Passionate Love - Wondrous and Perplexing

Mini-Love-Lesson  #232

Synopsis: Contrary views and differing forms of passionate love; how it is much more than sex; the romance and the eroticism; the three neural networks involved; its fading and rekindling; true love or not; a real and false passionate love difference; and the pain, problems and pleasures of passionate love are succinctly and with fresh information and perspectives presented here.

Most Sought, Most Mysterious, Most Troublesome

Euphoria, ecstasy, intense eroticism and all sorts of profound, powerful positive feelings - that is one view of passionate love.  Another is much less lovely.  It contains jealousy, obsession, compulsions, enslavement, drives to control mixed with total surrender and submission, intense insecurity covered by authoritarian domination, dangerous and destructive rage and some think a subconscious death wish.  More recently that disturbing view has been increasingly identified with mental illness and false love syndromes and not with healthy, real love (see our Real Love False Love e-book). Nevertheless, passionate love often is viewed as the most desirable form of love and the one that provides the greatest thrills, turn on’s, emotional fireworks, enlivening arousal, intrigue, enticing danger and incredible sex.  For so many, it definitely is a love not to be missed!

Much More Than Sex!

Passionate love often involves intense and extremely exciting sexuality but is much more than just sex.  In fact, sometimes passionate love is not sexual at all though that is what so many focus on when they think of passionate, romantic love.  Passionate, romantic love has been defined as a state of intense seeking for and or a sense of being in an ecstatic union with a reciprocating other.

Passionate love is felt with powerful compelling enthusiasm, eagerness and intense desires not always erotic.  The desire in real, passionate love is to be hugely involved with, enraptured by and immersed in the totality of who or what is loved.  Sometimes passionate love is not about a who but rather a what.  Religious zealotry and fervor are identified with passionate love as are patriotism and sometimes altruism.  To understand passionate love more fully, let’s first look at passion itself.  

Passion can refer to any emotion felt very powerfully and in ways that are compelling, almost uncontrollable, frequently consuming and involving intense yearning, craving, adoration, relishing, zeal, euphoria, compulsion, ecstasy and acceptable or even desired agony.  Now, let’s consider love (see “The Definition of Love”).

Passionate, real love can be identified as love felt with powerful, compelling enthusiasm, eagerness, intense pleasure and a huge drive to be connected with and able to act for the happiness and well-being of the loved.  It involves a great, high valuing and enjoyment of the loved, a valiant nurturing and brave protectiveness toward the loved and when romantic profound affection and eroticism.

The sharing, seeking for and experiencing of intense pleasure is involved in passionate love.  Simultaneously with passionate love comes a diminished awareness of pain, fear and everything which is unpleasurable.  Fully passionate, real love can involve incredible emotional intimacy, and what is sometimes called a great intermingling of spirits and a sense of ecstatic, cosmic connectedness.

Passionate love can be likened unto Germany’s grand, roaring Rhine River - fast, vast, extremely exciting, enormously enjoyable and all to often seductively dangerous and disastrous. When thinking of passion, one might do well to ponder the Rhine’s legend of the irresistible Lorelie who lured many a boater to a drowning death in its powerful swirling turbulence.

Differing Forms of Passionate Love

Think for a minute beyond  those two most commonly focused on areas of passion - the romantic and the erotic types of love.  Are you passionately in love with life, with nature, with a spiritual involvement, with beauty, with a great cause, with your children or family or with any deeply satisfying or meaningful endeavor?  You see, there are many ways to have true passionate love beyond the romantic and sexual, wonderful though they may be.

What about Romantic and Erotic Passionate Love?

It seems we are considerably hardwired to seek for and get into erotic and romantic love and love-like relationships.  It appears this has been crucial to our species survival.  Furthermore, it has been instrumental in helping humanity attain its preeminent status on our planet.  Not only that, but seeking and getting into love relationships has turned out to be exceedingly healthful for those who manage it successfully.  However, for many others who have tried and failed at love, it has often been disastrous.  For those who only partially learn to do love-relating well, it often has been a painfully growthful and exciting but arduous mixed blessing.  Nevertheless, our strong natural drives for sex, for passionate love, and for other kinds of love too, are now understood to have pushed us into populating the world, and to have become the most creatively cooperative of all species.

The Three Neuro Networks of Passionate Love

Psychoneurological research involving electronically looking into the brain while romantic love relationships are focused on, reveals a lot about passionate love.  That research points to three neuro networks involved when we feel passionate love.  One of our brain’s networks appears to handle attraction, another facilitates lust while a third processes emotional connection and attachment.  Operating together at strength, they help us have and experience the incredible feelings of romantic passion.  Sometimes that later leads us into lifelong, healthy, real and lasting love relationships and sometimes not.  In both cases, and after a time, romantic passion fades.  Replacing it can be a much more general, life assisting type of love variously identified as life partner love, spousal love , marriage type love, love mate love, companionate love or companion love.  These are thought to be processed by additional neural networks and somewhat different neurochemistry than that of passionate love.

What about Fading and Rekindling Passionate Love?

Some couples with life partner love can, and frequently do from time to time, briefly re-enliven their passionate love feelings.  Others practice various alternate lifestyles to re-experience their passion via the new and different.  Real love is not thought to be a part of the alternate lifestyle approach very often (except perhaps for those who become throuples) (see “Throuple Love, A Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?”).  Still others are glad to leave passionate love behind because it took so much energy, concentration and work that left little time for the rest of life.  Many others bemoan the fading of the passionate and long for its return.  Some of those search for and find ways to bring it back at least temporarily; quite a few others don’t but probably could with some professional counseling or coaching.

Is Passionate Love True Love?

Some think passionate love may not be real love at all but rather a sort of pre-love state testing whether lasting partner love can come into existence or not.  Others insist that passionate love is the real thing and the only kind worth totally surrendering to.  Still others note that several identified forms of false love-- namely Limerence, the IFD and the Fatal Attraction syndromes (see our Real Love False Love e-book)-- are full of passion but by no means do they dependably result in anything like healthy, real and lasting love. (Also see Title Index for each)  There are brain researchers who note how passionate romance and addictive opiates similarly seem to activate certain brain centers.  A difference is that romantic passion eventually fades or evolves naturally while drug addiction and some false love syndromes do not.

Romantic passion in the past has been variously referred to as being smitten, bewitched, spellbound, infatuated, love crazed, blessed out, beguiled, temporarily besotted, lovesick, having a crush and my favorite twitterpatted.  Interestingly none of those terms convey the idea of long lasting love even though those experiencing passionate love frequently pledge everlasting love, to love forever, etc.  The truth seems to be that a very high number of highly passionate, romantic relationships do not stay that way or even continue in any form once the passion fades.  Although, some do and those in them frequently proclaim theirs was real love right from the start.

A Possible Difference between Real and False Passionate Love

It is suspected that false, passionate love is the kind that pushes out and is destructive to other forms of love and love relationships.  Family love, friendship love and parental love and even pet love are all known to suffer, be neglected and even rejected when people are involved in passionate relating.  However, it actually may be that in passionate, real love those other love relationships tend to be enhanced, better appreciated and better taken care of.  The suspected reason is that the selfishness factor increases with false love and decreases with real love.  No one knows for sure.

It is entirely possible that some people have a real love springing up within a highly passionate beginning relationship while others do not.  Some of those who do not probably are experiencing a passion-filled, more temporary, false love syndrome.  Others may be experiencing a natural and healthful, but short term, romantic and passionate involvement which will provide an enriching interlude but not a deep and lasting love.  Terms like shipboard romance, close encounters of the temporary kind and weekend love affairs may have arisen from this kind of passionate, non-real love or only a mini-love experience.

The Pain, Problems and Pleasures of Our Passions

Maybe, more than you might think, there are people who learned to relate in and with love quite well after first having had passionate love’s peak emotional and sexual experiences followed by horrible, heartbreak disasters.  It is interesting what they have to say about their times of passionate love.  Lots of them proclaim they are quite glad for their previous times of passionate love but would not want to go through them again.  It was for them, a great adventure and they grew from it tremendously but it involved far too much chaos, agony and effort.  They also tend to proclaim that the love they have now fits their life far better than the tumult, tortures and tentativeness of their past passionate involvements. link “Adamant Love - and How It Wins for Us All” link “Ebullient Love - Love’s Joyous River” and link “Serene Love - A Gentle Power Flowing”  One of the things they learned was to be very self lovingly careful when it comes to passionate love.

One More Little Thing

Wouldn’t it be good to talk over what you just read with one or more others to see what they might think about passionate love and these ideas?  If you share this with them, we would appreciate it if you mention our many Mini-Love-Lessons, this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

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

Quotable Question: If you fall into passionate romantic love, will it end like other falls – in a crash?

Intimacy Creation - A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers intimacy ignorance; the two major kinds of intimacy; sexual intimacy; emotional intimacy; the cultural complications of intimacy; and then gives you a dozen ways to work toward creating and enhancing emotional intimacy in your own, personal life.

Intimacy Ignorance

Can you say “My most intimate experiences are among the very best experiences of my life!”?  Can you say “The intimacy I share with those I love most provides me with my most valued, special feelings!”?  Can you say “Intimacy with a loved one has been a supreme and sublime, love experience like no other!!”?  Can you say “I know very well how to go about creating intimacy and intimacy experiences with those I love!”?

“She told me we just were not intimate enough, often enough.  At first I thought she meant sex but that turned out to be quite wrong.  So what does she mean?  How in the world do I go about whatever this intimacy thing is?”

Often I hear this sort of question when I’m doing relationship counseling or coaching with men.  However, there are related statements I get from females. Their statements often are something like “Isn’t he just supposed to know how to be intimate if he loves me?  If he hasn’t learned how to be intimate by now doesn’t that mean something’s wrong with him and our relationship can’t work?  If I have to tell him how to be intimate won’t that spoil it? ”

Sometimes I get a female’s statement like this: “I don’t know how to tell him what I mean by intimacy.  He is willing to learn but I only know it when I feel it, but I can’t explain how to get there.  Of course, there are females who make statements more like the males and males who make statements more like the females, so it’s not strictly a gender thing.

Another kind of statement I sometimes get in counseling concerning intimacy goes like this: “Our sex just isn’t very intimate.” Or sometimes, “ When we feel really intimate with each other it just never turns into anything sexual, and I want it to be sexual at least sometimes but we don’t know how to make that happen.”.

Two Kinds of Intimacy

I like to suggest that the first thing to get clear about is that there are two main types of intimacy – emotional and sexual.  They go well together but also they can be confused with one another.  When this confusion occurs people frequently end up having difficult problems with each other.  It also is quite important to understand that people can have sex without emotional intimacy just as easily as they can have emotional intimacy without sex.

Sexual Intimacy

Sexual intimacy can be said to occur when people closely and personally experience each other’s activated and shared sexuality.  This can occur via sight, sound, touch, scent, taste and kinetics.  It also can occur via shared sexual thoughts and feelings, well shown and expressed physically and emotionally.

Sexual Intimacy often involves disclosing one’s sexual self to another, accompanied by close and extensive body exploration, and the sharing and showing of erotic responses to erotic stimuli.  Sexual Intimacy may or may not involve sexual intercourse and orgasm but it often does.  Some people do not seem to be able to do sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy, while others do so rather easily.

Still others mix and separate the two, at will, depending on who is involved and their own, individual, love situation.  Sometimes the words intimacy or sexual intimacy are used to merely mean sexual intercourse or that some other form of sexual action has occurred.  This, I suggest, is a misuse and more misleading way of using these words.

Emotional Intimacy

Emotional intimacy for most people is a little harder to identify and define.  Emotional intimacy can be said to occur when someone feels an emotional, close, personal contact and connection with another.  This usually is accompanied with feelings of warm, private affection and positive regard, and not infrequently with very strong, personal love of one type or another.

Emotional intimacy can be marked by a depth and breadth of knowledge of another, and a sense of emotional interweaving with the inner core or essential nature of another’s innermost, true self.  It is most likely to occur when strong emotions are felt and shared.  It can come with close, physical, mental, social and emotional association.

Occasionally it brings on a sense of two or more beings, at least temporarily, having a fusion of their core spirits and real personalities.  Emotional intimacy frequently leads to increased love bonding, sometimes accompanied by a sense of awe and of being spiritually understood and connected.  Recent evidence suggests that when emotional intimacy occurs there are strong, healthful and perhaps fairly rare neurochemical processes occurring in the limbic system of the brain.

Cultural Complications

In the larger, Western world, growing, mega-culture it seems like not a lot of people learn what emotional intimacy is, let alone how to create it.  Even fewer appear to learn how to maintain and grow intimacy in ongoing relationships.  In our more ‘macho’ societies emotional intimacy often is regarded by males as feminine and, thereafter, disregarded, ignored and avoided.

It’s interesting that in some societal spheres things seen as feminine are put on an ‘idealized pedestal’ in principle but devalued and psychologically trashed in actuality.  Then there are those people who fake intimacy as just a way to gain something on their hidden agenda list like money, sex, marriage, etc.

After attainment of the hidden motive, the intimacy actions disappear.  This seems to occur particularly often in cultures and societal groups oriented primarily to commercialism, consumerism, power, status attainment, etc. rather than love, cooperation, mutuality and having a deeper quality of life.

However, all over the world there are people longing and striving for intimate love connections, intimate romance, emotionally intimate sex, and relationships filled with intimate emotional intercourse.  All over the world there is the question “How do you go about being emotionally intimate?”.  It would seem most people have very few, clear answers.  The good news is you can learn how to enhance and grow your intimacy-making skills and, thereby, strengthen and improve your love relationships.

A Dozen Ways to Work Toward Creating and Enhancing Emotional Intimacy

1.    Get Close  As you relate to someone slowly get physically closer and closer to them if the relating seems to be going well.  The closer you get physically the more likely you are to be able to be emotionally intimate.  When close make lots of eye contact.

2.    Talk Quietly  Intimate, personal talk is low-voiced, quiet talk, at least at first.  Shouting with shared exuberance may come later but until it does almost whispering does best.

3.    Talk Emotions  Learn and use the many terms for emotions.  Identify emotional feelings, ask about emotional feelings, share emotional feelings, and never leave emotional feelings out.

4.    Listen Well  Always be able to repeat back, nearly verbatim, what a loved one or an important other says to you.  Always be able to label, describe, or ask about the emotions involved in what you heard.

5.    Touch Carefully  First, softly touch the hard parts like shoulders, elbows, wrists, etc.  And later softer parts. At first, hug gently but then firmly and strongly.

6.    Reveal Private Feelings  Going ‘psychologically naked’, more and more, is essential for intimacy development.  Revealing the emotions you have and sometimes the physical feelings, along with behaviors and thoughts, history, hopes, etc. is required.

7.    Respect and Accept Revelations and Sharings  Usually with kindness and without shock judgment or criticism receive what others intimately share and reveal.

8.    Expressionally Communicate Lots  Facial expression, tonal expression, gestural expression, and postural expression often are more important than verbal expressions.

9.    Show Care  Have real care for what another is experiencing and show it, be it happiness, or agony, or the most mundane of things.

10.    Adventure Together Emotionally  Create and seek out experiences you can jointly experience together that are likely to engender emotions be they strong, delicate, tender, inspiring, surprising, reassuring, intense, serene, ecstatic, moving or anything else.

11.    Take and Make Time  Make and take the time it takes to have emotional intimacy and don’t rush it.

12.    Empathize Frequently  Emotional intimacy takes joining with another by empathetically and sometimes passionately sharing their pains, and pleasures and also their mediocre times.  Avoid becoming emotionally distant, distracted, absent or frequently attitudinally against those you would love and be emotionally intimate with.

Hopefully these 12 points will help you grow your intimacy-making love skills. Of course, there’s lots more to learn so probably you will need to venture into this topic more.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you fantasize and then analyze what would be a wonderfully, emotionally, intimate experience for you and your most beloved?

Related posts:

1. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill
2. Touching Back – A Surprisingly Important Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
5. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill 

Forgiveness, Tolerational Love’s Sister

Mini-Love-Lesson #284

Synopsis: How growing tolerational love moves us toward forgiveness, freeing ourselves from self-sabotage and a more powerful, healthier future with others when it is done with heart and head working together.

Toleration involves putting up with Forgiveness involves letting go of. Tolerational love involves both.

A psychological understanding of forgiveness encompasses a mindful decision to reduce or free oneself from anger, vengefulness, obsessiveness and other hurtful and self-harmful, reactive states.  Other definitions of forgiveness include concepts like mercy, understanding (mentally and emotionally), clemency, absolution, forbearance and the like.  Remember, an understanding of tolerance is an ongoing willingness to endure negative feelings.  Tolerance also can be acknowledgment of people, ideas and behaviors different than our own.  Forgiveness and toleration, like sisters, can be found hanging-out together.

When we hold onto emotional pain, resentment, anger or hurt, it can harm us more than the person we felt hurt by.  When we forgive, we release the toxic negative and that helps us heal; this is an act of self-healing.  When we do not take things personally, it frees us up to be more tolerant by avoiding being trapped in a blame and defend cycle.  Forgiveness also means the noxious event does not continue to eat at us.  Forgiveness lessens pain’s grip on us.  It may occasionally resurface but usually not as strongly or as frequently if forgiveness is purposefully reactivated. 

When we ruminate on our resentment, anger, desire for revenge, hatred or other bad feelings, it can mean we are surrendering our power to change.  We also, in a sense, are giving away our power to the person or event that was the trigger of our pain.  True forgiveness helps us to regain our power, freeing us to live in the present, not the past.  We would do well to accept that we can’t change the past.  Forgiveness empowers us to have more mastery over our own emotional life in the present and the future.  That can make forgiveness an act of healthy self-love as well as love of another.

Tolerance can be a path to forgiveness which sets us free to be more understanding, empathetic and compassionate -- which are core components of tolerational love.  

8 Zen Habits To Forgiveness

    • Commit to letting go

    • Contemplate the pros and cons of letting go or holding on to the pain

    • Realize that we can make choices for how we feel and act

    • Focus on being empathetic

    • Take responsibility for our share of the difficulty

    • Focus on the present and solutions for improvement

    • Focus on being peaceful and serene

    • Focus on being compassionate

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting nor does it mean accepting, trusting, condoning or excusing maltreatment or misdeeds.  Not forgiving may be an evolutionary safety mechanism.  Being forgiving does not mean we have to suspend our cautionary suspicion which works to protect us from future ill treatment.  Not forgiving might mean we just are not ready at this time to forgive.  Forgiveness, if appropriate, can be an instrument for letting go and moving on.  Forgiveness along with tolerance often are essential for healthy, love relating.  

Have you heard the saying Betray me once, shame on you. Betray me twice, shame on me?  This speaks to the concept that sometimes there needs to be limits on repeated forgiveness.  The first infidelity may be more forgivable than the second, third or fourth.  Serial abuse can be reinforced and made worse by repeated forgiveness.  We need to be judicious about forgiveness and recognize that sometimes it may encourage unhealthy behavior.  Forgiveness, when appropriate, is a wonderful thing but when poorly applied it can backfire.  

In regard to the offender, forgiveness (if well received) may have a healing effect on them.  Forgiveness also may help them to be motivated to improve.  If they are hampered by guilt, shame or other de-powering feelings, forgiveness may help them to re-empower themselves and be more available for better relating.  

Like in a love-functional family, these sisters (tolerance and forgiveness) are conducive to harmonious, healthy and mutually supportive relating.

To help spread knowledge-based, useful information about love, please mention our site as the source of a whole lot of ways love can be done and done better. Thank you.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: When you forgive, do you feel you should give your perceived offender another chance, act nice to them or just withdraw interacting with them to protect yourself?  Or what?

Touching Back - A Surprisingly Important Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with touching back as a predictor of love success; and goes on to what not touching back does; sex love and touching back; some guidelines for touching back with love; more.

Touching Back As a Predictor of Love Success

Did you know that in a love relationship touching back is one of the best, single factors indicating a love relationship is satisfying and successful?

By ‘touching back’ we mean first receiving a loving touch then making a return action of loving touch.  This is important in all forms of love: friendship love, parent to child love, romantic love, etc.  It does not surprise most people to find out that more successful, satisfied, loving couples touch each other with love more than other not so successful and satisfied couples.

But a much better indicator of love success is reciprocal, return, touching actions.  At least that is what is reported in a recent edition of the magazine, Psychology Today, in a fairly comprehensive article on various aspects of the importance of touch.  However, there are some particulars concerning touching back after being touched which make touching back with love a little more involved than you might think.
Think of a person who loves you, softly caressing your cheek or of a person encircling their arms around you and giving you, what for you would be, the perfect hug.  Now think of a person who loves you reaching out to hold your hand or gently rubbing their fingers across your arm.
At this site, under the Subject Index heading “Touch”, consult the “50 Varieties of Love Touch” mini-love-lesson.

What Not Touching Back Does

Think of what you feel when you say hello to someone and they do not say hello back.  Think of what you feel if you stick your hand out to shake hands with someone and they don’t put their hand out to meet yours.  Many people feel a sense of rejection, or non-acceptance or having been judged very negatively.  In more subtle, subconscious ways it’s pretty much the same for many situations in which touching back could occur but it does not.

Not touching back when you have been touched lovingly can have a corrosive effect on your love relationships.  The indications are that the more you touch back and give reciprocal contact the more your love bonding together will occur.  And it appears the more you don’t touch back with love when physically touched with love the more likely it is that your love relationship may erode and come to an end.

One of the more powerful ways to send ‘a rejection message’ to someone who is trying to heal a wounded relationship is to angrily say to them “don’t touch me!”  And then of course there is ‘turning a cold shoulder’ which powerfully tells someone that you are not about to lovingly reconnect with them yet, if ever.

What Touching Back with Love Accomplishes

One understanding of love relationships goes like this: ‘for there to be a growing, real, healthy, love relationship love must be cycled’.  To do this you send out love messages that are taken in by another.  This by itself does not create an ongoing, love relationship.  For a ongoing and possibly lasting, love relationship, the person who takes in love must then send love back by love actions and messages which forms a first loop of a love cycle.  Then that process must continue and that cycling is what grows relationships stronger, bigger and better.

Tactile or touch love is one of the most essential ways for that to happen.  We now know that the neurochemical, oxytocin, which helps the process of living beings to feel emotionally bonded with each other, is created in the brain when tactile love is experienced, especially in the cyclically way just described.  Other healthy, positive brain chemistry changes, stimulated by loving touch, are also suspected to be occurring.  Being lovingly touched back is especially good for helping people not feel isolated but rather supported, safe and included.

One simple, but often surprisingly effective things I do in couples, parent/child and family therapy, is request people to experiment with loving touch and giving loving touch back.  I once had a couple do this little experiment of touching each other’s hands and touching back, focusing on doing it with love.  For over 10 years they had not touched each other in any friendly or positive way.  They hesitantly experimented with the ‘touching and touching back’ of each other’s hands.  They ended up weeping in each other’s arms, vowing to make up for all the time they had lost.

I have seen long estranged family members, parents and their adult children, and people in broken friendships get very similar results.  I’ve also seen people hold their arms wide open to receive another and that other refuse the offer, so the touching back experience did not occur and the relationship continued to dysfunction until we found other ways to improve it.

Touching Back and Loving Children

See this picture.  Two parents are talking with each other and each parent has their child standing next to them.  A very loud, big, powerful and angry sounding dog begins to bark in the background.  Both children grab their parents legs and squeeze up close.  One parent reaches down and pets their child’s head and caresses their shoulder reassuringly.  The other parent makes no reciprocal touch action in response to their child’s touch.  Which child is going to start crying?  Which child is more likely to soon be easily agitated, and then if not reassuringly touched, withdraw and possibly that night have a nightmare about big, mean, scary dogs?  The research on parent/child attachment pretty much shows the lovingly touched child will be more strong and secure, self-confident and more okay later in life.

There is an older school of thought that says ‘if you want to make your child independent and tough you don’t touch them, so they learn how to handle it on their own’.  Most of the results on this approach, that I am aware of, do not point to that being a healthful strategy. This school of thought was once so popular that the US government sent out pamphlets to new parents advising that they avoid giving touch to their children, which supposedly, was pampering and weakening their character.  They stopped this when real research showed opposite results to be occurring.

Touching Back Friends And Family

If a friend gives you a hug, or pats you on the back or makes some other form of physical contact with you which perhaps expresses friendship love, what do you do?  If other friends express their affection for one another physically do you feel embarrassed?  If a male and a female hug, or two females hug, or two males hug do you interpret it as sexual?  If people in public touch and touch back romantically, have you been programmed to identify it as ‘inappropriate’ or worse.  There is a suspicion that the people who lovingly touch each other and touch each other back cause the least trouble in the world.  There is some evidence to suggest that friends who do not touch each other with friendship love are less likely to form deep, lasting friendships.

Lots of people do not touch back their same-sex friends because they have a certain amount of homophobic fear.  This also occurs in some families.  A family-reconciliation counselor who works mostly with families that are having difficulties because one of the family members is homosexual gives this test.  She says, “Can you get to where you hug your homosexual family member just as easily and vigorously as you do any other family member?”  She then gets them to practice.  One thing to examine is this question, “What is the difference you make happen when a male and a female friend or family member touches you and you have a ‘touch them back’ opportunity?

Sex, Love and Touching Back

Some people seem to identify all touch with sex.  Some do not know how to differentiate love and sex, and when to show one and not the other.  If you get a loving touch that has no sexuality in it and then interpret it as having sexuality or being primarily sexual, the way you give a touch back may be relationally destructive and quite unwelcome.  If someone touches your shoulder, or elbow or perhaps your knee (all hard parts of your body) that touch is probably not sexual.  If they stroke your inner thigh it probably is sexual.  A kiss on your forehead usually is not at all the same thing as having someone else’s tongue in your mouth.  It is quite possible for loving touch to drift into including some sexuality.  What is important here is mutuality.  If both people who are lovingly touching each other mutually become sexually reciprocal, it may be pretty much okay.

Misreading the signs of reciprocity is where many people make mistakes.  It is important to remember, love is far more important than sex.  When sexual touching back occurs in response to what is primarily a love touch the love relationship can be harmed.  Therefore, usually it is very useful to go rather slowly into that which might become sexual.  Making sexuality overwhelm the expressions of love or push it aside can be problematic to a ‘just beginning’ or to an ‘ongoing’ love relationship.  Here’s a good thing to examine in yourself.  Study which of your actions are more likely to convey love as primary and which may convey sex to be of primary importance to you.  Also examine the question ‘do you interpret other’s touch actions as sexual when primarily they may be trying to convey love?

If two people are lovingly holding and caressing each other and it becomes more sexual, that can be a very good thing.  Here too, mutuality is important.  If one person is laying quite still while being lovingly and sexually touched, their actions may be interpreted as being too much like “a cold fish”.  Mutual touching back action is the cure for that.  As one client said, “One of the most wonderful things my husband and I do is curl up in each other’s arms and mutually hold and fondle each other’s genitals after having had sex.  Sometimes we go to sleep that way and it is incredibly intimate and special.”

There are people who just want to be touched and do not think about touching back sexually or with love.  There also are other people who are uncomfortable receiving touchback experiences.  They make it very hard for the cycle we’ve previously talked about to occur.  Generally the more two people are simultaneously lovingly and/or sexually touching, caressing, petting, stroking, etc. each other the better.  However, taking turns, where the giving and receiving and then giving of the touch back cycle can be fully concentrated upon and absorbed, also is a good option for many couples.

Some Guidelines For Touching Back with Love

∙    At first ‘Touchback’ in ways similar to how you were touched.  The same amount of pressure, energy, speed, the amount of area and the type of area touched on you will provide a guide for the first touching back.  Then if you receive additional touchback, in turn, you may wish to expand your own touching back.  If someone puts a hand on your leg while you’re riding in the car you might want to place your hand on their leg (as long as it doesn’t interfere with driving).  If someone reaches to hold your hand, give a similar hold back with a little squeeze, about like they squeezed your hand, as your hands came together.  Your touchback does not have to be a copy of theirs but if at first it is similar, the experience is more likely to go well.

∙    Talk over ways you like to be touched and ask about ways the other person likes to be touched back.  The more people who love each other ‘get really clear’ about how they want to be touched and how they like to give touch the better their touching relationship is likely to go.  The only way to get truly clear is with clear message sending and receiving.  Some people go for years getting hugs too tight or too soft, or too low or too high, or in some other way not just right for them just because they never clearly ask for what they truly want.

∙    Always be willing to experiment with new and different ways of touching back.  For instance, have you tried the ‘two hands on one’ return handshake, or the ‘love nudge’ at the movies, the ‘playing footsy’ under the table, the ‘pick them up and twirled around’ when they hug you response, or the ‘hold their face gently in your hands and kiss their eyelids’ return love action?

∙    Notice every time you are touched.  Some people do not, and without awareness there is little chance that they will, give a loving touch in return.  While you practice noticing, be careful about misinterpreting the touch you are receiving.  Is it conveying friendship love, sexuality, is it somehow controlling or otherwise negative, is it sympathetic, empathetic, sweet, saccharine, possessive, etc.?  There are many possibilities.  Your interpretation gives guidance to how you will give a return touch and whether or not it will be one of love.

Well, dear reader, at least for a while, are you going to give some thought to your love expressional, touching back actions?  Are you going to develop your touching back love skill more?

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
In regard to loving touch back actions, growing up what was modeled for you in your family and are you currently guided by that?

Related posts:

1. Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four
2. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
5. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill 

Infidelity and Love Info Silo - Love Dysfunction, Avoid It!

Synopsis: This mini love lesson deals with the question of what infidelity really is; New World infidelity; answers if it is the act or the agreement; considers if couples should breakup over infidelity; explores whether infidelity means he or she does not love me; considers forgiveness; and more.

What Is Infidelity Really?

Wow, do people vary on what they call infidelity.  Celeste said, “If you look at another woman for more than 30 seconds you’re cheating”.  Breck said, “My wife and I agree that it is okay to have sex with someone else when you’re more than 100 miles away from home.  So for us infidelity is sex with someone else within 100 miles”.

Kerri expressed that “it doesn’t matter what one does with their own or anyone else’s body, it only matters what they do with their heart. Heart infidelity is the only kind that really counts”.  Alfred proclaimed, “If you even think about another with lust you already have been unfaithful, committed infidelity, and you are an adulterer”.  Jeannie replied to Alfred, “If that is true, one might as well go ahead and have sex with anybody that strikes your fancy because I think just about everybody thinks about others with lust, and they may be weird if they don’t”.

Maurice told of his wife temporarily leaving him after finding him looking at porn on the Internet because she thought that was being unfaithful.  Later he discovered her reading the raunchiest sex scenes imaginable, which explicitly were described in her so-called romance novels.  Dolores said, “For us it’s about being excluded.  My husband and I do lots of threesome sex with our friends, and sometimes foursomes too.  If we did it without the other one present that would be an act of infidelity.
Jennifer said, “My husband, Jarrett, and I have agreed not to do anything that would endanger us bringing a disease home, so it’s really about ‘safe sex’ for us and, of course, no unwanted pregnancies please.

Marlowe remarked, “Where I come from having intercourse secretly with somebody other than your spouse is being unfaithful but oral sex, anal sex and everything else, except intercourse, doesn’t qualify as infidelity.  “I disagree strongly”, said Lucille.  “Infidelity starts with flirting, a passionate kiss is going way too far, and everything and anything beyond that is certainly infidelity and betrayal”.  Carl said, “I think it’s any time you break an important promise of any kind”.
As you can see, people can have very different ideas about this thing we call infidelity.  In couples counseling I’ve seen many couples disagree on what is  infidelity and this is an issue which is getting a lot more complicated.

New World Infidelity

Are you being unfaithful if you do mild flirting online with people you will never meet? How about talking really dirty and super-raunchy seductive online?  What about just listening to others do that?  Then there is online sex talk while mutually masturbating, and also having Skype sex with strangers.
A couple came to me and he was arguing she was unfaithful because her Avatar (a sort of alter ego, comic book like character she created online) was having sex with other people’s avatars in Second Life (an online, elaborate, alternate cyberspace world).  She said that was ridiculous, and it was just naughty fun and he shouldn’t be such an old world prude.  What do you think?

Is It the Act or the Agreement?

I like to suggest to couples that, from a very heart-centered position, they try to talk with each other about what they sexually want, might want, don’t want and could conceivably come to want.  Then I like to suggest that they make an agreement about what’s okay for now.  I also suggest that they include in that agreement a sort of clause that allows for renegotiation later.  That’s because people change and renegotiation discussions, done with love, may prevent a lot of trouble.

There are some husbands who say “my wife will never agree to the new and different things I’m starting to want to do” and there are some wives who say “my husband would never understand some of my wants”, gender role reversal of these statements happens also.  Then there are the lovers who are just too scared to bring up anything different than the standard stuff.

Sometimes it takes a lot of love and courage to deal with the truth of human nature.  Most unfortunately many couples don’t renegotiate their fidelity agreement until after one of them, or maybe both of them, has broken the original agreement.  So many people make fidelity agreements out of doing what they think is expected of them rather than what really fits them.

No small number secretly know or suspect they won’t keep a fidelity/infidelity agreement they enter into, but they make it anyway because it’s what people are supposed to do.  I like to suggest couples think about custom-tailoring their relationship with one another as that is a more unique, loving thing to do.  As you’ve seen from the above examples, couples fidelity agreements can come in a lot of different forms.

A Loving Approach to Another’s Infidelity

If you discover that your beloved has been unfaithful to you what should you do?  The first thing to do is don’t do anything immediately.  The best act of healthy self-love, which you’re probably going to need a lot of, is to go very slowly and do not do anything rash.  Definitely don’t make any impulsive life-changing decisions.

The next thing to do is notice your pain and if possible do something healthy to ease it.  Some people go to a good friend or family member and talk and get care and hugs.  Some people say a lot of self-affirming things and give themselves a hug.  Others do a lot of praying.  Various acts of healthy self-love definitely are in order.

Then it’s time to try thinking things through, difficult though that may be.  Getting help from a counselor, or therapist, or minister or someone like that can do a lot of good.

At some point going to your beloved and asking them to work with you on what’s happened, what it means, and what’s to be done about it is necessary if you’re going to have a healthy outcome.
Going into a rage, running to a lawyer and filing for divorce, becoming physically violent, or getting immediately lost in drugs or alcohol are all on the what not to do list.  I’m biased, but couples counseling is ever so frequently the best thing to do about it.  Be sure you go to a licensed couples counselor or couples therapist, not just an individual therapist because they often don’t know what to do that will help you as a couple.

At some point it will be important to note and work to understand where your pain really comes from.  In these situations a great deal of it may come from the way you were raised to think about infidelity.  Lots of people around the world take infidelity very seriously, and lots of people around the world do not take it very seriously and those, therefore, are not so severely effected by infidelity.  Those less severely affected seem to get healthier, more constructive results when infidelity does occur.  It’s amazing how much of your psychological pain can come from your culture and from your family upbringing and if you had been raised differently it might not hurt as much.

You can take a very loving approach to your unfaithful beloved.  The people who do that usually get the best results in the long run.  If you loved them before, just because you discovered they were unfaithful doesn’t mean you stop loving them.  Remember, a lot of people have said things like “love cures all ailments of the heart” and “love can conquer all”.   With lots of healthy self-love and with lots of hard-working, and maybe with heavy doses of ‘tough love’, things may be able to get better than they ever were before in your couples love relationship.

A Loving Approach to Your Own Infidelity

If you desire to do actions which your beloved would count as being unfaithful and you know if they discover your actions of infidelity they will hurt a lot, you have a lot of thinking to do.  If you’ve already done some of those actions you still have a lot of thinking to do.  What are you doing and why are you doing it?  Those questions are easy to ask but without assistance may be nearly impossible to actually answer thoroughly and accurately.

I like to suggest that you start with wondering about your own healthy self-love.  Lots of infidelity is done as an attempt at doing some sort of, possibly needed, favor or boost to the self.  I also like to suggest that you be as loving as you possibly can be to your beloved and to everybody else around.
Too many people having an affair start treating their spouse with indifference or distancing actions usually out of guilt or worse.  The situation needs more love and probably more truth.  I suggest that ‘beating yourself up’ with a lot of guilt, shame, self negation, etc. usually just makes everything get worse.  A better idea is to make the best ‘response-able’ set of actions happen.  Again a good, love-knowledgeable counselor may prove invaluable.

I recommend you consider taking a very love-centered approach to yourself, to your spouse and even to the other person involved, along with anyone else effected like children, family, etc..  Then work toward being able to live truthfully.

Know that having an affair or anything like that has been discovered to usually cause a lot of stress-related health problems and also quite a bit of poor self-care.  It won’t help anyone if you ruin your health, have a stroke or heart attack and turn into an invalid.  Take your vitamins, exercise, do things that relax you, etc.  With love and truth, and often with the help of a good, love-knowledgeable therapist, people get through all this and come out on the other side often better than when they went in.

A Dozen Common Reasons That Infidelity Happens

1. Genetic Predisposition  A wealth of recent, scientific evidence points to people being predisposed, especially those who may have a strong sex drive, and, therefore, being subconsciously compelled toward having sexual and perhaps emotional relations with a variety of people.
Some evidence suggests that people of higher than average quality, talent and psychosocial strengths may be especially so predisposed.  This is referring to ‘traits’ not a moral imperative.  That makes sense in an evolutionary way for the good of the human race because it keeps mixing the gene pool with higher quality contributions.

2. Love Starvation  People who are under-loved are much like people who are underfed. Their survival mechanisms push them to become adequately fed.  Love works much like a psychological food and so people subconsciously and automatically seek it where they can find it when they don’t have enough nourishment in their regular life.

3. Ego Boost  Romance, sex, being pursued, seduced etc. is for many people a great ego boost and they feel much better about themselves and their life, but perhaps they also feel guilty when they intimately have been with someone else.

4. Family And/or Cultural Programming   Many people’s families or the subcultural group that they grew up in subconsciously programmed them for infidelity.  For many being unfaithful is ‘just what you do’, while at the same time giving lip service to standard morality.

5. Establishing Intimate Independence  Infidelity, for a fair number of people, is a secret way to establish their own, independent, intimate selves.  By way of infidelity they privately see themselves as not controlled by society, religion, their parents, their spouse, etc. but rather by only themselves.

6. Curiosity  A bunch of people just have to find out what it would be like.  Others may have established a mated relationship early in their lives without experiencing other relationships.

7. Adventure  A major way quite a few people make their life interesting, full of excitement, drama, a sense of being fully alive, etc. is through acts involving infidelity.

8. Desire for Variety  Some people just are not going to be monogamous although they can be very loyal in a polyamore or other alternate lifestyle arrangement.

9. Revenge  There are those who get into infidelity as an act of vengeance because their spouse either cheated on them or has been particularly unloving or difficult in other ways.

10. Emotional Compensation  Some people are proving to themselves and others that they still are attractive, ‘have what it takes’, still are potent, can keep up with their infidelity-prone peer group or a group they identify with, or may be trying to give themselves evidence that they are not yet dysfunctionally old or decrepit, etc.

11. Avoiding Regrets  There are those who want to make sure they are not going to miss out on any major ‘psycho-emotional trips’ that other people get to go on in life and which they might regret missing.   Infidelity, a love affair, a higher number of conquests, etc. are on their secret ‘bucket list’.

12. Seeking a New and Better Love Mate This is the one almost everybody fears and it can be true both subconsciously and consciously.  Thus, some people may be involved in infidelity without consciously knowing they are actively seeking a better love mate.

There are lots of other reasons infidelity occurs.  The one most talked about in many circles is the infidelity which occurs when there is something wrong in the marriage or love relationship.  Lots of people jump to that conclusion.  A lot of other people jump to the conclusion that they are in some way sexually or relationally inferior, so they start blaming themselves a lot which usually makes things worse.

The other unloving source of infidelity is to think of the ‘unfaithful’ person as very blameworthy i.e. ‘a dog, a slut, a scumbag, a whore, etc.  Other blaming and self-blaming usually don’t lead anywhere worth going, and certainly don’t add accurate understanding to the picture.

Should a Couple Breakup over Infidelity?

Most of what I see suggests strongly that people who breakup over infidelity later very often wish they had not.  Most couples who use an infidelity experience as a motivation to work on improving their relationship usually are very glad they did so.

The wounds of infidelity frequently are very hard to repair.  However, with a lot of love, truth and reassurance relationships often can grow stronger than they were before the infidelity. Of course, that is only true if both people in the relationship are working at it with lots of love and truth.  Certainly a breakup is more likely to be necessary if there are a lot of repeated infidelities with lots of lies, deception, dishonesty, manipulation, etc. accompanied by a lot of emotional pain and life chaos.

Does Infidelity Mean He or She Doesn’t Love Me Anymore?

Quite frequently infidelity doesn’t mean any such thing.  As the above List of 12 Reasons people get into an infidelity experience shows, a lot of other causal factors may be involved.

What About Forgiveness?

Love is forgiving.  Love can forgive anything and everything.  To do that it has to be strong and great love.  1) Forgiving oneself, 2) forgiving one’s partner and 3) forgiving the way you both, in accidental teamwork, did not avoid the infidelity – all three usually are required.
The inability to forgive may be linked to low self-love.  It is important to remember that in ‘healthy self-love’ one always can be cautious and adequately self protective while at the same time be forgiving.  See the entry in the Subject Index under Behavior titled “Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love”

Learn More

There is ever so much more to learn about this subject, and learning more about it may do you and those you care about a lot of good.  To learn more go to the Problems and Pain entries under the Subject Index at this site and dig in.  In particular you might want to take a look at the entries titled “Adultery and No Divorce Love”, “Love Affairs: Bad, Good and Otherwise” and “Trust and Mistrust in Love”.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question If infidelity enters your life will you do love well enough not to let it destroy anything really valuable to your heart?