therefore, the work to develop one’s love skills, or is the more common concept that lasting love is a matter of luck and just finding the right partner correct?
14. Do people who learn to think about love more fully, accurately and extensively achieve more success in love relating than do people who rely on love success being determined by some mysterious, unknown force?
15. Is romantic love just one of many types of love, or is it separate and essentially different from all the other types and kinds of love?
16. Do we find love or do we grow love, and which concept is better to focus on and work with?
17. Who is right, those who say self-love is a good thing or those who say self-love is a bad thing, and why?
18. Can people really love their family, clan, tribe, state, country, cause, work, art, religion, deity, nature, life, people, humanity, the universe, etc., or is using the word love just a way to say something is important and valued?
19. If we experience real love for someone, is it forever as some religions hold, or for at least as long as we live, or can real true love die, fade away, dissipate and no longer exist?
20. Of the following, who do you suppose has the most useful, valuable ideas and understandings to teach us and help us learn about love, and also of these, who would you be most open to learning from?
(The following all have things to say about love)

A. Behavioral scientists (research psychologists, ethnologists, etc.)
B. Brain scientists (neurophysiologists, neuropsychologists, etc.)
C. Social scientists (sociologists, social psychologists, etc.)
D. Mental health practitioners (counselors, clinical psychologists, etc.)
E. Medical professionals and practitioners
F. Marriage and family therapists, couples counselors, etc.
G. Philosophers, (including seers, sages and wisdom masters of old)
H. Poets and songwriters
I. Theologians, religionists and clerics
J. Romance writers
K. Grandparents, family, friends, etc.
L. Others      
                                                                                                                   .
Do you want to include in this list astrologers, fortunetellers, matchmakers, shamans, rishis, curandaros, etc. and do you also want to think, of all these, which ones would you mistrust the most?

Dare to Make It More Personal

Now that you have seen the general questions and given them some thought, dare to make it all much more about you and your own personal love life!  You can do that by going back through the questions and seeing which ones you can easily restate using the word you, meaning yourself.  For example, question #2. becomes “can or could you romantically love two people at the same time?”  Some of the questions take a little bit more rewording than others.  Then too, you might want to make some notes on your current thinking about the questions that are more personally applicable.  You also might read and/or talk to someone with more intimate, self-disclosure occurring.

Another way to make this exercise more personal is to think about someone that is special to you and apply the questions which you suspect that person would believe, feel, or do.  For instance, question #2. becomes “could someone special to you romantically love you and someone else at the same time?”  Then ponder about how that might change how you think about this question and about that special someone.

The third way to make it more personal has to do with talking to a special someone honestly and openly about what you both think and feel when dealing with each question, both in general and more personally (“Startup Love Is Never Enough”).

Connecting with the Wisdom of the Ages and the Cutting-Edge

In ancient times and again in the Renaissance, European people read, thought and wrote about love quite a bit and they did this as intelligently as they could.  That is, they did it until the Catholic Church began to ban profane i.e. non-sacred and not church authorized thought, speech and writings about human (as opposed to spiritual) love.  Widely read and talked about books such as, in English called “Dialogues of Love” written by and for Jews but of much broader popularity and “The Art of Love” in five volumes and “Remedies for Love Sickness” were suppressed and disappeared.  It probably was not until Stendhal in the early 1800s tried to intelligently research love and wrote his eventual breakthrough book “On Love” that some people began to give love serious, intelligent thought.

Today Loveology (as it is being called and pioneered in Russia) is being looked at along with happiness in China, is being studied in laboratories in the West and researched in many academic and scientific fields around the world which is starting to produce astounding (magic like) results.  You to can join this cutting-edge thinking smart about love phenomenon.  Maybe by reading this mini-love-lesson you just have.

Help spread love know how, tell someone about this site.

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

♥ Love Success Question  Is there anything happening in your mind working toward dodging, postponing, being reluctant about or vaguely disturbed about learning to think smarter about love?  If so, what do you suppose that is all about?

Startup Love is Never Enough !

Mini-love-lesson  #196

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson is about helping people get beyond just having startup love and growing on to having lasting love that can work for a whole lifetime and much more.

What Too Many Couples Say!

“It looks like our honeymoon period is over”.  “It seemed like we were so in love at first but now it’s all fading out”.  “Is our love starting to die?”  “We were so great in the beginning but now we’re just getting to be another unhappy couple like so many of the couples we know”.  These are the all too common kinds of comments a great many couples make after a startup of seeming to be very in love.

But wait!  Research shows there are a whole lot of other couples who rapidly recover from that potentially disastrous slump and others who never experience the “honeymoon is over” thing.  They, in fact, just keep getting better and better.  So, what makes the difference?  Is it luck, fate, the stars, communication, is it that one or both of them are doing something the others are not, or what?

Real Answers That Help

For some couples the answer is they didn’t have real love in the first place but rather a form of false love.  It could be limerence or some other false love which means they need to learn about real love and its differences from false love and then what to do about it.  For many other couples they had real and sufficiently healthy love at the start, but there were two very important things about love they didn’t know or didn’t know in a deep and solid enough way.

The Block:   Part 1 of the Primary Answer
The truth is it might not only be about what they do not know.  It might also be about a falsehood so many couples have been taught or subconsciously programmed to believe.  This falsehood blocks them from learning or deeply realizing a preeminent and profoundly needed understanding of an unwanted truth.  It is an understanding of what it really takes to succeed at real love-relating over time.  So often the blocking false teaching has to be given up before what really works is able to be learned at the required gut and heart levels.  That turns out to be harder than it might sound because the teaching usually has gotten rooted deeply into our subconscious belief system, and we so want to believe it, and reject whatever contradicts it.  Therefore, let’s deal with that blocking falsehood first.

A Ruinous Doctrine of Romantic Love
A thrice divorced client in great anguish asked me a question I have actually heard put many ways, many times from my patients and clients.  “Once I fall in love with the right person, isn’t that love going to be enough for the rest of my life?  So why do I have to do anything more about love?”  I replied, “If you really have deep love for someone and find out you can get better and better at loving them, won’t you want to do that – get better and better at love?  Isn’t that what true love would have you do?  If you have children, wouldn’t you work to be better and better at loving them?”  The client thought for a moment and then with a look of enlightenment said, “Help me doc, I have so much to unlearn and even more to learn.”

Don’t you or didn’t you want to believe that One day you meet your one-and-only, true love and you both automatically fall in love with each other.  Then by the nature and magic of love you both also automatically live happily ever after.  And that is all you have to do about love.  Succinctly put, that pretty much is the core of the romantic doctrine.

Do you know that it is quite possible that some version of this guiding romance dogma is alive in your very own subconscious mind?  Worse, it could be subtly steering you toward the likelihood of your own romantic ruin?  That can be so, even if your conscious mind sees big problems with it as a guiding, operational principle for your love life.  The research shows that this doctrine, indeed, may work for those who do not get to have an ongoing, real love relationship over time, like Romeo and Juliet who’s lives ended in their teens, and possibly for precious few others.

Do you ever wonder why in so many of the great romance stories, both new and old, the couples do not get to be together for even as much as a year before something wipes one or both of them out or separates them forever?  Possibly it is because if they were a longer lasting couple, the authors of those love stories know the couple would start having problems and would have to learn the real secrets of lasting love or break up.

The Block:   Part Two of the Primary Answer
The Much Avoided Real Secret of Lasting Love
Have you ever run into the idea that families are people farms and what makes them successful is how well the couple starting the farm knows how to work their farm with love.  Please notice the word work and how different that is from the romantic doctrine’s words automatic and magic.

Successful, lasting love-relating takes skillful work.  Ovid, Rome’s great love poet, taught this in the year 1 AD (or CE).  It takes the work of learning how to do love work.  It takes the work of learning loving teamwork; it takes the never-ending work of learning how to give out and take in healthy, real love ever better; it takes the work of growing healthy, real love; it often takes the work of practicing healing love; and it takes the work of learning how to individually love each of the individuals involved in your love network, including yourself.  It also takes the work of learning how to keep fresh or repeatedly refresh, renew and re-enliven your love relating.  The good news is with improvement oriented practice everyone can learn how to do skillful love work.  And more good news, probably it also will be immensely rewarding to you and those you love.

What Startup Love Is Good For

Startup love is only good for starting up.  It seems to be Mother Nature’s way of helping couples get started but after that you have to learn, work and practice a whole lot more than Mom Nature provides.  If you are going to get to have strong, lasting and improving love, you will have to work at it.  Lasting love is complicated, challenging, confusing and lasting love requires continuing commitment and continuing improvement-focused-behavior, in spite of victories and defeats, advances and setbacks.  Becoming complacent with victory or too easily giving up with defeats, is not a path to a strong, growing and lasting love.

Startup love between parents and newborn infants works much the same.  After the early, natural, initial, love bonding of a parent with a child, comes all sorts of work on how to love that particular child in the particular ways they need for their growth and development  (At this site’s mini-love-lessons see Parenting Series: Paul’s Points on Love for Parents).  Those parents who go to the trouble to learn about the major ways of nurturing a child with the appropriate behaviors of love have been showed to do much better than those who do not learn that knowledge or practice it.

Startup love in friendships, with comrades, new family members, with pets and others can work the same as with couples and infants but instead often may depend on slow growth, love development.  In any case, startup love is best seen as something to be added to, by deliberate work at doing better and better love skills development.

If Your Love Is Crashing, Sinking, Fading, Drifting, Slumping or Plateau-ing???

If you sense or suspect a love relationship of yours is doing one of the above, start by thinking about your ways of love-relating.  How are you relating with love and how can you improve relating with love to and with your loved ones?  To learn how to do better, you can do a host of different things.  You can read all the mini-love-lessons listed in the Subject and Title indexes of this site which seem to apply or grab your attention.  You can study the eight major ways or categories of behavior that social psychology research has discovered helps love get delivered from one person to another (Start with the mini-love-lesson titled Behaviors That Give Love – the Basic Core Four). You then can read more about those in our book Recovering Love.

You can work with St. Paul’s list of what love is, what it gets us to do and be in the New Testament.  You can work at talking your beloved’s love language by studying Chapman’ s The Five Love Languages.  You can see if you can find a real-love knowledgeable couples or family therapist, counselor, personal coach, cleric, mentor, guru, or other guide and work with them as an individual, or better yet, as a couple or as a family.  You can look for and go to personal growth and relationship classes, workshops, retreats and also online courses having to do with healthy, real love development.  You can read everything you can get your hands on about growing healthy, real love – which you are already doing by reading this.

In other words, you can start, by yourself or even better with a loved one, doing the work of learning the how to’s of better love relating.  I again want you to think of a farm.  If the people running the farm just rely on nature to produce the crops they soon would go back to living as primitive hunter/gatherers and sometimes starving.  This, in fact, is the same with love.  In regard to love, many live at the hunter/gatherer, primitive people level, unaware that they can do far better.

If you learn, practice and keep working to improve your work of farming love, you very likely will do very well.  If you rely only on startup love thinking it is so great it will last you a lifetime and, therefore, you do not have to work at it – well, good luck, because you probably are going to need it.

Help spread love knowledge, tell somebody about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How do you feel about hearing that you could have inside you a misleading, destructive, non-conscious program effecting how you go about love?

Related posts:

1. What Makes Love Last?
2. Is Love Ignorance The Problem?
3. Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love?
4. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
5. Can Love Overcome Incompatibility? 

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?

Related posts:

1. Is Love the Most Important Thing in the Universe?
2. Is Love a Value?
3. Spirituality and Love Great and Grand”
4. Cuddling for Greater Love and Better Sex – a Love Skill
5. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life 

Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Mini love lesson #185

FREE, over 200 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson helps you look at how unknowingly you may have been subconsciously infected by destructive teachings about self-love and much more.

What They Say about Self-Love

“You can’t let people think you love yourself.  If you do they will think you are conceited, you have the big head and are stuck up.  Then no one ever will like you or want you around”.  Did you ever hear anything like that as a kid?  Did you ever think anything like that about yourself?  How about this: “You can’t love somebody else until you first love yourself”?.  I hear that idea about once a week from different people.  Then there is “self-love leads to becoming a sex pervert”.  Of course, there also is the great commandment or admonition “love others as you love yourself”.  Have you ever wondered what that “love yourself” part is all about?

Do these contradictory statements about self-love confuse you, or cause any inner conflict or have you just never given any of that much thought?  Whatever is in your subconscious mind about self-love – contradictory or not –  could be having a surprisingly big but hard to see influence on how well you do in life.  It especially could effect your success at love relationships.  Self-love has been found to be a big factor in love of others, work success or failure, the harmony or lack of it in child raising, general health, victory or defeat in any endeavor, defense against stress illnesses, resilience in overcoming setbacks and how much good you do or don’t do others.  So that we can really understand the issues involved in self-love, let’s briefly look at a few of its surprising and intriguing development issues.

How Did Self-Love Get Such a Bad Thing Reputation?

It is the government’s fault.  Does that surprise you?  You see, a major source of anti-self-love propaganda was put out to support the form of autocratic government known as monarchy.  That propaganda effort has been going on for several thousand years and continues to this day.  Historically, self-love was thought to encourage people to be for themselves instead of living for and in obedience to their liege lord, or monarch.

Self-love also was seen as a social order disruptor.  That is because self-love leads to individuality and that leads to being uppity or trying to raise yourself above your preordained, proper place and station in life.  Everyone keeping in their place in the order of things was understood to be the basis of social stability and collective safety.  Self-love meant self interest might prevail over the interests of authority.  It was greatly feared that self-love could even help lead to that horrible thing known as democracy.  By the way, that is why marrying for love never had much of a chance until America got invented.

The Royals and the priests of ancient Greece used religion to teach that the one thing the gods could not tolerate was human pride.  Apparently that was because prideful people could get uppity and in doing so might challenge and maybe even overthrow the gods and the Royals.  The early church seems to have picked up on this, joined in with the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and has been, off and on, condemning self-love as a dangerous sin threatening authority and the orderly functioning of society ever since.

Words & Terms Used to Effect Your Thinking about Self-Love

Here are two lists of some of the words and terms that may have gotten into your mind and the minds of those you care about concerning self-love.  In the first list the words tend to carry negative connotations and trigger negative feelings about self-love.  The second list is more positive and represents more recent influences and understandings related to self-love.  Notice what you feel as well as what you think while you read each word or term.  That can help you ascertain how you may have been influenced or programmed to react concerning self-love.

Self-love has been called antisocial, alienating, conceited, disobedient, egocentric, egotistical, heresy, hedonistic, indulgent, jealous, narcissistic, non-empathetic, prideful, selfish, sinful, self-centered, self exulting, self-important, self interested, sociopathic, subversive, stuck up, uncaring, ungodly, uncharitable, and vain.  Is it any of these things to you?  Was it any of these things to the people who raised you?  Is it any of these things to the people who are important in your life now?

In recent years in many more modern circles, self-love has begun to be seen in a much more positive light.  Healthy, real self-love has been called autonomy assistive, altruistically beneficial, balancing, charity inspiring, constructive, confidence building, contributory, democratic, empowering, energizing, ego supportive, enlightening, emotionally healthy, freeing, good parent modeling, honest, individualistic, individuation fueling, mentally healthy, pride making, protective, resilient, socially beneficial, self caring, self honoring and self strengthening.

Can you see how healthy, real self-love can be helpful to each of these factors in a person?  Is it reasonable to you that each of these factors may be elements of self-love or its result?  Does it seem right to you to conclude that self-love is something you and everyone else would do well to have lots of?

Healthy Self-Love Against the Problems and Deficiencies of Today

Millions are in counseling or therapy today because they suffer from crippling low self-esteem, inadequate self-confidence, poor self-concept, inferiority fears, feelings and complexes, issues of deficient self worth, self limitation syndromes and the like.  Still millions more would do well to become engaged in counseling or therapy for the same reasons.

Then there are millions more suffering from overcompensation reactions to the same problems and that is what leads to narcissism, arrogance and the like.  Let me also mention those who are lost in escapist patterns of addictions stemming from the same root sources.  Then also there are all the millions of children, spouses and families ill effected by those who suffer from these same causes.

Developing sufficient, healthy, real self-love is seen by many mental health professionals as the cure, or at least part of the cure, for all this.  Alienation, debilitating isolation, love starvation and a lot of other problems can and frequently are made better by healthy, self-love development via love infused therapy.  That at least is the growing clinical conclusion being drawn from the new understandings of what healthy, real self-love actually is all about.

For Growing Healthy, Real Self-Love, Consider Doing These 3 Things

If you or anyone you know or care about seems to suffer from any of the maladies mentioned above, consider these actions:

First, read, study and put into practice what you learn from the following list of mini-love-lessons on self-love found at this site.  It might be best to read them in the order given but it’s okay to do it otherwise.

0.  Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? (You are doing this one)
1.  Self-Love – What Is It?
2.  Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It
3.  Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
4.  Unselfish Self-Love
5.  Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
6.  Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism
7.  Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love
8.  Self Talk for Improving Love

By doing these additional, eight, brief mini-love-lessons on self-love, in effect you will have taken a short course on self-love and how to grow it.  There is lots more to learn but though I’m biased I say that is a great start.  These mini-love-lesson teachings on self-love have been known to help a great number of people to start and improve the way they grow their own healthy self-love.  Hopefully you can do the same.

Second, consider finding a good, love knowledgeable counselor, therapist, personal coach or mentor.  Then work with them on a regular basis focusing on the development of healthy, real self-love.  This can be done in individual or group sessions and sometimes quite well at personal growth workshops, special retreats and seminars.  But be careful.  We suggest you get user references before you select because quality can vary greatly.

Third, nothing helps you learn something like teaching it.  Leading a discussion group, a reading club, or facilitating a self-study class or giving an out right class on healthy, real self-love or something similar likely will put you in touch with a lot of fine people and help you really get this super important, life-changing knowledge.  You also informally can do something like introducing and talking over these self-love topics with friends, family, workmates or whoever.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Seriously, how often is your self-love an active part of your everyday life?

Related posts:

1. Why Love Problems Hurt So Bad
2. Love Affairs: Bad?, Good? and Otherwise
3. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
4. Self-Love – What Is It?
5. Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism 

Above Normal Love

Mini-love-lesson   #181

FREE Over 200 Mini Love Lessons touching thousands of lives in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: Learn about aiming high to achieve high-level love; inside and outside the box thinking about love; the positive psychology of above normal love; and the how to’s for achieving above normal love (As you read, ask yourself with whom might you like to talk over or mention this mini-love-lesson to?).

Aim High, Go High

‘The higher you aim the higher you are likely to go’ is a truism in many areas of life, so why not also in the area called love.  Do you ever think about having an ‘above normal love’ for and with another person, a child, a lover/spouse, your family, a deep and dear friend, or maybe even with yourself?  How about an above normal love relationship with life, nature, a cause, a purpose, your work, your spiritual focus, etc.?  (see “Living Well via Loving Well”)

Have you, like me, heard a fair number of people say things like “I know hardly any marriages that are happy”?  Could it be that some of those are unhappy because the people in them didn’t know how to aim high enough?  Or maybe it is because they didn’t know how to aim at all.  There are some who say many people have not been taught how to think about love very well at all.  It also is thought that what they think largely may be an ‘inside the box’, mostly old-fashioned, failure-prone way of thinking about anything, but especially about love.

Inside-the-Box Thinking about Love

Inside the box thinking about love tends to include ideas like the following.  Love is unknowable.  It’s dangerous to know about love because that will spoil it.  Love is all a matter of luck, fate, the stars, heaven and things you can’t influence or control.  Love is automatic so you don’t have to think about it.  Love is feminine and it’s women who take care of it.  Love is a weak, silly and frivolous thing.  Thinking about love is a waste of time, especially for men.  Love is something you have to surrender to and let it take you wherever it takes you.

Knowing anything about love is impossible, so don’t even try.  Love is something you find or you don’t.  Love is magic and you are helpless and at its mercy.  Love is just a polite term for sex.  If you have to work at love, it’s not real love.  Love is really an irrational madness that just gets you trapped and hurt.  We are not supposed to try to understand love because that might get in the way of what it is meant to be.

Now, if any of those statements represent ideas, teachings, notions or possibly subconscious programming in your head, please, please examine and re-examine what you have come to, or maybe been brainwashed to think.  Notice none of those concepts helps you know what to do that could make things better.  None of them enables or empowers you to do love well or even make improvements.  They all seem to promote a kind of learned helplessness.  Some un-learning, therefore, may be in order.

This ‘in the box’ kind of thinking about love has two powerful things going against it.  The first is science.  A host of discoveries in a wide array of fields including the brain and behavioral sciences, biomedical research and even behavioral economics are showing that love and its dynamics are knowable and that love even is more incredible, amazing and wonderful than we thought.  Those discoveries also are learnable, useful, helpful and healing for both individuals and relationships.
The second big thing going against ‘in the box thinking’ is religion/philosophy and the teachings of Wisdom Masters down through the ages.  In their teachings there is a tremendous amount about what love really is, how to do love successfully, what not to do and a whole lot more  (Check Plato, Ovid, St. Paul, Buddha, Rumi).

Outside-the-Box Love Thinking

Ponder these five short questions.  What do you suppose above normal love looks like?  What might have to happen to make above normal love likely in your life?  What would you personally have to do to create and grow above normal love in your life?  (If you think you already have above normal love, think about making it even better).  What would having an above normal love do to your life and the lives of those you impact?

Having a Psychology of Above Normal Love

Let’s take a short look at how yours, mine and everybody’s thinking about love has been shaped by popular psychology.  You may not have known it but, concerning love , the authors of movies, TV, magazine articles, novels, sermons, syllabuses for many courses and classes, plot outlines, etc. might have been influencing and controlling how you think and don’t think about love.
Those authors and other influencers largely worked from what modern psychology was discovering and teaching.  It was new, exciting, intriguing and different from a lot of what had been taught before.  However, this became what we are calling an ‘inside the box’ way of thinking.  So, let’s look at that a bit.

Until rather recently, official psychology only was focused mostly on the negative and the mediocre.  The mediocre was called ‘normal’ and the ‘negative’ was neurotic.  The negative also came to be known as abnormal, meaning bad and undesirable along with terms like insane, psychopathological and mentally ill.  For ‘normal’ there were additional terms like sane, sound of mind, average and in the courts compos mentis.  The mind set was there were only two categories of psychological concern, bad and average.

Only in the area of intelligence did psychology focus much on ‘above average’ and that mostly was only in educational psychology.  So, if you thought psychologically, you thought about what was pathos or sickness, what was wrong, what was the problem, what was the inferiority or deficiency.  Or you dealt with what was normal, and within the norm, average, the usual, ordinary, standard, conformist, etc.  If it deviated from that, it was ‘abnormal’ and, therefore, bad and undesirable.  Even superiority in almost anything was suspected of being an abnormality or somehow bad and undesirable.  There were those who tried to think about what was better than average (out-of-the-box) but they were suspected of being abnormal and deviant too.

These two, standard mind sets blocked and warped looking for the above normal in everything including in the area of love.  Love sickness and what can now be thought of as ‘false love’ were studied by some.  Thus, in the modern world your thinking and my thinking probably unknowingly were shaped, blocked and warped accordingly.  We were then sort of trapped inside a modern, cultural thinking box along with almost everybody else.

Healthy, real love by its very nature is an area of excellence.  Therefore, it is not in the purview of normal or abnormal psychology.  In the 1960s the seeds of an ‘out-of-the-box’ revolution began.  What was called humanistic psychology, and especially its self-actualization theory, brought a fresh, new view.  Then along came a research psychologist named Harry Harlow who in an animal lab discovered that positive, love behavior in monkeys was as important as ‘food’ for keeping baby monkeys alive.

Later, as president of the American Psychological Association, he chastised the whole field of psychology for not paying attention to love and especially to love’s positives.  Years before his findings, in the area of pediatrics, there already had been discovered much the same thing regarding human infants but psychologists did not much read pediatric research.

Most recently, the newer field of Positive Psychology has been invented creating a great, new third area of focus – that which is above average, good, healthy, ascendant, etc.  Love studies, or as the Russians call it Loveology, can be seen as a very logical component of positive psychology.  This is a field which is all about the ‘above normal’, or as I like to call it “the flowers in the garden not just the weeds” (“In The Garden of Love”).

We say all this because it is very likely, without you knowing it, your thinking about love, along with ours and almost everybody else’s,  has been destructively confined to ‘in the box’ understandings and behavior concerning love.  Now, however, you can get out-of-the-box and learn what is being revealed concerning doing love well, better, in improved ways, more healthfully, more successfully and more wonderfully.  You can get out of the old mind set and go on to one that works much better.  Doing that helps us understand that healthy  real love is incredibly important to our survival, well-being and advancement and the above normal ways of love make just about everything in life better.

How to Achieve Above Normal Love

Because you are already reading about ‘above normal love’ you are already doing some of what it takes to start going after above normal love.  It first takes new learning, un-learning and really thinking about love.  Along with that, it may take correcting mistaken, not useful and self-defeating ways of understanding and behaving.  After some learning and thinking changes, it will take acting in new ways having to do with love.  You see, love must be understood as a ‘doing’ as well as a thinking and feeling kind of thing.  There also is learning what not to do and practicing more successful-prone behaviors.

Here is an exact example of achieving ‘above normal love’.  Suppose you read that Ovid in the first century taught “if you would be loved, be lovable” and that to make love lasting takes skill.  So you might wonder what skills are needed for that?  (By the way, wondering is a necessary part of thinking about love).  As you try to answer that question, you discover that in the Christian New Testament, Paul of Tarsus wrote what can be seen as a list of what ‘to do’ and ‘not do’ to do love.  One of his items was “love is patient ”.

Then you might hear about modern psychologists discovering that if you learn and practice what is called ‘reflective listening’ and ‘active listening’ skills, you likely will be seen as quite patient and caring as well as lovable.  So, you learn and practice these skills and if you do well you find your is love getting better, stronger and more likely to be lasting.  In this way, you accomplish and achieve a greater amount of ‘above normal love’.

Couples, families, friendships, support groups and other collections of people together can go after learning ‘above normal love’. That often enhances and quickens the process.  Joint learning is usually done with reading, thoughtful discussion, co-behavioral experiments in practicing of what is learned, co-planning love tactics, creating love strategies, giving heartfelt and spirited mutual support as you go, etc.  Learning together also can help better love bonding together.  Remember, it is adding the ‘doing’ part that leads to great personal and relationship growth and the likelihood of a life full of ‘above normal love’.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Which of the following might you start reading so you can better travel toward or enhance ‘above normal love’?  The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Love by Helen Fisher, All about Love by bell hooks, Love and Survival by Dean Ornish, The Meaning of Love in Human Experience (for helpers) by Reuben Fine, Why Love Matters (for those who help children) by Sue Gerhardt, Recovering Love by me, Real Love False Love by Kathleen McClaren and me, and more Mini-Love-Lessons at this site.

Falling Out of Love - Or Was It False Love?

Synopsis: First we introduce you to an emotion you may not know; followed by the question “Is real love something you can fall out of?”; then the topics: exes who keep loving each other; research explorations into falling out of love; what’s religion got to do with it; and we end with looking at falling in and out of love versus growing in love.

An Emotion You May Not Know?

Have you ever thought you were really in love with someone only later to have strange feelings telling you had fallen out of love with that person?  Can you look at past ‘in love’ experiences in which your feelings changed to a ‘not in love’ feeling or awareness?  If you are in a current, spousal type, love relationship, are either or both of you getting feelings of the love starting to lessen?

Do you know that people in certain language groups are aware of different emotions than are those in other language groups?  The Russian language has a word for the emotion a person feels which tells them they are or have fallen out of love with someone.  That word is “razliubit”.  Some have described it as a bittersweet emotion, a bit akin to the emotion called nostalgia plus a sense of something as finished or finishing, and it is time to look toward something new and unknown.

Sometimes it is interpreted as telling a person they were not in a real love but just in an infatuation or some other form of false love which could never last.  It apparently can have both glad and sad parts and maybe a sense of relief or freeing.

Note that when we have a label for an emotion and use it, we much better can identify it, think about it, talk about it and understand its guidance message.  By labeling this ‘falling out of love emotion’ Russian speakers can deal with it apparently quicker and better, and act on it sooner and better than those without this label in their conscious awareness.

Is Real Love Something You Can Fall out of ?

Some theoreticians think once you have real love for someone it is forever.  They suspect that it is only various forms of false love that can actually end.  There are many who say they could never stop loving their children, or their parents, or their brothers and sisters, or their best friends – no matter what.

There also are a lot of people who say they still have a love for someone they used to be married to, but it has changed some, or is in a sort of ‘inactive’ status, however, it is still there in their heart.  Some people say things like, “I still love all my exes”, “My ex is just like a brother or sister who I dearly love”, “Certainly I love my alcoholic spouse but I dare not do anything with that love because it would destroy me, as it nearly did” and “It’s sad we were so wrong for each other but we still love each other a lot, even though we hardly ever have anything to do with each other anymore”.

Exes Who Keep Loving Each Other

There is a lot of clinical evidence in case histories that points to couples who have broken up or divorced, who actively keep loving each other.  Many family counselors commonly hear things like, “My ex and my new husband get along just fine.  That’s good because I love them both”.  “Yes, I love my new wife tremendously but in a different way.  I still love the mother of my children just as much and I will always love her.  I couldn’t stop if I tried”, and “In our family our ex-mates and even some of our ex- lovers still are family members. They all show up for birthdays and Christmas, and everybody still loves everybody.  Newcomers have to accept that”.

Often times post-breakup or divorced exes who keep loving an ex cause a lot of trouble, especially for new spouses.  It is not uncommon for a new spouse to feel very threatened by their mate’s continuing love for an ex-spouse.  The mindset or schema for how divorce is supposed to work in a lot of people’s heads, does not include room for love of an ex.  For them, once you divorce you are supposed to stop loving, or are supposed to have fallen out of love and even perhaps made an enemy of your ex.  In other’s schema or mind pictures, it is okay to love whoever you love, but how you do it changes in various ways when a new spouse comes along.

Research Explorations

Fairly recently research into falling out of love has begun and its findings, though somewhat meager, are quite intriguing and certainly pioneering.  Evidence points to ongoing, successful couples fading out of romantic love and that romantic love being replaced by a more solid sense of deep, abiding love which is longer lasting.  Other couples also experience the waning of romantic love and with that dimishment often comes the dissolution of their relationship.  It seems some romantic love relationships are killed by repeated emotional abuse and neglect.

The falling out of love experience seems to go with couples in which one or the other, or both, markedly reduce their acting with the behaviors that are known to convey love (see mini-love-lessons on the Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four).  Deceit, loss of trust, sometimes sexual issues, feelings of repeatedly being undervalued and too frequently being lovingly undealt with seem to often precede the falling out of love experience.  There is confusion as to whether one falls out of love or the love is killed by anti-loving behaviors and neglect.

What Does Religion Have to Do with It?

It is thought that the popular concept “real love is forever” came from various religious teachings which interestingly are found in a wide number of the world’s religions and theological writings.  Perhaps it was traveling monks, along with troubadours, who spread the stories and myths that love is a forever thing.

The concept that love never ends is distinctly and clearly scriptural in Christianity.  However, certain religionists have made an exception for carnal love, even for those married.  Any love, even if it is quite real, is seen as sinful and corrupting by any pleasurable sex according to those religionists.  However, a growing number of theologians, more love-focused than only strictly faith-based, strongly disagree and support the idea that all forms of real love may be forever.

Especially in certain Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions there are teachings promoting the idea that all love, even passionate and sexual love, is of divine origin and, thus, is everlasting.  Similar thoughts can be found in the Scriptures and theology of Judaism, Taoism and a good many other smaller religions.  Thus, the thesis that one does not fall out of true love but only falls out of false love is quite arguable from a wide range of religious perspectives.

Falling In and Out of Love Versus Growing in Love

Here is a concept to consider.  Couples who ‘fall in love’ can also ‘fall out of love’, but couples who ‘grow in love’ cannot.  That is because falling in love may be more a symptom of infatuation or some other form of false love, like the one called limerence.  Some couples, perhaps many, may start their relationship by having a ‘falling in love’ experience but then grow a different, more real love that is lasting.  Still others experience the falling out of love phenomenon because it is a false love and not lasting.  Couples growing a real love through loving effort and loving actions, plus some time, are thought to do much better and be much more long-lasting than those who rely on the falling in love experience.

Much has yet to be learned about all aspects of love, including the falling out of love phenomenon.  Hopefully this mini-love-lesson discussion will assist you in pondering your developing understandings of love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you still love all the people you have ever loved?

Related posts:

1. Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love?
2. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
3. False Forms of Love – Spouse Acquirement Syndrome
4. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding 

Unselfish Self-Love

Synopsis: Three contrarian questions lead off our mini-love-lesson; which then goes to eye-opening answers to those questions; some knowledge about the benefits of unselfish self love; more.

Three Contrarian Questions

Who do you think does more good in the world, the highly self caring or those who are frequently self-sacrificing?

Who do you think are more giving and helpful to others, those who are highly self-critical or those who like and love themselves a lot?  Who do you think attends more to the less able and less fortunate, those who are low or those who are high in active self-love?

Eye-Opening Answers

The research data shows, contrary to what many have been taught to think, the healthfully self loving are more effective and more frequently active in doing kind and compassionate love behaviors and working for the benefit of others than those in various other comparison groups.  It appears the self-sacrificing are not viewed as very good at self care.  Therefore, they are thought to grow depleted and less able to help others over time.

The self-critical often are seen to be too busy giving themselves negative attention to do all that much for others and are considered to have a lack of sufficient self-confidence which slows them down.  The emotionally needy and low in self-love put much more of their energy into confused attempts to get their own needs met, so they too often do not have much to give others.  The timid and guilty fear to act because they might do something wrong and they also are believed to back away from criticism, resistance and disagreements that arise in trying to benefit others.

Those who are healthfully self loving turn out to be the more unselfish, compassionate to others as well as to themselves.  They also are more likely to act altruistically, charitably and champion humanitarian causes, plus be more steadfast in encountering resistance and they are far less likely to surrender to criticism or opposition.  At least that is what a growing body of research points to.

There are other groups that are largely unselfish but it seems that without sufficient, healthy self-love and the self-care and self compassion healthy self-love brings them, for various reasons, don’t do as well.  There are those who think they have never done enough but the self-negativity that brings can be de-energizing and counterproductive.  There are those who have been taught that all pride is a sin, feeling good about yourself is egotistical and blinding to one’s own flaws, and all types of self-love lead to being self-centered, self-indulgent, self-seeking, smug, complacent to the detriment and expense of others.

So far at least, research does not support the contention that people who believe this way are better at being beneficial to others than are those who have strong, healthy self-love. Quite the contrary in fact.  There is evidence that points to the self compassionate and self caring being the most compassionate and caring to and for others.  Thus, they more than others, actually best fulfill the ancient admonition “Love others as you love yourself”.

Are the Selfish the Least Self Loving?

It can be argued that the highly selfish, egocentric, braggadocios, egomaniacal, etc. are just misguided and mistaken, and are attempting to make up for their own considerable lack of real and healthy self-love.  In essence the selfish are seen as trying hard to be self loving but they are trying in the wrong ways.  From this point of view they are doomed to real, self love failure.  Their’s, in fact, is seen as fake self-love.

The healthfully self loving are thought to more likely have a large sense of mysterious awe concerning their own nature, a great sense of gratitude for all that contributed to their own, unique selfhood, plus a tendency toward humorously accepting their own flaws and fumbles.  These are not characteristics thought to be easily found in the strongly selfish.  It is the unkind, uncharitable, unforgiving, un-thoughtful and insensitive to others who are deficient in self-love.

Those who are healthfully self loving are more likely to have what can be called ‘a full cup’ and, therefore, have a lot more they can give to others than those who are desperately trying to fill their very empty and leaking cup, so to speak.  The healthfully self-loving do not need to be egotistical because their cup not only ‘runneth over’ but does not leak.

Narcissism Versus Healthy Self-Love

Narcissism often is defined with the term self-love.  In light of a growing body of evidence concerning healthy, real love, it would seem appropriate to re-think narcissism.  Narcissism is understood to be a condition which blocks or at least lessens love for others.  More and more available evidence shows healthy self-love to enable and promote the love of others.  In fact, narcissism most accurately may be seen as a form of false self-love.  Perhaps it was not self-love that Narcissus experienced when he saw his image in the pool of water and fell in love with himself, but rather just a romantic infatuation, crush, or some other form of false love like love/lust confusion (see the entry) or even a case of time-limited limerence (see the entry).

One of the characteristics of the healthfully self loving is self compassion, well mixed with empathetic compassion for others in suffering and misfortune.  Narcissism is understood as making people so enamored of themselves that they do not notice or care about the suffering and misfortune of others.  Clearly healthy self-love and narcissism appear to be two very different things.

The Benefits of Unselfish Self-Love

It is very self-serving to be unselfish.  A bunch of surprising research results, show that when you act from altruism for the benefit of others you get all sorts of health benefits like improved immunity mechanism functioning, lowered bad cholesterol, better blood pressure and a number of other very, healthy things.  When you show compassion for the suffering of others, but also when you show compassion for yourself at the same time, or soon after, the likelihood of feeling depleted from giving to and caring for others is much less.  Likewise, if you show empathetic responses tor others, they are much more likely to show the same back toward you.

So, if you want to be good to yourself be good to others.  Once again, the amazing wisdom hidden in the simple words “Love others AS you love yourself” is being shown to have biological validity.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Have you ever decided to make yourself feel good by going to do some kind of good for another?  If not, how about starting now?

Related posts:

1. Compassionate Love, A Big Sign of True Love?
2. Thinking Love to Improve Love
3. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
4. Self-Love – What Is It?