Catharsis Empathy - A Love Skill

Synopsis: Hank on alert; confrontation and bafflement; a wife and sister’s explanation; preventing fighting; catharsis empathy unraveled; and the benefits are all parts of this very important love skills, mini-lesson.

Hank On Alert

Hank went on alert when he overheard his wife and sister sounding mad and nasty in the kitchen.  Cautiously he eavesdropped more.  He figured out they were not mad at each other or at him, but rather at someone else they both knew, and that brought him some relief.  As he listened he was appalled at all the putdowns and criticism they were viciously leveling at this acquaintance.  Then he heard mean-spirited sounding laughter and got anxious again.

He worried maybe this negativity he was hearing eventually would spill over onto him.  Their talk sounded unreasonably one-sided, irrational and illogical.  Hank really wished his wife and sister would be more balanced in their appraisal of this person.  Surely, the unfortunate, targeted person they were talking about wasn’t all bad and maybe even had some good traits.  Besides, being so negative and mean-spirited was bound to be bad for them too.  He wanted the women in his life to be pleasant and kind, and what they were doing sounded so sour and ungenerous.  He screwed up his courage and decided to confront them about their negativity.

Confrontation and Bafflement

Hank bravely walked into the kitchen ready to argue and cajole, but he was caught entirely off guard.  His wife saw him and lit up with a big smile saying, “Hi Hank, come join us.  Your sister and I are having a great talk.  I just love chatting with her.” Everything seemed cheerful and Hank was baffled.  Slowly he diplomatically got around to bringing up his great puzzlement over what was really going on between them.

A Wife and Sisters Explanation

Hank’s wife explained it this way, “We’re helping each other blow off steam, or maybe more accurately, we’re bonding with each other as together we vented out our toxic, bad feelings.  It helps us get clear and feel better.  It’s a lot like what you do at a football game.  You scream and holler insults at the other team or at the referee, and pretend to hate them.  In doing so you bond with your buddies there with you.  We just were doing the same thing more personally.  If anyone ‘really meant’ what they were saying when you are screaming about how awful the other team is, you’d think they were stupid or maybe crazy.”

Then Hank’s sister added, “It’s also like going to a rock concert.  You’re mostly there for the feelings brought on by instrumental music, not the ideas and information in the lyrics. You’re there sharing your emotions and your feelings, and because there’s a like-minded crowd you can do it bigger and better.”

Preventing Fighting

Hank’s wife then thoughtfully added, “I just realized a lot of our fights happen when I want you to be my ‘cheerleader’, and I want to feel like you’re on my side but you start playing devil’s advocate and reasoning with me and trying to calm me down.  When that happens I feel you are not on my side, and even sometimes like you’re my enemy, and I want to get away from you and find somebody who will treat me with empathy, and feel what I feel whether I’m right or wrong.  Besides, that right or wrong stuff that has nothing to do with it”.

Hank replied, “This is a whole different way for me to think and it’s going to take me a while to wrap my mind around it.  I think you’ll have to tell me when you want me to be your cheerleader or to just listen with empathy and not try to reasoned it out.” His wife replied, “Okay, I know you get worried when I cathart, so I’ll try to remember to ask you to be my care companion and not my instructor or fixer or debater.  Thanks for hearing my point of view and being willing to try to be empathetic when I have to vent.”

Catharsis Empathy Unraveled

What Hank ran into and misidentified can be called “catharsis empathy”.  It refers to a time in which one or more people need to vent, or let various emotions out, and have the feeling that the person they are venting with is right there with them, on their side, is joining with them without criticism, and is helping bad feelings come out.

Often when there are pent-up, negative feelings and the dam breaks to let them out, lots of things get said that make no real sense unless you understand the words just help the feelings get vented or experienced better.  It’s like when you tell your kids “It’s time to go to bed” and a kid replies “I hate you, Mommy”.  You know they don’t really hate you.  They are just venting frustration.  It’s not to be taken seriously, but instead understood with empathy.

The Benefits

Cathartic empathy helps people unburden themselves and at the same time helps them become bonded with one another.  When done intimately and personally, it helps us grow more love-bonded.  Receiving empathy and the ‘comradery’ feeling that comes with it while venting helps clean out psychological toxicity.  That, in turn, leads to the ability to think much more clearly afterward.  When one person wants cathartic empathy and not intelligent discourse, it useful for them to say something like Hank and his wife and sister talked about.  An example would be “I just want you to be my cheerleader ,not my coach; just hear me and feel with me, okay?”

It useful to ask loved ones “Is this one of those ‘be your caring cheerleader’ times, or is it something else?”.  Getting good at identifying such times, and showing empathy when catharsis or when any emotional expression occurs is a ‘super important’ love skill. Thousands of arguments and fights, and even breakups might be prevented by showing empathy to a catharting, venting loved one – instead of that ‘blowing off steam’ leading to destructive conflict which so often happens.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
So, how good are you at asking for and giving empathy when emotional catharsis is needed?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
2. Emotional Intercourse
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

Love Learning Action Plan

Dr. Cookerly's suggested

LOVE LEARNING ACTION PLAN

Welcome
Here is a plan that is designed to make a great big, positive difference in your life and in the lives of those you effect.  Of course, that only works if you work the plan.  Just like swimming, it takes actions added to mindful learning plus practice before you get to experience the many great benefits and joys possible.

I suggest you start by reading through the seven points of this plan to get some basic familiarity with it.  Know that it is quite alright for you to adapt the plan to fit your situation and what works for you.  I do suggest that you first use it as it is, or as close to that as possible, before experimenting with alterations.

Over the years, I have developed and used the seven elements of this system and have gotten very good results in a variety of settings.  I have used it with hundreds of individuals, couples and families in my counseling practice, in US coast-to-coast workshops I have conducted, at child and parent guidance centers, in psychiatric and psychotherapy clinics, medical clinics and hospitals, in college and university classes I have taught and in all I have seen very positive outcomes and received lots of appreciative feedback.  So, I suspect if you use this plan, you likely will get some very good results like so many others already have.

This Love Learning Action Plan is aimed at helping you achieve the many benefits of regular, consistent learning as apposed to the disadvantages of sporadic, occasional and crash course learning efforts.  It also is a plan for helping you toward enjoyably learning about the wide, wide, exciting and fascinating new world of knowledge about love, about love’s incredible uses, about love’s immense power, love’s numerous enriching feelings and love’s many action-how-to's.

Love Without Learning

Failure to learn the ways of love tends to lead to failure in love.  Love without learning is love without growing, healing and improving which tends to lead to love-relationship stagnation and eventual death.

A Fundamental Love Learning Dynamic:
Love feelings come naturally
Love relating comes with learning
Love skills come with practicing what you learn
Love victories come from love learning, plus practice, plus skillful love actions

Why a Love Learning Action Plan?

1. Knowledge is power!  Love knowledge is love power ready for use.  Love knowledge is best acquired by consistent, planned and repeated love learning actions.
2. Working a plan is how most big, important things get done.  Love is a very big, important thing.
3. Growing love is much like growing crops on a farm.  Both are best done by continuous learning coupled with well-planned, continuous actions.
4. Doing regularly planned and scheduled learning about love tends to work for attaining more numerous and higher quality improvements in how you think about love, feel love’s many feelings and behave routinely with healthy, real love.
5. Love enriches life.  Consistent, periodic love-learning leads to fuller and more frequent, recurrent love enrichment.
6. Planned, periodic, regularized love-learning builds on itself which results in much more complete learning in ways that more casual, irregular and erratic learning cannot match.
7. Planned and regularized learning about love makes for better love skills development and more frequent usage of what has been learned.

THE LOVE LEARNING ACTION PLAN

I. Get Committed
Get committed to learning a lot more about love and using what you learn in your life.  Get committed to experimenting with regular and consistent learning of all sorts of things about love and, in the learning process, enrich your life and the lives of those you touch with what you learn.

I suggest you commit to a certain number of months (3, 6, 12) in which you will work your love-learning-plan as diligently as you can, no matter what interrupts, diverts or works to sabotage your efforts.  When those things happen, return to your plan’s path as soon and as well as you can, and keep going.  In addition, consider complementing yourself for having allowed only a temporary derailment and then continue forward with the plan. (This is a more healthy, self-love way to proceed after any setback as opposed to beating up on or shaming yourself, doing self disparagement, or guilt which likely only leads to discouragement and de-powering yourself).

Part of anchoring in and strengthening your commitment can be to get yourself ready for making serious study efforts.  That might be done by selecting and arranging your primary study space, figuring out how you are going to record what you are learning, the thoughts generated by your learning, arising questions and anything else you want to add.  For most people, that means keeping a love-learning notebook (or a dictating and recording device) into which you can put all sorts of different things that relate to your love and your love studies.  Some do it by journaling, others include poetry and pictures, and still others keep action goals and calendars to review and stick to goal accomplishment.  Writing or dictating notes is a necessary part of this love learning action plan.

II. Subscribe Today
Bookmark the main page of this website and check back every Monday.  There are no strings attached and nothing you have to buy.

III. Read and Study Regularly
As soon as possible after each mini-love-lesson arrives, and preferably in a comfortable study space, start reading the lesson.  As you do so, it is good to mark in whatever way you like (highlight, underline, circle, copy, etc.) the parts that grab your attention for whatever reason.  Those may be the parts chosen in your subconscious, possibly because they could be of extra importance in your life.  Commit to making at least one brief note about what you are reading for every mini-love-lesson and then do so.  Making notes helps because when you write, you use different parts of your brain usually resulting in different and additional, better thinking than when you are just thinking.

As you study each mini-love-lesson, consider making not only notes but also sketches, diagrams, graphs, lists, symbols and any other symbolic representations  of your understanding along with colored abstract designs which can be important projections of your innermost feelings.  The notes and other entries are just for you alone and to help your conscious and subconscious, right brain and left brain, outer, mid and deep brain, etc. to learn love at many levels.  You might want to journal your feelings as well as your thoughts as you go.

There is another study technique I especially want you to use.  It has to do with the illustration in each mini-love-lesson.  I suggest you spend at least a little time pondering the illustration and guessing into the picture your interpretation of what you will decide it means for you and to you.  It is okay to puzzle over what it means according to others but the more important part is what you read into it.  There are no right or wrong interpretations; your interpretation is likely to be the one most right for you.  As you do this, consider the colors used, placement and sizes of different parts of the illustration and the empty places.  They all can be meaningful.  Then make some notes about all that.

IV Revisit and Reencounter the Lesson One Week Later
After a week goes by, take a look at the things you marked as having grabbed your attention, review the notes you wrote and any other type of entry in your love-learners-notebook (or recording).  You also can reread the lesson.  What are your new thoughts?  Do you have different feelings than you had a week ago concerning or related to this lesson?  Either way, what are your feelings telling you about you and love now?  Make some additional, brief notes about this one week later, re-study effort.

V. Set Love Action Goals
In setting your love action goals, it usually is best to start with only one or two, small and very specific goals at first.  An example of what I mean by specific might be an action like I will place my hand on grandfather’s forearm and say “Grandpa, I know you aren’t used to me saying it but I wanted to tell you, out loud, I love you”, while lightly squeezing his forearm and smiling, then departing unless he starts talking.  Accomplish this by Sunday evening.  Notice how behavioral and easily observable this kind of goal is.  That makes it easily counted as accomplished or not accomplished in your love learning notebook.  Remember, to record your feelings and their degree of intensity (Mild, moderate, strong?) maybe right after your targeted goal time has passed.  You also might want to record your thoughts on how this goal behavior could be improved-on in the future.

Don’t forget healthy, self-love, action goals which actually sometimes are the best to start with.  Here is an example.  Look in mirror and say out loud, with a big smile – “good for you; you truly are working at learning lots more about love – and, as a reward, go eat one piece of dark chocolate candy or put on my favorite music”.  Then make a brief note of what you did and how you felt about it.  When you ponder inventing love action goals, it helps to target particular people, groups of people like families or pets, as well as yourself.  Then it is good to do a brief, imaginary rehearsal of your planned love action.  Things probably will not go exactly as you plan but the little rehearsal likely will help it go better than it would have otherwise.

Know that even if your planed love action goes seriously awry, it still is a victory because you can learn and improve from it.  It also is a victory because you had the gumption to do something instead of doing nothing.  Of course, if it turned out quite well, bravo and then learn from that too.  I had a great professor who told me “go fail at some things because that’s the route to true success”. I did and it was.

VI Talk What You’re Learning
Talk, at least a little, to one or more others about what you are learning, thinking, feeling and doing about love.  Do that every week or at least every month.  Mark it on your calendar as a to do and check it off when its done.  When we talk what we are learning, it tends to anchor the learning and help it stick.  Talking about what we are learning also uses parts of our brain that silent thinking does not.  Like writing, that tends to produce different and additive, beneficial ideas to our thinking.  Sometimes we can be quite surprised by what comes out of our own mouths.  We then realized we did not know that part of us knew something the rest of our self did not.  It can be astonishing how much talking, out loud, about love can lead to a new thought we hear for the first time just like another person we talk to hears it.  That kind of thing happens more easily with people we love and trust.  Some people do this talking love by teaching.  They teach what they are learning about love to their children, give a talk to a club, teach a class or even a course in one setting or another  It is an old, tried-and-true formula.  To really know something, read about it, ask questions about it, do it,  then teach it.

While you are talking about what you are learning concerning love, be sure you to do your fair share, or more, of listing to what others have to say.  Once in a while that is where you can learn the most important things about love in your life.

VII. Expose Yourself to Other Love Knowledge Sources
All around the world and down through the ages people, and other higher-order creatures, have been doing things with and about love.  You may learn from them all.  A Dakota medicine woman once told me “dogs were put in the world to teach humans love” and I believe her.  So for learning about love, study your pets and especially dogs.  Surviving more than one broken heart also taught me a lot.  I really do not tend to recommend that danger-filled route unless you already are very good at healthy self-love.  Spiritual and religious sources are plentiful and sometimes superb but also sometimes are rather questionable and even at other times are downright unhealthy.  Psychological sources also abound but sometimes they can be quite shallow or meaningless.  Loving grandparents often exhibit the best features of love so watching them might be a good learning experience.  There are lots and lots of good, bad and time-wasting books on love.

As you read our mini-love-lessons, occasionally you will come across books I recommend.  Different books suit different people in different ways, so you have to discover the ones that speak best to you.  Also you can pick love-related topics, like jealousy or forgiveness for example, and use our site’s search feature often to find mini-love-lessons concerning the topic you are interested in.  Even though we have over 200 mini-love-lessons, there are lots of topics we have not covered yet so you may have to use Google or some other search engine to see what you can find on your topic of interest.  Generally concerning love, I am not very impressed with about 4/5's of what search engines turn up.  However, the other 1/5 occasionally can be quite excellent.

Your job is to search for resources that speak to you and involve yourself with them.  As you search, you probably will have to sort through a lot of nonsense, stupidity, ignorance, misinformation, sick, totally wrong stuff along with downright anti-real love and even evil, supposed love information.  So, it is important to be very discriminating and discerning as you search for other sources.  Nevertheless, it is very worthwhile to seek out both the wisdom of the ancients and the most modern scientific discoveries concerning love, plus everything in between.  Searches like this frequently can become inspiring, strengthening, healing, growthful, useful, empowering, enriching, fulfilling and fun.  That is part of the plan.

Conclusion

Remember, it is okay to adapt, alter and add to this plan.  Do what works for you.  If you are working a learning plan with another person, or with several people, be sure to work at synthesizing what works for all who are involved.  As I see it, to really learn love, it takes a combination of reading, writing, pondering, talking, then doing and redoing, along with lots of practicing love oriented actions.  Someone said “love without action is dead”.  So, make love live in your life as you study it.

There you have it, my seven step action plan for learning to put more healthy, real love in your life and into the lives of those you care most about.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Love Quotes

With our "Quotable Love Quotes" we present questions about love to intrigue and fascinate you!  Questions to help you hone your thinking and doing about love!   Questions about love and its many incredible aspects so you, and yours, can better co-discoverer your own love truths!  Questions about love’s mysteries to quote and talk over with others in ways that may become delightful and bonding!   Questions about love that can help you discover, learn and know more of the many marvelous ways of healthy, real love!  And lots more!

Here's how it works.  At the end of many of our mini-love-lessons you will find a quotable love question.  Enjoy pondering it and exploring what pops up in your own thoughts and possible answers to the question.  Then, we suggest you go quote the question to one or more others (a spouse, lover, friend, family member, your bright offspring, etc.).  Ask for the other person's input and share your own thoughts and feelings jointly while discussing whatever comes up.  See where that leads and what happens next.  Keep it friendly, after all it is about love.  Strive together to make it all enriching, refreshing, clarifying and definitely helpful to your own ways of love relating.

Quotable Love Questions irregularly will be alternated with the Love Success Questions featured at the end of each mini-love-lesson.

Gratitude As a Love Skill

Synopsis: Are you a “thanking” person, good at the love skill of gratitude?; how to develop gratitude awareness; how gratitude improves your physical, mental and relationship health; how to grow your gratitude love skill, and healthy, real love via gratitude.

Are You a ‘Thanking’ Person?

A month after our most loving and appreciative guests left we were still finding little Post-it notes secreted away in different hiding places telling us about different things our guests were grateful for during their stay with us.  Each note came as a tangible, little, friendship-love surprise gently touching our hearts.  It endeared them to us even more than they already were.

This is an example of highly love-skilled people who found a special way to express their gratitude.  True thankfulness grows out of gratitude.  Gratitude, let me suggest, is a highly worthy sub-classification of love behaviors related to the larger major category of ‘affirmational love’.  To have gratitude one must have awareness of what one can be grateful about.  This takes a mind-set focused on the good things coming one’s way.  Then one must have at least a minimum amount of healthy self-love and confidence to risk showing appreciation.

It is amazing how many people fear that if they show their gratitude it will be unwanted, or they fear they will do an inadequate job of showing gratitude.  Some fear their way of showing gratitude will be regarded as silly or somehow inferior and, therefore, they stop themselves from the full expression of their gratitude.  Some people think that their show of gratitude must be done in some large and impressive way and if that can’t be accomplished they don’t show it at all.  Notice in the above example of the Post-it notes the people doing this could have thought such notes might be annoying or regarded as cheap or insignificant.  I suppose people poor at ‘receptional love’ indeed might be so inclined.  I hope you’re not among them, but if you are remember help is available here and at other love-focused places.

Gratitude Awareness

Let me suggest you have more to be grateful for than you will ever be able to be aware of, let alone give thanks for.  To start with, you were born as a great, amazing bundle of miracles.  Even a rock is miraculous but you are so incredibly more than a rock.  Be grateful!  When you were born you were loved enough to keep you alive.  Many are not and they die of marasmus and other ‘failure to thrive’ diseases of infancy.  Be grateful!  Then you began the incredible, miraculous process of maturing and discovering the incredibly miraculous world you were born into.  Some who are born cannot do that, so be grateful!  You were at least minimally loved, laughed with, played with, and taught something of the world.  Be grateful!  You also were able to learn on your own and that learning ability was a gift some do not have.  Be grateful!

Then there were the people of your life, some of whom were not so great.  Others, however, probably influenced and guided you better than you are aware of.  If they had not you never would have learned to read what you are reading now, nor would you be able to think about it as well as you can, and probably you wouldn’t be able to grow from what you’re thinking as well as you can.  Be grateful!

Gratitude Improves Your Health

Recent research shows that those people who actively feel and show gratitude improve their physical health in a number of ways as they do so.  Mental health also is advanced by loving gratitude which triggers neurochemical improvements in our brains.  Longevity also has been linked to gratitude and, as might be expected, those who are good at gratitude are measured as having significantly better interpersonal relationships.  Those who are poor at gratitude are measured as less physically, mentally, emotionally and relationally healthy and they live shorter lives on average.

Undervalued Gratitude

There are dangers to not feeling, showing and receiving expressions of gratitude.  Some people shrug off showing gratitude as a waste of time and an unnecessary action.  There are those who are embarrassed when gratitude or thanks is shown to them.  Sometimes that’s because they don’t quite know how to receive it or reply but that can be learned.  Then there are the people who have been trained to quickly dismiss expressions of gratitude so as not to seem egotistical.  This may discount the gratitude-giver which might harm the relationship with that person.

There are those who don’t show gratitude for egocentric reasons, believing themselves to be somehow superior rather than just different from others.  Some overly power-oriented people think showing gratitude demonstrates weakness.  That can lead to fear and away from love.  Then there are those who are suspicious of gratitude, thinking it is merely a manipulation setting them up for some sort of misuse.  All of these people who undervalue gratitude miss out on the health benefits mentioned above and on the very real joy that results from truly being grateful.

One of the more interesting findings in gratitude research has to do with people becoming thankful for something, and then showing that gratitude which then appeared to open the door to solving a life problem they were having.  Research also has shown people good at gratitude get through hard times easier than others.

Did you know that Gratitude Groups are being experimented with in some prisons, nursing homes and certain schools.  Groups discussing what they have gratitude for and how they will demonstrate that gratitude are producing a variety of surprising, positive results.  Gratitude exercises in couple’s love education classes and workshops are resulting in couples more deeply bonding with each other.  Guided gratitude facilitation in family love education retreats and seminars show similar results for whole families.

How to Grow Your Gratitude

Of the people who have influenced your life who are you most grateful for?  For each decade you have lived can you think of some people you can genuinely say you were quite fortunate to have had in your life?  Of the people who are in your life now who most merits you showing gratitude to.  Are there people in your past who have passed away to whom you wish you had shown more gratitude?  Who are the people you would most enjoy showing gratitude to?  Who are the people who would be most surprised by you showing gratitude to them?  Perhaps you will want to spend some time thinking about these questions and you may want to make some lists.

Suppose you were to give some of the people you just thought of a call, or send them a note, or visit them expressing your gratitude for what they have meant in your life.  Then again you might do it in an anonymous way.  It is good to feel gratitude and that does you healthful good but expressing it may be even better.  The more you focus on and feel gratitude and then express it the more you are likely to grow your gratitude-giving competence as one of your love skills.

Love Via Gratitude

How soon can you genuinely thank somebody for something?  The sooner the better.  How soon will you pay attention to something someone has done for you, or that benefits someone you care about, and lovingly tell them of your gratitude?  As you encounter people today and tomorrow will you make yourself aware of at least some small thing they do that you can appreciate.  Will you then be at least a little grateful.  Some think our world leads us to notice the things we don’t like more than the things we can like.  Many people’s families or a sub-society they grew up in taught them mostly about griping, complaining, whining and being ungrateful.  This anti-gratitude way of going about one’s life approach now is seen to be surprisingly stressful and to shorten life.  Train yourself in appreciation-awareness and to feel and give gratitude as part of ‘affirmational love’ giving and your life will be a happier, healthier place to live in.

Large numbers of people just don’t have much of an awareness of gratitude and the good it does.  Especially our love relationships can be benefitted by people who feel and frequently show genuine gratitude for the love acts of others.  So today and tomorrow and the next day too, I want to dare you to be grateful for something you would not have otherwise been grateful for and then show your gratitude in one fashion or another.

Gratitude can be shown with a pat on the back, a hug, a smile, just a few words of thanks, a note, a gift, doing a favor for, public bragging on another person and in a host of other ways.  I want to challenge you to challenge yourself to make yourself good at the love skill called gratitude.  Hopefully this little love lesson will assist you in that endeavor.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question The concepts of healthy self-love suggest that you give gratitude to yourself for having helped yourself live as well as you have.  So, are you doing that?

Related posts:

1. Gratitude – As a Love Skill
2. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Respect – As a Love Skill 

Throuple Love, a Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?

Mini-Love-Lesson #213

Synopsis: What throuple love is; its legality, offspring, sexuality; who desires it; and the question “Is it a real love?” are all briefly presented and explained here.

How Throuple Love Happened to Alice, Betty and Charlie

It all started sometime after Alice’s policeman husband was tragically killed in the line of duty.  Her best friend, Betty, and Betty’s husband, Charlie, began looking in on Alice and her two young daughters then taking them places like shopping, the movies and the park along with their own children.  Later they all watched TV and did other ordinary stuff together.  It was obvious to all of them that they were growing quite close, including the children.  One day Betty said, “Suppose we all move in together, after all, it would save money and we have become like one big family”.  That led to a lot of talk and spending experimental weekends together which went quite well.

One day Alice said she had a problem with the suggested all live together idea.  She confessed she was both romantically and sexually attracted to Charlie and, truth be told, sometimes also a bit attracted to Betty too.  She went further saying she felt sometimes like she was falling in love with both of them.  Betty surprised herself as well as the others by saying she loved Alice and didn’t think she would really mind sharing her husband with Alice, sort of like they had seen on a TV show about Mormon sister-wives.  Charlie then related he had love feelings for both Betty and Alice, truth be told, he revealed he had sexually fantasized about having threesome sex with both of them.

Cautiously one weekend with all the kids away at the grandparent’s homes, they started a very loving, three-way, sexual relationship.  At first they laughed together at their awkwardness, then got really amazed with how turned-on and passionate they all got with one another.  All three were quite certain they would want to do it again and they did.

One thing that just evolved was all three of them enjoying spending more time before and after sex, non-sexually cuddling and caressing one another.  It was after one such very loving three-way experience that Charlie, kind of awkwardly proclaimed, “I think we three are creating a marriage with each other.”  Alice and Betty soon agreed.  After some parent guidance and blended family counseling which included all the children to make sure that they carried this off in the best way possible, they bought a big house and moved in together.  That was years ago and except for some problems with outside family members their love-filled, very psychologically real, three-person marriage/union has gone quite well.

Another surprise came when they discovered lots of people around the world were doing pretty much the same thing and there was a name for it, along with websites, support groups, an app and a whole bunch of other stuff.   The name for it, similar to the word couple, is “Throuple”.

What Is Throuple Love?

To understand throuple love, just think of the term couple love and add a person.  Throuple love is a love-mate or spouse-type love for two people simultaneously instead of just one.  A throuple love relationship is where spouse-type love goes back and forth rather equally between three people as they have and live in a committed, love-based, three person, psychological marriage.  Sexuality is a part of that but not the center of it, as likewise it is in a healthy, love-centered marriage.

Throuples are to be differentiated from threesomes who usually are more temporary and more about sexuality than love.  They also are different from couples who have a third person, friends with benefits type relationship, although probably that is closer and might turn into a throuple relationship at some point.  Technically a throuple could be considered a form of polygamy or polyandry but those terms more often reference a one gender dominance situation.  Throuple usually is a classification within the subcategories of plural marriage, group marriage, polyamor relationships and alternative lifestyles, all of which are encompassed by the larger category of marriage-type relationships ( see “Poly Love” and “Multiple Sex Partners and Love”).

Some people also use a term like throupling to refer to actions and states of mind involving or going toward throuple love and relating.  Throupling, throuple love and throuple marriages can occur between one man and two women, one woman and two men, three women, three men, one or more bisexuals and one or two others of either gender, one or more transsexuals with one or two others and may include other gender oriented categories (see “Other Genders Love” and “Does Sexual Preference Influence Love?”).

What About Throuple’s Legality?

The first legal recognition of a throuple union occurred in the country of Columbia in 2017.  Three men were granted family law, legal union status with the same rights as couples.  When challenged, their legal union was upheld by that nation’s constitutional court.  Worldwide, supportive compliments came from other throuple relationships around the globe as well as from various libertarians, liberal religious groups, alternative lifestyle supporters and relational freedom advocates.  Condemnation, death threats, hate messages and other legal challenge attempts came from a wide variety of other conservative, traditionalist, reactionary and regressive groups apparently mostly in South America but also in some parts of Africa.

In most parts of the world, throuples just are not dealt with legally or, at worst, are arrested and imprisoned with some even endangered by the death penalty.  In countries rated as more democratic, throuples tend to be accepted and some legal support is able to be obtained through contract law and broadening family law.  In countries rated as more non-democratic or anti-democratic, severe problems can be encountered.  In various places, the safety of those in a throuple relationship where laws against polygamy, homosexuality and other forms of alternate lifestyles exist are a concern, as they are in lands heavily influenced by various conservative religious laws.

What about Children of Throuples?

Throuples make the argument that three parents can be, and often are, much better than two or one parent households.  What little research evidence there is suggests this may be true.  One of the possible reasons this may be valid is that when a child needs comfort, information, support or any parental help, there may be more loving adults available.  Certain testimony from those who have grown up in three parent, throuple type, homes seems to be quite positive about it so far.  Contrary comments from throuple offspring, to date, are uncommon.

Definitive, long-range studies have yet to be completed.  Harmful and destructive throuple influences on children have been postulated by some, but not proven or objectively confirmed as having any real frequency of occurrence.  The preponderance of available, though meager, evidence to date, suggests throuple love correlates well with good, healthy, parental love and subsequently children who turn out quite well as they mature.

What about Throuples and Sex?

King-size beds apparently are rather popular with throuples.  One reason is because three people being sexual with each other simultaneously is not so easily done in smaller beds designed for couples.  As commonly proclaimed, throupling is not primarily about sex but rather about love, or at least the attempt at modern, egalitarian, three-way love.  Three lovers cuddling together as they go to sleep with love in their hearts for one another is more the prototype image than three people climaxing together (see “Sexual Love Laces”).

Some throuples take turns or do one at a time sex, some occasionally bring in a fourth person, usually a dear friend and a few go about things in the open marriage sort of way but, so far, the evidence suggests not many.  Throuples usually seem to emphasize they are going about their relationship in very democratic ways including what they do sexually.  Democratic equality and mutuality, along with a willingness to experiment with what each other wants, seems to be the standard.

Who Wants Throuple Love?

Quite a few bisexuals seem to see a throuple love relationship as a real boon to their natural desires and proclivities.  One bisexual said, “I no longer have to cheat, have affairs and feel guilty now that I’m in throuple love”.  Bi’s have related that in a three-way love and sex relationship they no longer have to deny or try to suppress half of their true selves.  Some married lesbian and gay men also have related that the throuple way has allowed them to stay married and continue as full-time parents, so it is way better for the children.

Throupling homosexuals being sexual is more with a same gender partner but it can occur in the threesome way.  Some report becoming a bit more bi themselves and getting turned on by seeing their two other throuple partners enjoying each other.

It is surprising to many that a fair number of older, retired people seem to have formed throuple-type, love relationships.  Cases of widows and widowers becoming friends and then developing multiple person, marriage-type love for one another and finally living in a three-person marriage arrangement might possibly become somewhat common.

Transgender and mixed gender people of various types also see throuple love as a form of living married that is well-suited to their particular needs and wants.  One trans person said it was wonderful not to have to get a divorce like happens to so many married transgender people when they make the transition.  “I started in our throuple as a biological male with a male and a female spouse.  For a time, I was sort of a half-and-half but was just as loved by my other two.  Then I got to my real self as a full female and was still pretty much loved just the same way I was when we started.  Even better, all three of us pretty much are just same except my female clothes take up more room now”.

There are those who grew up in happy, big families who find the throuple way of doing love relating to feel like being home again.  Others admit to being bigamist at heart and there are still others who enjoy having a sort of brother or sister spouse.  A very small number are known to have grown up in throuple household and just see it as what they are used to and like.  Others who have had bad experiences with two-person marriage are willing to try a throuple love approach.

In short, a growing number of people all around the world either want a throuple relationship or are willing to give it a try to see if it works for them.  It is too early to tell but some analysts suspect throuple love is going to keep growing and eventually perhaps become common.

Is Throuple Love Real Love?

You can’t really love two people at once, can you?  At least one person’s love for one of the others will be fake love, won’t it?  And if you love one better than the other, won’t that break up the throuple?  Doing this throuple love thing isn’t natural, is it?  All sorts of questions arise and those in throuple love relationships give some pretty interesting answers.  To the question about loving two people comes the reply “lots of people love two children, two parents, two siblings, two friends etc. so why not two romantic or marriage type partners?  To the second question comes to the reply “throuples have less fake love and false love problems than do couples because they have to examine everything more carefully, and three minds work better than just two or one”.

The third question about loving one better than the other gets the answer “people may unequally love two children, two siblings, two parents, etc. differently at different times and it all works out fine, so why not two lovers?  To the issue of what’s natural comes the social psychologist’s and cultural anthropologist’s answers showing millions of people living and having lived in multiple person marriages and done so quite sufficiently and successfully.  Monogamy actually may be in the minority throughout cultures and over long time periods.  That certainly is true in the animal world.

If you measure real love by the behaviors and operations that exhibit it, and by the operations that differentiate it from false love, or by what the limbic system in the brain does neurochemically and neural electrically with love, or by the social biological correlates of those who strongly report feeling love after years of love relating, then we have no reason to think that throuple love could not be just as real as couple love.  However, it will take a lot more good, solid research to support or contradict this much more fully than is currently evident.

Could throuple love be right for you, or members of your family, friends, etc.?  Again, emphasis on love.

One More Little Thing

Who might you want to talk all this over with, and maybe tell them about this site and its FREE 200+ mini-love-lessons?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If you knew a throuple, would you invite them to dinner at your home and, yea or nay, what does that tell you?

Related posts:

1. Transcendental Love: Mysteries and Wonders for Your Future?
2. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
3. What about “Bi” Love?
4. All or Nothing Love – The New Way of Marriage
5. Poly Love