Good Time for More Love Learning?

Mini-Love-Lesson  #269

Synopsis: Making very good, helpful, interesting and possibly fun-filled use of your time while socially isolated alone or together by searching into more of the many ways love knowledge is being discovered and spread is the topic of this mini-love-lesson.  It also presents some pretty intriguing sources for the more engaged, deeper, probing students of love and love related topics.

Useful Fun Time Learning?

Might this be a good time for you, or you and yours together, to learn more about love?  There is so much that is new and wonderful being discovered concerning love and all the great things it does for us.  Exciting research into healing love, parent-child love, altruistic love, lasting couples love, love and the brain sciences and hundreds of other “loveology” topics are opening up for meaningful investigation.  They are revealing amazing and highly useful love knowledge we all can use.  At same time, other efforts are working to spread the ancient truths of love taught by various great teachers and wisdom masters of the world’s diverse cultures, societies and religions.  This is making a fresh, possible, worldwide integration of love understandings and the many ways to go about doing love well.

Love knowledge is starting to be applied in areas of life where healthy, real, love ideas and concepts were seldom applied before.  Take for example, how concepts of healthful love are beginning to be introduced into politics.  This is evidenced by the love platform candidate, Marianne Williamson, who made it all the way to several of the US, nation wide TV, Democratic Party presidential debates.  Politically minded people also are increasingly reading about politics and love, as in books like Love and Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer and A Politics of Love by Marianne Williamson.

The Pandemic: A Forced Opportunity for Love Learning

The 2020 pandemic is forcing us to learn how to do love in spite of isolation and safe living rules about do not touch and stay apart.  Some are adapting to the new challenges and requirements and some are not, or are not yet.  Far too many are becoming increasingly lonely, depressed and essentially love-malnourished or even love-starved.  Thus, we all are challenged to find fresh ways to love one another as we love ourselves through this worldwide crisis (see “Isolated and Doing Love Anyway”).

If you are one of the millions who really enjoy learning, this can be a good time for you in that way.  You can use it for learning about the ever widening, fascinating and fun-filled world of growing love knowledge, hopefully like you are right now.  However, there are a couple of caveats.  As you may already know, you may have to wade through a lot of fact-free nonsense, misleading falsehoods and useless puff stuff about love to find the good stuff.  Then I suggest discussing what you are learning and thinking about love with others.  As you do this, maybe you will discover some blocks to learning about love in yourself or in others.

Getting Past the Blocks to Love Learning

Learning about love is probably not as easy as it should be.  There is a lot in the way.  First, of all, as the Buddhist Sage, Thich Nhat Hanh, points out, the word love itself is sick and in need of rehabilitation.  It is often used in frivolous, inconsequential and trivialized ways such as in “I love that food, hat, tune or whatever”.  At other times it is synonymous with loveless sex.  There are those such as forensic specialists that see love as something that is all too often possessive, jealous, insane and essentially as a dangerous, destructive and even deadly force in life.  A multitude of others do not look deeply into love because they see it as only a romantic myth, and/or a made up fantasy entity of no actual substance or consequence.  For others it is just too confusing and indefinite to even try to become current, or up-to-date about.

Some dismiss the importance of love in ordinary human life as too contaminated, earthly, profane and common.  For them, the word Love is worthwhile only when used in a holy, religious context.  There are other blocks to learning about love too numerous to discuss here.  Even with all that to get past, finding material on healthy, real love and its dynamics proves to be well worthwhile, but of course I am biased about the subject (see “Is Love Ignorance the Problem?”).

Until rather recently, psychiatry, psychology and even marriage and family therapy have had only a little to say about healthy, real love.  In the behavioral sciences love often has been seen as a pathology, a sub-topic of sexuality or only as being about shallow, sophomoric romance.  I find it interesting that it took an animal, comparative experimental, laboratory-oriented psychologist studying monkeys (Harry Harlow) to get the general field of psychology to pay any useful attention to love itself.  Now, the newer field of positive psychology offers love a real place in behavioral science.  Much of the best knowledge about love has come from child psychology and before that pediatric medicine.

The importance of love started to be seen by scientists with the early 1900s discovery that infants physically died when they did not receive love conveying actions, even though they were otherwise well taken care of, fed, clothed, etc.  Harlow discovered the same thing for monkey babies in the 50s.  There really is a fascinating history of love discoveries to learn about if you have a mind to search for it.  You might enjoy reading Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum.  For dramatic, engaged and intrigued learning about the early struggles for a science of love, I recommend The Practice of Love by Ashley Montagu.

The media and the Internet offer a plethora of, in my opinion, juvenile and irrelevant mishmash on love, mixed with the occasional jewel of worthwhile, usable and sometimes even inspiring information about love.  Intriguingly, it is Russia that seems to be the country where love is being taken most seriously.  It is there that loveology is an authorized, natural science complete with research grants and advanced degree programs (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology?”).

In spite of all the blocks, you can find, with some effort, very useful, enjoyable to learn sources about healthy, real love and how to do it well if you look for it.  Naturally, I recommend this site for doing just that, but as I have said I am biased and probably prejudiced and opinionated too.

To Learn Love, Get Yourself to Read and Talk More about Love!

Look for some good books to read about love.  Remember, the latest book is seldom the best book on any topic so look for some of the older ones as you search.  The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm is still one of the best for many people.  A more recent one, Teachings on Love by the renowned Buddhist sage, Thich Nanh Hanh, has a lot to offer.  The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman helps a lot of people with couples love, although there are more than five major ways to convey love according to the research.  Of course, for those seeking to recover from or avoid love problems I honestly and heartily recommend our contributions Recovering Love and Real Love, False Love.  Perhaps easiest and quickest is to keep picking entries from this sites over 250 mini-love-lessons.  Some readers pick One-A-Day and report getting a lot out of that approach.  The real point is to keep seeking and gathering input about love so that your outgo about love is always fresh and growing (see “How Love Works - 7 Basics”).

With what you read while isolated, talk to others via phone, Skype, Zoom and other similar services.  Bring up love and love topics seeing what others think and, in the process, developing your own thoughts further.  If you are isolated or mostly isolated together with a Love Mate or family or friends, etc., you can learn and talk together discussing the many aspects of love as you learn about them.  For many, this is great way to develop your own understanding much further.  Some make agreements to read the same material and at regular, preset times talk about it in an online, book club fashion (see “Learning about Love - Together”).

Using whatever degree of social isolation you are practicing, you may utilize that time to ready your love abilities for a freer future.  In the meantime, you can increase your love knowledge about a great many love related things, perhaps starting with protective love as it relates to healthy self-love, family love, mate love and other love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: In this pandemic time, who are you going to tell two or three things about what you are doing by way of protective, healthy self-love and for self nurturing -followed by asking them about what they are doing?

Real vs. False Self-Love: a Key to Successful Couples Love

Synopsis: Here we explore questions of how healthy self-love helps a couple’s relationship and how false self-love harms it; what may be getting in the way of healthy self-love and the help it can give love relationships; how healthy self-love goes beyond self-esteem; and how healthy self-love is one of the keys to healthy, lasting, couple’s love.

Couples Love and Self-Love

It is likely you have heard it said, “To love another you must first love yourself” and maybe then heard something like “that is the key or a key to succeeding in couple’s love.”  It might be more accurate, although not as simple and catchy, to say “To romantically, and as an adult, succeed at couple’s love, healthy real self-love can be extraordinarily important”.  There are quite a few ways healthy self-love supports healthy, successful, couple’s love.  There also are a number of things that get in the way of developing healthy, real self-love which in turn negatively affects couple’s love and all other forms of love relationships.  One of the most important is your attitude toward self-love.

How Have You Been Taught to Think and Feel about Self-Love?

In many places it still is taught and preached that self-love is to be considered a serious sin or at least a very bad and selfish thing.  It wasn’t until the late 1800's that the super-influential psychologist, William James, put forth the idea that there were two kinds of self-love that were actually positive.  One had to do with feeling positive affection for oneself which helps with enjoying life and the other was about self protection which, of course, helps with survival.

Not much happened with that idea until Dr. Eric Fromm in the 1950's in The Art of Loving pointed out how important self-love was not only to survival but also to loving others.  This positive view of loving yourself was very controversial and much condemned in many authoritative religious and dominant philosophical circles, much as it had been since the Middle Ages.  In the highly influential theology of Calvin and the equally important philosophy of Kant, self-love was reasoned to be extremely destructive to individuals, to society and, furthermore, it was seen as spiritually corrupting.

Whether you know it or not consciously, it is likely you have been influenced by those leaders and other standards setters of commonly accepted moral thought.  If so you may be subconsciously prejudiced against self-love or at least conflicted about it.  If you are even only moderately anti-self-love consciously or subconsciously, that is likely to be harming your love relationships.  That is according to recent clinical thinking in couple’s and family therapy and research on the effects of negative thinking about yourself.

What We Do Not Mean by “Self-Love”

By self-love we do not mean being egotistic, narcissistic, hedonistic, self-indulgent, selfish, uncaring, having a me first attitude, or anything like what those words refer to.  Those words, in fact, describe characteristics of false self-love.  Healthy, real self-love actually is seen as leading away from those character traits rather than toward them.  That is what a growing body of recent psychosocial and clinical research points to.  People who become narcissistic, egotistical, etc. are clinically viewed as trying to make up for a lack of love in their life, especially self-love.  They just are going about it in a very poor way.  As one little kid in children’s therapy once put it, “There’s a hole in my self-love bucket and I can’t plug the leak – yet.).

Getting into “As” and Its Magnificent Importance

We want you to get into the word “as” and what it can really mean.  It can mean at the same time, in the same way, to the same degree and along with.  Now apply that to the great, early, Hebrew admonition which also is the second of only two commandments from the Christian’s Jesus teaching that goes “love others AS you love yourself.  This statement also is interpreted as “love your neighbor as you love yourself”; neighbor being explained as everyone you may have any effect on.

If you love another as you love yourself, you highly value both, you are concerned with, desire for, and when possible act for and take pleasure in the well-being of both.  You also enjoy both in many ways, are protective of both, have a strong sense of connection about both, you wish to nurture both, and if possible you work to heal both if sick or injured.  All this and more is encapsulated in what is meant by “AS”.

Going Beyond Self-Esteem

Some people get self-esteem and self love confused with each other.  Healthy, real self-love definitely includes but goes far beyond self-esteem, sense of self-worth, self respect, positive self regard, self appreciation, etc.  The kind of love we are talking about here involves a feeling of strong, genuine affection toward our own person, a big sense of awe about one’s self, an appreciative curiosity for discovering more about ourselves, a constructive desire for being healthy and happy and for doing the self-care involved in that, and involves the spiritual joy of being in existence.  There is pride but there also is a thankfulness for all the good fortune involved in becoming who one is.  There also is great  gratitude for being the unique work of art that we can experience ourselves to be.

This is different from the false form of love of the narcissistic egotist who looks down on others and falsely elevates himself, taking all credit for who they try to see themselves as being.  With healthy self-love there is self honoring but not looking down at others.  Instead healthy self-loving people look across to others as equals while appreciating differences seeing others also as unique works of art.  It is a self-love that motivates us to love others ever better as part of our own self-fulfillment.  From that comes a love of life, of others, of nature, of art, etc. which in turn makes us far better people with much more to offer the world and those we love.

Learning about Self-Love for Couple’s Love

There are many important reasons for learning the differences between real and false love and applying that knowledge to self-love.  One good reason is it is healthy self-love to avoid the various forms of couple’s false love that can ruin your life.  Another good reason is it also is healthy self-love to convert destructive couple’s false love to real love, or if you can not convert it to the real thing it is healthy self-love to escape toxic, couple’s false love.  These are some of the reasons Kathleen McClaren and I wrote our e-book, Real Love False Love.  It is the first and so far only book known to us which covers 12 Major Forms of destructive, false love.  Real Love False Love also offers quite a few fresh, different, very practical ways of understanding and dealing with all sorts of love issues.  It details how you can tell the real from the false along with many fresh ideas for attaining the real thing. (Real Love, False Love is now available at Amazon.com: Kindle e-books link at a new low price.  If you get it there, we would be ever so delighted if you give it a brief review and a rating – yes, that is a plug).

How Healthy Self-Love Improves Couples Love

When we love ourselves we feel good about ourselves.  Not all the time, but often.  When we feel good about ourselves we know we have something to offer and want to offer it and help those we love to feel good about themselves too.  We enjoy them better and enjoy life with them better.  When we have low self-love, we tend to be down on ourselves much more frequently and that makes us less for those we love.  To love someone well, it helps to often be up and to be able to participate with energy, with up emotions and when necessary with empathy and caring.  Low self-love leads to low and poor, quality output in just about everything, including in our love relationships.  Creativity, motivation, loving interaction, sexuality, generosity, sharing and many more, all suffer in relationships where there is low, healthy, real self-love.

How False Self Love Harms Couple’s Love

False self-love tends to bring on defensiveness, selfishness, arrogance, conceit, disdain, being overbearing, deceitfulness to hide inadequacies and to appear as having more worth and okayness than is true.  Low self-love tends to result in becoming critical as a way to appear better than others and commits the mistakes and causes the harm described in Carl Jung’s “Superiority Complex”.  Superiority complexes are in fact created to cover a secret, inferiority complex.  People in this kind of false self-love can and do play a lot of destructive, psychological games of the “I’m okay, you’re not” type.  Putdowns and passive aggressive attacks are also common here.  They sometimes tend to quite subtly and sometimes more obviously tear down more than build up the people they supposedly love.  At the very least, they neglect them and cause love malnutrition.  All this, over time, can be very destructive to the supposedly loved one and to the relationship.

Another form of low self-love results in poor self-care, needless self-sacrifice, a destructive lack of confidence, under-judging one’s own competence and generally not being able to offer the best of oneself because of self negation.  Those who have good self-love know they have quality to offer and they offer it much more freely and frequently.  Those with false self-love secretly tend to sense what they have to offer is not so great so they are much more stingy when it comes to giving of themselves.  They also sense their bucket has a leak in it so they are much more likely to be selfishly greedy working to get love rather than give it, or only giving it to get it.

To learn more about healthy self-love link to this site’s other mini-love-lessons which contain the word self-love in the title.  They can be found both in the Subject Index and the Title Index which can be found under the blue banner at the top of this site.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  How are you helping those you love, including yourself, have greater, healthy, real self-love?

Subject categories: False Love and Myths, Kinds of Love, Problems and Pain, Theories and Understandings

Keywords: self-esteem, self-confidence, couple’s love, key to success, lasting love

Love Goals and How They Can Help You and Yours

Mini-Love-Lesson  #192

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

Synopsis: The Love Goals approach, which reportedly is helping many couples, is introduced and explained, along with answers to its critics, examples of how it is used and a step-by-step prescription for putting it into your bag of love tools for improving your love relationships.

What They Are Saying about Love Goals

“Learning about setting and achieving love goals made our marriage twice as good as it was before and it wasn’t all that bad to begin with” said Mike, a ten-year married aeronautical engineer.  ”Susan, a 16 year married with three children, public health nurse told us, “Our family life and our romantic life both went to a whole new level when we started using the Love Goals approach.  It’s such a great way to teach children how to love but it’s teaching us adults a lot too.  ”Esther and Roberto both told us that using the Love Goals method was instrumental in saving their marriage, and Sophia and Jacob spoke of how having love goals got them through a very hard time.  Larry and Terry related how using love goals got them into really knowing how to succeed at doing their love and not just feeling it.

So, how would you like your love relationships to get you and yours similar, improvement results even if what you have now is really very good?  If so, be curious and read on.

What Are Love Goals

Love goals are specific love giving, conveying, sending and demonstrating behaviors that people decide to make happen so that their love relationships will be more filled with healthy, real love.  Stronger love, happier love, higher, broader and deeper love, bigger love, healthier love and more lasting love are all part of what love goals aim to achieve.  Individuals, couples, families, etc. can use them to make love happen better, bigger and more often.

Love goals can be as simple as deciding to say thank you more often and more sincerely than you usually do when talking to a loved one.  Making a goal of giving a better good morning hug to a beloved with a loving look and loving words every day for a month would be another good example of a specific love goal.

Love goals also can be a lot more comprehensive.  An example are the couples who work with Paul’s New Testament, First Corinthians list of what love is and is not (love is patient, kind, not rude, etc.) and jointly create specific goal behaviors to put into their life.  Here is a sample.  “I will make a love goal to tell myself to act with loving patience and smile lovingly at you [spouse/mate name] whenever I think you are making us run late.  I will do this instead of getting mad and critical which I now see ruins some of our time together for a while and just makes us even more late”.  Those couples work their way through all of Paul’s 16 points making specific behavioral goals to implement each of the points.  They report big improvements from doing so.

Mutual Love Goals and the Wonders They Can Work

In The Science of Happily Ever After, Dr. Ty Tashiro reports that couples who mutually make an inviolate rule to spend short periods of time together giving each other a “love fix” with words and touch every day no matter what else is happening, do far better at handling the rest of life and are physically, emotionally and relationally happier.  Dr. Carla Naumburg, author of Parenting in the Present Moment, tells of research that shows having dedicated, behavior goals of brief, daily, child involvement (and in that time making love connecting actions occur too), it results in producing healthier, happier children and better parent-child relationships.  Parents doing the same thing with each other also produce better parenting and better couple relationships.

When couples freely and jointly act to achieve mutual goals aimed at making their interactive behaviors more love-demonstrative, their relationships can be expected to move up several levels no matter where those relationships start from.  That is the conclusion of people working with the Love Goals approach.

Going from Abstract to Concrete Love Goals

Most people start with abstract ideas for love goals like being more appreciative, a better listener, more affectionate, etc.  That is good for a start but it is not going to help if you stop with that kind of broad concept that can be behaviorally enacted in too many, unspecified, different ways.  Those abstract, broad ideas have to get converted into specific, or concrete, exact behaviors before they can become exactly enacted actions.  Otherwise, they usually are just nice ideas that do not become goals that actually get achieved.

If your goal is to be more affectionate and feel closer together, you both might have to decide something like: curl up in each other’s arms, on the couch, cuddling with each other, saying only words of love, for 15 minutes, allowing no distractions or interruptions, between 7:00 and 7:30 PM Monday, Wednesday & Friday, every week for eight weeks before you evaluate the results of your love goal actions.  If this is mutually decided and agreed upon, that is an example of a well stated love goal that actually might get accomplished.  You also will need a way to calendarize, tally and track your love goal actions.  While you are at it, make it fun and enjoy it!

That is an example of what it takes to make a behavioral goal that is sufficiently clear enough to be mutually understood.  By the way, it also is good to add an alternative date and time if a cuddle time gets missed.  Then if you add an additional reward for accomplishing your goals, it is even better.
Without those kinds of specifics, most couples and families find their efforts just fade away and their love goals are not reached even though they were sincere about setting them.

In families, kids especially need these kinds of specifics in order to keep their parents on track for goal attainment which is something they are prone to do when they get really involved in love goal work.  That also is something a lot of kids are prone to do too in our experience.

Answering Love Goals Criticisms

“Why do we have to do all that?”  “Don’t we know we love each other and isn’t that enough?” “Isn’t love just done automatically?” “Doesn’t making it such an organized thing take all the fun and magic out.?” “Who has time for all that?”– These are among the criticisms leveled against the love goals approach.

The answer for all those questions goes like this.  Love works like a healthy, nourishing food.  Just think of all the purposeful, planned and organized disciplined effort that goes into getting good, healthy food from what mother nature provides all the way to fueling your own health and well-being.  It is the same for love.  Love takes behaviors to grow it, deliver it, skillfully prepare it and the actions of partaking of it.  Both food and love do not just automatically keep showing up in your life.  Somebody has to DO a lot of stuff to make that happen.  The better you can skillfully DO the actions involved, the better both food and love are.  The less you do, the more the quality and the quantity are likely to suffer.  A young client of mine once said, “I’ve learned it’s like when I don’t do enough about love, love doesn’t do enough about me”.

A Love Goals Prescription

Here is our prescription for putting love goals into your life and using them well.
Start by reading our site’s “The Definition of Love”.  Then read the mini-love-lessons that have to do with the major behaviors found to convey love “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” .  After that, preferably jointly, decide on which of the eight categories of direct love behaviors you both might want to start with.  Then choose a single, exact set of actions to take that likely would improve the way you and your love partner show each other love.  Remember to decide where, when, how often and for how long (at least a week and preferably several months) you will work as a team to practice putting that love action into your life.  Be sure not to avoid having an end date for your goals so that they do not just fade away and so that you have a chosen time to evaluate your progress.  It is then you decide to keep going or not, or what changes to make in your goals.

Here is another way to go about using love goals for growing and improving a love relationship.  Together pick any area of your relationship that you both would like to see get bigger, better, stronger, or occur more.  Or you can, pick a more specific something that you just happen to want to be different than it is.  Then make your choice as to what exact actions you will take to go toward your love goal as described above.

You can look at things you might like to see happen less or not at all.  However, then you will need to choose what exact actions you will use to put something else in its place.  Without replacement actions, it is very hard to stop whatever has been happening and which may have become a habit.  Even then, it may be a back-and-forth battle between old habit behavior and desired new replacement love goal actions.

You can do all these things individually, even secretly, but usually it works better when your love goals involve a team effort.  Of course, having individual even secret love goals is not at all a bad thing.  After all, this is about being more loving – and that’s a very good thing.

Lots of couples, families and friends use regular love goal meetings to help themselves keep benefiting from the love goals approach.  Others keep coming back to it every so often more irregularly.  Either way, see what you might want to do with purposefully putting love goals into your awareness and into your life.

Help spread love knowledge – tell someone about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How exactly might you want to, or need to, become more loving and thereby become more lovable?

You might also want to read: “The Definition of Love”, “A More Ample Definition of Love”, “Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Four”, “How to Make Love Improvements Permanent” & “Learning about Love Together”. Also for the best description of the eight classes of behavior that directly show love, see Chapter 5 How Do We Grow Intimate Love, Chapter 6 How Do We Make Love Really Show & Chapter 7 What Connects Your Love with Mine in my book Recovering Love.

Isolated and Doing Love Anyway

               

Mini-Love-Lesson  #268

Synopsis: Here we first are helped to realize the extent of how love needs are increasingly going unmet, and the dangers that brings to us due to worldwide safety needs and resulting isolation caused by the pandemic.  Then we are showed the different, counterbalancing and creative ways we can diminish the dangers and do our love anyway.

Isolated Alone or Together

In this time of pandemic dangers, our ways of doing our love often are being severely challenged.  This especially is so for the millions of people living isolated, sheltering in place and living physically disconnected for safety’s sake.  Not only that, but around the world hundreds of thousands of people are losing those who have been both major sources and recipients of their love.  That has greatly adding to the problems of isolation.

Millions are quarantined from having direct contact with those most dear to them. Furthermore, they also are isolated from the others with which they share friendships and other caring relationships . Worldwide our safety needs are blocking us from our love needs being met and from fully meeting the love needs of others.  Children are going without being lovingly kissed, hugged and tucked in at night by their parents who serve on the front lines of the fight against this deadly disease.  Grandparents are not being blessed with the joys of grandchildren, the spouses of healthcare workers are living largely disconnected and apart from their most beloved, and dearest friends are not receiving comforting and reassuring hugs from one another.  Some who have violated the stay apart guidelines are now alone, grieving and guilty for having possibly infected a loved one who is now gone due to the virus.

For all those cut off from love sources, the danger is growing. Having less love interaction can mean becoming increasingly stressed, depressed and susceptible to depression and eventually even suicidal episodes, substance abuse and/or relapse, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes.  In so many places, love is being enacted less and needed more.  So, what are we to do?  Can we change to new ways of showing our love enough, in time and with sufficient potency?  Yes, I think we can! (See “Could You Be a LAT Lover and Succeed at It?”).

How To Love Well in the Time of Pandemic Isolation

To meet the love challenges of our time, here are some suggestions.  First of all, please follow the scientific and medical people as your best guides for safety and not risking the spreading of this highly infectious and deadly disease.

Next, admit to yourself that you have psychological needs including love needs which may need your attention along with some changed and new behaviors.  Any uncomfortable or bad feelings you are having may be trying to tell you that.  If you are living more isolated from those you love and those you have been befriended by, you are or will be negatively effected.  How much and how well you respond is up to you.  Do know that when love is reduced or absent from a person’s life it affects brain and body health negatively.  For those you love and for healthy self-love, you can search out and practice more taking care of your own love needs along with doing what you can about other’s love needs in this time of isolation.  Here are some “how to’s”.

Increase your in-person phone contacts, even if you are more comfortable with texting.  You see, it is not just the words spoken, it is the tones of voice and other vocal variables that get love nurturing, love care and love connecting done.  In fact, in personal communication research the data shows the words can be as little as 7% of the meaning communicated.  In personal auditory communication, vocal variables carried the majority of the message impact received.

Use video connecting a lot.  Skype, Zoom and other e-video services make it possible to see and hear your loved ones in real-time.  Video interaction can increase the personal/emotional meaningfulness of a personal communication event by over 50% according to some communication researchers.

Make contact efforts with everybody you care about, even a little.  You even can include almost everyone you ever cared about in the past.  If you are worried about what to say before you phone or video contact someone, try this.  Think of three or so questions to ask and three or so bits of information about your own life to share.  Remember, it is not important to say important things, it is important just to personally connect. Saying just about anything, sounding friendly and/or caring, along with listening well is what makes valuable connecting happen (see “Communicating Better with Love: Mini-Lessons”  and “Listening With Love”).   

Surprise connecting calls are great. “I thought about you and just decided I would call to connect and see how you are” is all you need to say as a reason for calling.  Reconnecting with those you haven’t talked to in ages usually works for old friends and old acquaintances who might become current friends.  Remember to ask about their feelings concerning the pandemic and how they are handling it, as well as relating some of your own feelings.

Connect with strangers.  You sometimes can make new friends by talking to strangers in Internet chat rooms, call-in shows, and on podcasts and other network services.  If you are depressed or otherwise distressed help lines are available and often do wonders.  It is an act of healthy self-love to make contact, and people to do that with are available, welcoming and usually interesting as well as interested.  Know that by making the effort to contact them, you may do them as much, or more, good as they do you.  Enjoy that!

You also could make contact the old-fashioned way by writing letters.  Handwritten letters especially are becoming rather rare but increasingly precious and cherished.  Texting is good too but usually lacks having deeper emotional impact which is, of course, why some people prefer it.

The Importance of Healthy, Self-Love Actions

You can be your own source of love if you learn the “how-to’s of healthy self-love and practice them.  In our current isolation and safe distancing life situations, healthy real self-love actions may be more important than ever.  That also is true for people you may be isolated with (see “Loving Others “As” You Love Yourself???”  and “Self-Love – What Is It?”).

Take charge of keeping your mind active and interested.  You can do this by learning new things, relearning old ones, exploring strange topics, engaging in hobbies further than you have before, getting involved or more involved with simple arts and crafts, doing new and different things with food and delving into all sorts of subjects you don’t know much about.

Take charge of your body and making it healthier and more fit.  Look for fun new ways to exercise, dance and play one person athletic games with yourself.  If you are the least bit ambidextrous you can play right-hand versus left-hand games.  If you are isolated with others play wrestling, arm wrestling and even thumb wrestling, compete with throw or bounce ball, play hop-scotch and many other games are some of the options open to you.

Do more love and play with dog(s) or other pets if you have a good, loving, playful dog or two.  There is an old legend that says dogs were put in the world to teach us love.  They probably are better at it than humans sometimes, so let us learn from our betters. Cats, parrots, horses, ferrets and lots of other animals might be available for play too.

Go outside even if it is only on a balcony or in a tiny backyard.  It is better if it is a park, a woods, a field or whatever’s available (follow safety guidelines).  Go there and look until you really see and perhaps even feel your love connecting with nature.  The studies are conclusive.  A loving, appreciative involvement with nature is nurturing and surprisingly healthful.  Let nature love you and love it back, and love life at the same time. 

Schedule your life.  Without a schedule, lots of people just do not do what they hoped to do or planned to do.  You can schedule just about everything, even your efforts at love and love connecting.  It also helps to reward yourself in various ways for keeping to your schedule but it does not work if you skimp or cheat.

Projects are another way to do your love.  Make something for a loved one. With and for self-love, make something for yourself.  You could write a love note to everyone you love.  You might put together a special recording of favored music or create a scrapbook of all those unorganized photos stored away someplace.  For a loved child, you might make up a story and even illustrate it with sketched or cut out pictures.  For family, you could do some family history collection and record it.  For your most intimate loved one(s), creating the first half of a romantic sexy story for them to finish is a titillating yet loving possibility.  Painting pictures, making collages, pottery and sculpting also are gifts of love you might now have time for.

Here is a special project for you to consider.  Short messages and sayings about love rendered in artful calligraphy, modernized printing or in rustic form on special paper or canvas, or on boards and/or perhaps framed can make precious and cherished love gifts for presentation after we are all done with isolation.

Counterbalance the negatives coming your way.  Paying too much attention to the world’s negatives and not enough attention to the positive can be toxic.  It is important to stay current on what is bad, wrong, dangerous and depressing for lots of reasons.  It also is important not to overdose on it.  So for healthy living, counterbalancing the negatives by paying attention to and searching out and experiencing positives can be very important to your mental health.  That also applies to the more negative people in your life.  Too much experiencing of nay-sayers, constant complainers and the doom-and-gloom folks can be unhealthy.  However, totally excluding them can have its drawbacks too.  So, search out and often contact positive people, especially happy loving people.

Here are a few suggestions for how to start counterbalancing.  Google the Good News Network and/or pick from the other positive information services under the good news entry which contains lots of today’s upbeat, positive stories, events, etc.  Then for your more in-depth factual reading I suggest looking into the newer behavioral science field of positive psychology.  Positive psychology has some pretty interesting, well-written books which have come out of this factual, uplifting, research science.  If you would like to know and be amazed by how far we have come in human progress, let me turn your attention to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.  It is a book well-written, rich in facts, and it includes a great deal of the “good stuff”, often left out of standard history lessons.

Learn More about Love

Whether you are quarantined all alone or with a spouse, family members or a another loved one, you can use this time of isolation for making a big, life improvement.  In the process you also can reduce your growing cabin fever, listlessness, feelings of aggravation, annoyance, irritability, boredom, purposelessness or whatever other feelings you might want to reduce.  You can do this by learning more about the amazing knowledge of healthy, real love newly available.  As you do this, you then may get happy and excited working on how to make ever improving use that knowledge in your own life.

One way to do this you already are working on by reading this mini-love-lesson.  You can continue that by studying more of our mini-love-lessons on love found at this site which, of course, we encourage.  You also can send for and read books about the new findings, new thinking, old re-discovered findings and thinking, research discoveries, efforts and trends – all having to do with love and love related topics.  Most of those reveal the subject of love to be more immense, amazing, incredible, learnable and healthfully usable, not to mention empirically discoverable than anyone ever guessed.

You also can look up a lot of love topics on the Internet but be careful there.  There is a lot of misleading and mistaken, along with just out-and-out wrong, harmful and absurd things written as the truth about love on the Internet.  Some books also are pretty poor or just not really about love though love is in the title.

Everything you learn about love can be talked about with those you connect with via phone, video or however.  Isolated alone or together, you can find ways to take care of your love needs, your love relationships and your ways of doing your love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: Who have you not yet learned much from concerning love – ancient sages, philosophers, theologians and great religious teachers of more than one major faith, psychoanalysts, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, animal experimental psychologists, social psychologists, linguistic psychologists, neuropsychologists, marriage and family researchers and counselors, psychotherapists, various brain scientists, physicians and medical researchers, other behavioral and social scientists, or ???   All these have a lot of worthwhile things to say about love you might be intrigued with and enriched by.

Could You Be a LAT Lover and Succeed at It?

Synopsis: How and why Georgia and Harrison do togetherness better apart; LAT– the new coupleness category; Far apart and next door apart closeness examples; Challenges; 10 ways to do LAT well; Plus the ‘not single and not married’  lifestyle look; The big, new question or solution for troubled couples.

Georgia and Harrison loved each other a lot but they weren’t even close to becoming compatible at living together.  They had married with high hopes but Harrison was a jumpy night person, a neat-nick who always had to have loud Jazz playing, and his decorator tastes were decidedly industrial.  Georgia was a calm, slow-moving, morning person, an admitted slob, and quietness is what she liked to listen to most, while frills, doilies and doodads cluttered up her living space.

After several unsuccessful attempts at weaving their lives together under the same roof they came to couples counseling.  They both were positively shocked when the idea came up that they could live apart and still be a successful couple.  It took some getting used to, a fair amount of counseling work, coordination, and tolerating their family and friends thinking they were really odd.  But now they live about a mile apart and call their way of relating a “very compatible, romantic arrangement” which Georgia says “is kind of like being perpetually engaged and married at the same time”.

More couples for all sorts of different reasons are working at their adult love relationships while living apart.  So many in fact that demographers with the US Census Bureau have invented the new category called “LAT” which stands for “Living Apart Together”.  Consider Marvin, who lives in Vancouver B.C. on the Pacific, who loves Marion, who lives in Charleston near the Atlantic, with almost a whole continent between them.  They have a home in Dallas where their pet iguana gets taken care of by a housekeeper, except when they get together for a weekend about once a month.

Then there is Sergei who gets home to Terri about once every three months from his ocean liner job.  Ella and Frank won’t even consider living together until they get their children, by former relationships, raised separately because it works better that way, although they are very much a committed couple who love each other.  And then there’s Deb and Don who occupy different sides of a duplex.  They say they find that their duplex living provides just the right degree of closeness and apartness for their relationship to succeed.

Living apart together, sometimes at great distances apart and sometimes closer, presents a fair number of the special challenges.  However, remember all love relationships have challenges but if the relationship does not work out it’s usually not so much because of the challenges.  It’s more often because the love in the relationship wasn’t strong enough or being done well enough.  LAT love relationships though sometimes do present very different and puzzling challenges needing close study and creative solutions.

LAT relating frequently is quite difficult even to think about for those raised on the standard ‘under the same roof’ couples lifestyle programmed into so many of us.  Yet, a fair number of people are doing LAT and learning to succeed at it, and some like it even better than living together.  Others do LAT out of necessity and plan to live together eventually, but in the meantime they still need to learn LAT skills.  So, here are some of the actions a number of LAT couples are taking to ensure their LAT love is successful.

1.  Calendarize everything. LAT lovers often discover they have to write just about everything on the calendar or in their PDA pertaining to their relationship – way more than do most couples.  They have to work at putting the exact times they will be contacting and connecting with each other, and exactly how that connection will be made, and what they exactly will be doing for how long during that time of connecting.  Ending times for various activities are often as important as start times.

2.  Make contact daily. LAT couples, especially those who live a great distance from one another, make great frequent use of all methods of electronically relating.  Skype connecting so they can see as well as hear each other is especially useful, but e-mail, texting, phoning each other and even being surprised with snail mail cards, packages and love letters are also to be considered.

3.  Make psychologically intimate contact. LAT couples, especially those living long distances from one another, can have many romantic and erotic encounters with one another electronically.  A Skype facilitated, candle light dinner shared over the Internet, phone sex, when talking on the phone using pet names and terms of endearment, ‘sexting’, romantic and even poetic e-mails and e-cards, shared Skype sex experiences, etc. can be common with LAT couples.  Some LAT couples even are having their “avatars” make love with each other in Second Life and other cyber locations.

4.  Use pictures. LAT couples are thought to keep more pictures of each other around, send each other more pictures including sexy ones (properly secured), and create or acquire more things that pictorially symbolized their love relationship.

5.  Read together. LAT couples often are reading the same books and articles, and then call each other up and talk about what they think and feel about what they’ve been reading.  Knowing that your beloved is reading the same thing you are can have its own special good feelings.

6.  Mini vacation together. LAT couples can add to their success by planning more vacation-like, short experiences together.  Of course, longer times also count.  A weekend at a Bed and Breakfast, meeting together in a different location, an overnight or a day long car trip together, even at one home or the other disconnecting electronics – ordering dinner delivered – putting on special music – and enjoying each other like you’re on vacation, and things like that can work wonders.

7.  Take a course together. Take an online course together or actually meet somewhere for a conference or seminar is another thing some LAT couples do together and sort of cover two bases with the same action.

8.  Engage in “I.T.” counseling. LAT couples who are having relationship troubles can by phone conference call, Skype, etc. engage in couples counseling together and the counselor or therapist can join you in cyberspace.  This doesn’t seem to work as well as face-to-face counseling but it will do tolerably well if mutual face-to-face work is too difficult to arrange.

9.  Prioritize dating. LAT couples living close, or at a distance from one another, do best if they give the highest priority to their dating times and other joint activity times together.

10.  Send lots of love messages. All couples, but especially LAT couples, can benefit from lots of different kinds of love messages frequently sent.  Naturally, it’s very important to respond with love to love messages which creates “love cycling”.

One of the big questions some troubled couples are learning to ask each other is “would we be better living as an LAT couple?”.  Along with that goes questions like: “would we do our love more healthfully, constructively and enjoyably if we didn’t live under the same roof”?  For troubled couples it’s helpful to know there’s another option to the age-old dilemma of either to get divorced or to stay married.  A surprising number of couples have gotten a divorce and then slowly gotten back together, followed by successfully becoming LAT couples, but not living as ‘under the same roof’ standard lifestyle, married couples.

It comes as something of a surprise for some people to learn there are whole societies in which couples don’t live together, though they are regarded as married and quite committed to their relationship.  In the Western world culture it seems that a number of people are choosing to be ongoing, committed to the relationship, but not living together couples.  Some are sort of forced into this arrangement such as military couples or those who have jobs in different locations.  But sometimes even after being discharged or finding jobs in the same city, a few decide to continue in a more LAT style.  A great many couples where one of them has a job with a lot of traveling live at least partially as LAT couples.  Health problems, old age infirmities, and sundry legal problems sometimes force loving couples into LAT living.  Whatever the reason, it is important to know people can succeed at a LAT lifestyle.

The biggest issue for LAT couples actually is the same one that exists for all couples, though for LAT lovers it may be bigger.  That issue is ‘how well will you actually do your love’ as a couple.  Love must be demonstrated, received and enacted, not just felt or thought about for it to succeed.  Insufficiently done love results in unsuccessful love and that is ruinous to love relationships.

Corollary questions are: ‘how well and how often will you show your love in each of the eight major groups of behavior by which love can be demonstrated’ (see the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” and the other related entries); ‘how well will you receive the love shown to you and be nurtured by that love’; ‘how well will you learn and practice the ways of love and how much work will you put into doing love well’?  For all those questions and more, let me suggest checking out all the entries at this site – especially ones about communicating love.

Now, I have a request.  If you know of anyone who is in or may be facing the issue of being in a LAT lifestyle, please refer them to this site and especially this entry so they have at least a little help in dealing with all this.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Have you ever given serious thought to how well you might live and love in different lifestyles and could a LAT lifestyle suit you well?

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2. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
3. Does “Cougar” Love Work?
4. Say It With Love
5. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?