A Romantic Myth That Kills Love

Synopsis: This mini-love–lesson first focuses on your danger; gives examples of the problem; looks at the sabotaging myth’s dynamics; views the “pretty poison fairytale”; touches on the problem of conflicting gender training; and gets you to the avoidance answers which usually work.

Are You in Danger?

Is a romantic myth hurting your chances at a happier and healthier relationship life, full of real love, and you don’t even know it?  That is what seems to happen to millions, sometimes even to the point of destroying an otherwise possibly good, love relationship.  Romantic myths can be so lovely and at the same time so “anti-love” in their effects.  How does that happen?

Romantic myths get into our subconscious as we grow up, and then they may guide us later in life without us consciously knowing it.  Sometimes they guide us into relationship disaster.  More times they just steal chances for happiness and make for a lot of difficult and miserable relational experiences.

Four Examples, One Problem

Abbey angrily said, “If I have to tell him what I want, that spoils it.  If he really loved me he would know, wouldn’t he?  When I told him exactly that, we had the worst fight ever!  I don’t know if it’s worth it for us to go on.”

In considerable frustration Fred related, “My lover plays this stupid guessing game, making me figure out what I’m supposed to do next, to show love I guess.  I almost never get it right and then I get punished with cold rejection.  But what I don’t get, and really need, is information about what exactly is wanted.  Once in a while I get some vague clues but even if I figure them out it doesn’t help for the next time it happens.  I’m at such a loss.  I’m about to give up trying it’s so frustrating.

In despair Jessica told of her guy breaking up with her, after she, as gently as possible, had told him he had gotten her the wrong birthday present, and not only that, but he had given it to her in the most unromantic way, and at the worst time and place.  How could he have gotten it so wrong?  And she lamented, “By now I would’ve thought he knew me well enough to know how to love me without me having to tell him”.

After a disappointing sexual episode Harvey reported he had asked Misty what exactly she wanted, and what was the right way to make love to her.  Misty then haughtily proclaimed that telling him answers to questions like that was such a total turn off.  Furthermore, telling him things he was supposed to already know made her feel unfeminine and like she was forcing him, and that would never work. It was then that Harvey decided to go back to his old flame, Sarah Jean, because there was no guesswork there, and they had the best sex together ever anyway.

As you can see, this myth can kill many special moments of love, make people feel pressure instead of love, spoil loving occurrences, and entrap people in love-dysfunctional assumptions and expectations.

The Sabotaging Myth

In each of the above cases the underlying, destructive myth goes something like this.  If you have to tell or ask for what you want from someone, who is supposed to love you, it spoils the giving and receiving of that love.  And your lover should know what to do without communication just because they love you.  After all, your mother knew what to do when you were an infant and unable to ask.  Doesn’t that prove that love just knows?”  This myth also teaches that ‘clearly asked for love actions’ are to be discounted and rejected.  It implies that true love gives the right knowledge and if you truly love me you’ll know what to do without me asking you, informing you, or Lord forbid, teaching you how and what works best for me.  However, sometimes I can give you a little glimpse of a clue.  But that’s all.  Thus, dream and crystal ball gazing are required.

So many couples in my couples counseling get immensely happier and far more functional as a couple when they give up that myth and start asking clearly for what they want from each other.  Some are unhappy about giving up the myth but they get so much more when asking that it ends up not mattering after all.  Others are unhappy because they have to go to the trouble to actually identify what they themselves do want and then communicate it clearly.  But that too is the adult way that actually works, as I see it.

I like to suggest, and perhaps you’ve heard me say before, love and restaurants work the same.  No matter how great they are, they both require people to do a clear job of asking for what they want.  Try going to a nice restaurant and do not ask for what you want, then see what happens.  About the same thing that happens with many couples who don’t ask– not much.

A Very Pretty Poison

This lovely, poisonous myth started getting into our heads when we were little children by way of fairytales.  Consider the fairytale scenario.  Prince Charming always, and usually immediately, does exactly the right thing without having to ask the advice of a wizard, wise elf or anyone else.  Nor does he go get a consultation from a White Witch, ask other princes what they did, or find a magic manuscript that will tell him what to do.  He just knows and he knows instantaneously.  In Snow White, he suddenly opens Snow’s casket and kisses her dead body, and lo and behold, she pops to life.  Love’s magic know how got him to do that.

It is pretty much the same story in Sleeping Beauty except for the adult version where she needs a spanking to wake up in a fit of pleasure – pain ecstasy?  In Rapunzel the right prince is the only one that figures out to tell her to let down her extremely long hair so he can climb up and save her.  So, we learn that true love means you will do exactly the right thing when you need to.  If you don’t, it either means your love is not real, or you are too ignorant, or you are being mean.

Jump to modern romance novels where the main hero automatically knows just how to romance and make love to the main heroine without her having to tell him anything about what she likes.  It must be real love because he is the one who knows.  No talking is necessary.  Sometimes in the modern versions it is the gal who automatically does the right romantic thing.

You might ask, why does this work in fiction and not in real life?  The answer is that in the ‘love and romance stories’ one brain, the author’s, writes all the scenarios.  In real life relationships two brains are involved and that necessitates communication because no two brains think all that much alike.  With years of knowing each other, better guesses can be made, but even there changes and surprises sometimes occur.

Our Conflicting Gender Training

Part of the problem is our conflicting gender training.  For ages, as kids, most of us guys avoided the romantic scenes while many of you gals were paying rapt attention.  You learned what romance was supposed to look like, and we did too to some extent, but mostly we were interested in things like football and making gadgets work.  Culture is changing now but the changes are nowhere near complete.  About sex, love and romance the guys and gals still are not learning the same stuff and the old romantic myths still have a lot of power.  That sets us up for many disappointments, brings on much misunderstanding, and results in a lot of couples being unhappy and sometimes breaking up.

Where Do We Get the Right Know-How?

The often unseen or avoided answer to this question is – from each other!  It can start with using the adult viewpoint that tells us to take responsibility for learning and identifying what we ourselves want, then clearly ask for it.  Know that you ‘own’ your desires because they are in you and, therefore, it is your responsibility to do your part about satisfying them which is also the adult way, is it not?  If you want a soft, tender kiss or a big, passionate bear hug, make it simple and ask for it directly.  That is the most likely, successful thing you can do in most relationships.  And then, of course, enjoy it fully.

What If Asking Still Spoils It for Me?

In simple terms the answer is, work at getting over it and giving it up.  Work on learning to enjoy the marvels of getting more exactly what you want, more often and sooner because that is what usually starts to happen in the good, functional, couple’s life where people identify and ask for what they want.  If it does not happen that way, then it is time for a bunch more communicating.  Remember, to also ask with love.  That means with loving words, loving tones of voice, maybe a loving touch, and any other way you can make your request an act of love itself.  Be sure you are not ‘anti-love’ asking, like “You never hug me anymore, never take me anywhere, don’t fix my favorite meal”, etc.  Those are gripes, not requests.  It is surprising how many people don’t seem to know the difference, and the different effects they may bring.

Clearly ask for what you want and you just may get it.  Don’t let this old, love-destroying, romantic myth kill your relationship.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you ever examined what you take for granted (? subconscious programs maybe?) regarding the way love, sex, romance and marriage are supposed to go?

Is a False Love Divorce A Good Thing?

Synopsis: We start with a case of happiness guilt; go on to the many differing ways marriage, breakups and divorce are seen; religious issues; and end with the quest for real love and its great importance.

A Case of Happiness Guilt

Lorenz and Selah both felt a bit guilty and wondered if they should feel a lot worse than they did.  Both felt relief and a wonderful sense of relaxed freedom they had not felt for the three years of their unsuccessful marriage.

In couples counseling they jointly had come to the conclusion that their relationship could not work, that they were in no way right for each other, and that they should give up trying to make something that was harming both them and their two-year-old daughter.  After searching deeply and broadly, they came to the conclusion that the underlying problem was they did not have a real love for one another.

What they did have was two forms of false love.  Examining major forms of false love, Selah saw that she had been fooled and trapped in the False Love Syndrome known as an IFD Pattern. Before she discovered this, the false love marriage nearly had ruined her life.

Lorenz knew as soon as he read a paragraph describing the False Love Syndrome called Spouse Acquirement Syndrome that this indeed was exactly what he had done and he had fooled him into believing that he really was in love with Selah.  He saw he wanted to believe it was real love but in truth subconsciously he knew he had to acquire a spouse because that is what men in high success careers are supposed to do.  He admitted to himself that success was all that mattered to him at that time and so he found an acceptable woman and did what it took to ‘catch’ her, then he married her.

This couple decided that ending a falsehood actually felt good and in doing so they were giving themselves a chance to find new, real love.  They were quite relieved because this decision ended their incompatibility fights, their mutual growing sense of hopelessness, and all their fake and phony efforts to pretend they had real spouse-type love for each other.  In the process they became much better, cooperating parents.  They then were relieved to see that their daughter was growing happier now that they were happier.

They both came to suspect that maybe their marriage had done what it was meant to do –  produce a marvelous child and maybe help them grow up and better understand love itself.  They came to think that they never really had a real marriage because they had never been in real love with anything like a loving psychological and spiritual unity.  Divorcing, they put their energies and time to better use not only for their daughter but for themselves and other family and friends also.

For Lorenz and Selah getting a divorce basically was correcting a serious, life path mistake giving them the opportunity to find a more real and healthful path.  As this understanding soaked in, their guilt faded and both felt the relief of stress and strife from not having to live a lie anymore.

How Others Saw It

The friends and families of this couple had a great many, contradictory things to tell them about their divorce decision.  Together they made a summary of what they heard.

“Marriages are made in heaven and, therefore, it’s wrong to divorce!”

“Marriages are made in legal proceedings, and end in legal proceedings, and the rest of marriage is whatever you think it is.”

“Real marriage is made by two people who have real love for each other and are psychologically and spiritually bonded together by their real love.”

“The legal part is just a formality and paperwork, and the religious part is just a social ceremony dressed up in religion.”

“Marriage is a cultural contrivance we all have been brainwashed to go along with so society can be organized, stabilized and controlled.”

“Divorce always hurts the children.”

“Marriage is a gift of God and a contract between two people with God.  It starts on earth but goes on for eternity.  Therefore, all divorce is  breaking a covenant with the divine and you will be punished for that.”

“Love and marriage are just fairy tales we try to make real, and they were invented to keep people together while they start a kid and that’s all they really are.”

“I suspect both marriage and divorce today are just commercial devices designed to help sell more stuff because with both marriage and divorce a lot of money changes hands.”

“Divorce is a good thing because it helps mix the gene pool, and besides that nature didn’t intend us to be with just one partner for all our life.”

As you can see from their summary, they were barraged with many views, at odds with each other, about these subjects.  So, what is your view?  Also is your view based in what you have been trained to think or is it something you have come to on your own?

Religious Issues

In my marriage and family counseling work as a relational psychotherapist, I have on a number of occasions been asked to do Catholic Marriage Tribunal evaluations for people seeking an annulment.  This was so they could have a new church-sanctioned and blessed marriage in a Catholic Church with a new love of their life.  A basic question to be answered is “Was the former marriage a real marriage?”  One of the several concepts used to assess that question is to ask “Was the marriage based in a real love, a false love or something else?”

A corollary question has to do with whether or not there was a psychological condition, problem or illness involved which impeded the marriage from becoming a real marriage?  The identified False Love Syndromes help to answer this question.  Each major pattern of probable, or possible, false love indeed can be seen as evidencing a psychological problem, condition, or be related to a psychological illness which is especially obvious in a case of Fatal Attraction Syndrome.

It especially has been pleasing to me to see various prelates of the church take the question of real and false love into consideration in their deliberations.  It also is gratifying to have various ministers of several faiths use real love and false love concepts as they grapple with various issues of marriage and divorce.

There is growing evidence that changes are occurring in various religious bodies regarding love, marriage and divorce.  Those changes show greater flexibility and more loving forgiveness, as well as greater understanding occurring in these often problematic arenas.

Many of the world’s religions, or at least branches within those religions, are quite accepting of divorce and divorcees, but many are not.  The evidence I am aware of suggests that in many parts of the world, religious institutions of many kinds are taking a less condemning, less judgmental and less rejecting approach to these issues, than they have in the past, and toward the people struggling with them.  From this mental health professional’s viewpoint, that is a very good thing.  However, no small number of others disagree with me on that.

The Quest for Real Love

More and more people around our planet want to live in an ongoing, spouse-type, partnership relationship based in real and lasting love.  Sure, there are lots of other reasons people become couples or get married.  It can be for sex, safety, status, propriety, money, custom, to feel okay about themselves, and a host of other things.  But even in those unions there usually is some hope that the relationship will grow a real and lasting love.

The unseen problem for so many is that a false love might ensnare large numbers and lead them astray into what often turns out to be a life-harming disaster.  When a breakup or a divorce happens because people were in a false love and an ongoing catastrophe, is a divorce primarily a bad thing or a good thing?  Is it the correction of a mistake or just another additional mistake?

So many have been taught that all divorce is bad, wrong, sinful, etc. but the world seems to be changing in regard to that.  Some think the importance of real love is in ascendancy over the importance of marriage.  No small number of pundits bemoan the high divorce rate in many lands, and also consider couples who breakup after living together to be equally bad.  But if the healthiest way to live is in a real love relationship, as much research points to, isn’t ending a false love in order to set people free to find real love, more positive than negative?

There are those that think there is no such thing as real love, but more and more studies in the brain sciences and in a host of other research fields indicate otherwise.  Of course, in many cases there are all sorts of other, intervening variables which affect the outcome of both a marriage and a divorce.  But all-in-all the quest for a real love relationship is being shown to have greater and greater importance.  Sometimes the quest seems to necessitate going through a breakup or divorce, and getting to the other side where real love can happen.  What do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you know enough about what constitutes healthy, real love and what the signs and symptoms are for false love?

Related posts:

1. Adultery And No Divorce Love
2. False Love Awareness
3. Murder and False Love
4. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?
5. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding 

Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers six important ways recent research in behavioral economics and the emotions of economic decisions have discovered, which can help people in love relationships be happier together.

About Happier Love

Is your love life getting happier?  By love we don’t just mean sex but that is definitely included.  We mean, are you doing love in such a way as it makes you and those you love smile, grin, laugh and have a sense of shared joy and, maybe once in a while, even have a sense of oceanic rapture together?  Whether you are a couple, a family or are really close, loving friends, you ‘together’ can learn and practice certain behaviors which researchers have discovered may assist us in growing happier as we go about love together.

1.  Savor more and more together!
Any good, joint experience is worth lingering in, so enjoy and share it longer and more fully.  So often we cut short our joy in order to get to the ‘next thing’.  Usually the ‘next thing’ could have waited a bit longer and wasn’t really that good, important or as necessary as you might have first thought.  Jointly sharing and, in essence, saturating yourselves longer in any positive experience likely will do you and your love relationship more good than whatever you are about to hurry on to.  Savoring any positive experience together can double your joy, strengthen your relationship and help you be more physically and mentally healthy.

Savoring basically is accomplished by purposely focusing longer on, and sort of soaking up, or emotionally digesting further the experience and it’s various elements.  Then for doing it more fully together, you can share what you focused on and the feelings that brought you.

2.  Be jointly open to flexibility!
Do you push to have the excellent date, set the just right scene, produce the most superb romantic dinner, create outstanding and incredible sex, have the finest time ever, give the perfect party or even just have a super clean house before company comes.  Well, doing all that often makes for way too much pressure, tension and stress for happiness to have much of a chance.  At best you may get a sense of pride and a sense of relief when it’s all over.

The more perfectionistic the goals and standards, and the more elaborate and picky the plans, the greater the likelihood of insufficient mental flexibility for shared elation to occur.  With flexibility and tolerational love, shared merrymaking has a much better opportunity to happen.  The ability to laugh together at various foul-ups, jointly appreciate odd occurrences, be united in humorous tolerance for deviations from the plan, and celebrate the unexpected as a loving team, the more you are likely to create great, happy memories and fine togetherness.

3.  Schedule fun including sexual fun frequently.
Most good and happy times occur because they were on somebody’s schedule to make happen.  Even if an experience seems spontaneous it is likely at least part of it was planned.  By its very nature, spontaneity can help provide some wonderful times together but it cannot be counted on to provide all the recreation (re– creation) fun love relationships need.

I suggest you abide by the principle that says ‘it won’t happen unless it’s given a time and it’s on your calendar’.  Enjoy whatever else comes along but don’t depend on it to fulfill your minimum, regular quotient of quality love experiences.  That requires scheduling.  Those who do this are found to have a lot more happy times, have greater experiences together and consistently grow their love better than those who don’t.  By the way, shared experiences usually bring more happiness than most acquired objects.

4.  Grow your mindfulness sharing.
Mindfulness means focusing on what you are experiencing right now, in thought and feeling.  It also means not letting your focus switch to anything in or from the past, the future or anywhere besides the ‘here and now’.  Mindfulness sharing means doing the same thing but sharing your ‘here and now’ awareness with someone you love.  It can involve verbally expressing the thoughts and feelings you are having right now about and with each other.  That works especially well if the mindfulness has to do with appreciation and affirmation.

Sharing mindfulness also can be done nonverbally with the expressional communications of touch, lovingly looking into each other’s eyes, facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures and posture changes, and just being physically close while experiencing emotional connectedness as you experience what is happening around you.  Think of standing together holding hands and feeling awe together as you both look at a truly awesome sunset, over and equally awesome land or seascape.

Now if for example, you are there but your mind has wandered off to some issue at work, checking your e-mails, or worrying that you didn’t lock the door back home, you have lost a “precious now” and are no longer receiving and sharing the “present” of the present.  Love’s intimacy, closeness and bonding will all be less.  When that happens I suggest you practice ‘mind yanking’ back to the ‘existential now’ and lose yourself in it together.

5.  Go for shared, serene joy as much, or more, as you go for jubilant excitement!
Shared calm serenity, simple easy-going non-demand comfort, quiet awesomeness, and the grand mystical togetherness feelings of deep, joyful love often bring much greater happiness than momentary ecstasy, or the highs of adrenaline-filled adventure.  Relaxed, peaceful, ongoing joy and happiness often is the best of love, although elation surprises and experiences also can be great.  Go for both.

6.  Enjoy emotional intercourse every day you can!
Emotional intercourse happens when you empathetically feel whatever a loved one is feeling emotionally, and they know or sense you are feeling something very similar to what they are feeling.  It can happen mildly to moderately, or in wonderfully strong and powerful ways.  If you ever feel like you really are inside each other, or you have melded together, or in ecstasy you exploded together and have become one with the universe, you have experienced great, emotional intercourse.

If you feel comforted and safe, pleasantly but deeply with, peacefully connected and just right with someone you love, you may be having the very excellent, more moderate form of emotional intercourse.  And if you have moments where you just are showing and feeling care for someone and they for you, that might be one of the milder, emotional intercourse experiences occurring.  There is great individual difference in these, but they all are very good.

To have emotional intercourse, focus on your loved one and what is going on in their heart and gut as much, or more than what is coming from their mind.  Enjoy their enjoyment.  Then center yourself in care or loving appreciation.  Do this especially when they are happy, or up, about something as well as when they are down.  In happy experiences be sure all your attention does not go outwardly to the experience and what is happening there, but also that some of you attention, or a lot of it, goes to the one you love and sharing the joy, or whatever feeling they are having.

At the same time share your own concurrent emotional experiences.  Then keep going back and forth in the sharing of feelings with them, responding with your thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings.  Notice and share each emotion you are having when your loved one relates an emotion they are having.  This back and forth sharing of emotions of both of you, especially the happy ones, is the emotional intercourse that jointly grows happy love. (See the mini-love-lesson “Emotional Intercourse”).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of the idea of becoming ‘a happy love farmer’?

Related posts:

1. Other Ways to Say I Love You
2. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
3. Emotional Intercourse
4. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

Receptional Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 285

Synopsis: The often overlooked way of giving love via receiving love well is presented along with 7 ways to carry it out; plus how to internalize, enjoy and benefit more from the love that comes your way.

Receiving love well is an act of giving love well!  Receptional love behaviors are those which, by act or word, demonstrate a positive reception of any of the other major ways of directly communicating love.

Integrating Receptional Love into the seven, major ways of giving love is the key to cycling love.  Without reception, love behaviors do not do the good that they might.  What a waste!  

Suppose a simple, sincere statement like “I love you” comes your way.  What is your Expressional Love receiving-response?  Does your face light up in a great big smile or a cute little grin?  Are your tones of voice upbeat and appreciative.  Does your body language communicate elation and pleasure?  What is your Touch Love receiving-response?  Do you tenderly hold their hand or give them a big bear hug, or a sweet kiss on the forehead, or two-handed handshake?  How about a Verbal Love receiving-response?  Do you say something like, “That touches my heart”, or do you proclaim, “Yes, you do and I’m super glad you do” or do you whisper “I feel a little thrill of joy hearing that”?  What about a Gifting Love receiving-response?  “Saying you love me just the way you did, makes me want to give you a massage”.  What might be your Affirmational Love receiving-response?  “I hear a lot of feeling in the way you said that and reaches me deeply”, or simply, “You’re wonderful”.  Consider a Tolerational Love receiving-response.  When hearing a perfunctory “I love you”, you might say, “Could I hear that again with a little more oomph?”  Think about a Self-Disclosure Love receiving-response.  “Secretly, I’ve been longing to hear you say that”.  

If we become proficient with our receiving-responses to the seven, major, behavioral ways we directly show love, our love cycling will be strengthened and enhanced.

Using our personal knowledge of a loved one, combined with The Seven Love Behaviors, can lead to custom tailored, love receiving-responses.  For example, Delilah was a dolphin aficionado so, in appreciation for each of the special things she did, Raul would get her a card featuring dolphins or a dolphin figurine or a dolphin book, or such.  Delilah called it her “I’m Swimming in Love” collection.  Personalizing receptional love responses makes them extra special.

To receive a dose of love well, first you have to notice it.  Then sharply focus on what just happened.  Give it some concentrated attention.  When you do that, it naturally flows into the third phase of good reception – soaking it up.  If you experience feelings like “I feel loved”, “this hug feels so good”, “an unexpected gift – what a delight” you are reaping the enrichment of love reception .  To feel these feelings more intently, it may help to say to yourself “I’m being loved and I’m going to let myself really feel it”, “this is special and I’m going to cherish it” or “I’m not going to let this moment pass, I’m going to experience it deeply”.  Lingering and savoring love coming your way can help your sense of appreciation grow.  Appreciation is another part of good love reception.  Sometimes all this may happen almost instantaneously and sometimes it can be more lengthy.  It is our job to really get what is sent, to fully experience it internally.

Externally, our job is to let the sender know we have received their act of love, we like it and we are better because of it.  A thank you is a simple, polite response but even better may be showing or telling them about the effect their love message has had on us.  Even before making an automatic “I love you too” statement or a quick gratitude response, we might say something more personal and laudatory.  This is a splendid way to vitalize love cycling.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  Do you know that belated thank you’s can be made into better actions of Receptional Love than immediate ones – if you put enough into them?  So, who might you surprise with a totally unexpected , special, appreciation message today or tomorrow?

Loneliness and Love

Synopsis: First this mini-love-lesson covers the surprising ways loneliness harms us; then the issues of ignore, fight, escape, just get used to loneliness, or what?; doing what loneliness wants you to do; a cautionary note; Ricardo’s example and Ricardo’s results, (can they be yours?).

Surprising Ways Loneliness Harms Us

Recent research shows loneliness is especially bad for your brain.  What is bad for your brain can be bad for many of your body’s health processes and systems because the brain influences and regulates them.  Loneliness also is bad for your psychological health and that can influence everything else in your life.  One study of over 8000 men and women showed the lonely have up to a 20% faster rate of decline in mental abilities.

Those who have prolonged loneliness are seen to have more stress illnesses and a greater likelihood of having brain inflammation problems.  Loneliness can be seen as a component of love malnutrition or love starvation, which is understood to have a very negative impact on our immunity mechanisms, cancer resistance, blood pressure and a host of other physical problems.

Ignore, Fight, Escape, Just Get Used To It – or ???

Many people try to escape their loneliness by diving into their work, business or various other involvements.  Some try to escape into substance abuse or various behavioral addictions.  Others get some temporary help from antidepressants and other medications.  Another group of people try to fight loneliness seeing it as some kind of weakness or enemy.  Still others see it as just one more human emotion to be ignored.  Learning to live with it can dull the pain but the damage being done by prolonged loneliness  still can happen.  Usually none of these approaches prove to best serve our health or well-being. At best, they may provide some assistance in the short run but they can turn out to be quite bad for us in the long run, or at most, useless.

So what are we to do?  Wallow in our loneliness and just let it do all the harm it can?  Of course not, that won’t help but there is a way that will.

Doing What Loneliness Wants You to Do!

Like all emotions, loneliness was created in us to do us some good, even though it feels bad, sometimes extremely bad.  It may in fact get worse for not doing what the feeling of loneliness wants us to do.  When we follow the guidance message in loneliness, the bad feelings tend to subside.  Sometimes they begin to subside as soon as we get loneliness’s message, even before we have begun to follow that message with action.  So what is the healthful, constructive, guidance message in the feeling we call loneliness?

Basically loneliness can be seen as an emotional message telling us to go in search of love in any of its many forms.  If you can’t find love quickly, go in search of “like” or at least tolerable company first because that might be on the way to healthy, real love.

It also is important to know that it is not just about romantic love, as our culture and/or family training may have subconsciously programmed us to think.  We are a gregarious species, meant to connect with each other and especially to connect in love relationships with one another.  So, hear the guidance message of loneliness telling you to go in search of new or renewed love.

You may be de-energized from your loneliness, think searching for love is too much work, you don’t have what it takes, love is all a matter of luck anyway and your luck in love is bad, and 100 other self sabotaging negatives with which to block yourself from taking productive action.  Remember, your loneliness may just get worse if you do that.  And none of those blocking mechanisms get you to a new and better place though they might help you rest up a bit first.

A Cautionary Note

As I have emphasized before, all our emotions, even the most painful ones, were created in us to do us constructive, healthy good though they may overdo it, under do it, or mis-do it like all human systems.  If you get any kind of interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message that is destructive to yourself or to anyone, it may have cathartic value but that is all.  Acting destructively is almost always destructive to yourself and not the real guidance message of any emotion.  Unless your interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message goes toward health and well-being, probably for all concerned, it is likely not to be your best or most accurate interpretation.

Following Ricardo’s Example to Love

Ricardo was laying awake night after night, hurting badly with loneliness.  He tried various prescription medications, then alcohol and other substances but nothing seemed to help all that much.  Some people at work, including his boss, pressured and nagged him into going to a counselor, and he went along with that just to get them off his back.  He expected to have to dredge up a lot of his past which would just use up a lot of time and money, but he thought he could probably cut it short being able to say okay, he tried that and it didn’t work either.  He was surprised that his counselor didn’t want to talk much about his past but wanted him to do some immediate things that might be helpful.

After resisting and just a few sessions later, Ricardo got himself a pet dog and everything started changing for the better.  He learned that a good pet dog is perhaps the world’s quickest and surest way to get some good, healthy love.  Brain studies of canines show evidence that, in brain functioning, dogs really do love pretty much just like we do and it is not just because we feed and pet them.

In counseling Ricardo did have to do some work on his blocks and fears that had some causation from his past, but mostly it was about understanding and following the guidance messages in his emotions.  It wasn’t long before Ricardo tentatively went in search of new involvements and new acquaintances.  He went online and discovered some groups with similar interests to his own, and with reluctance got himself to some meetings.  The new acquaintances showed him that new friendships might develop and were even likely.  He then looked up some relatives that he had lost contact with and a renewed family love possibility came out of that.

Ricardo volunteered to help in a cause he believed was good, and surprise surprise, out of that came a new romantic interest.  He took a class in something he was intrigued by and that yielded some more very interesting new people in his life.  He got involved in a religious connected singles group and out of that came a sense of spiritual love that he had not known before, plus some other new friends.  In counseling Ricardo learned about healthy, self-love and that there is a lot of good that comes from that.

Ricardo’s Results

Today Ricardo has a small group of deep, close friends he feels very bonded with, a renewed family love connection, a wide network of medium and milder friends, a fine and growing romantic love relationship and a much improved, healthy self-love.  Ricardo is not lonely anymore.

Whether loneliness comes from months or years of aloneness, or the death of a mate, or from shyness or any other reason, the prescription is the same: overcome reluctance and connect with others, and grow a loving support network for your health and well being.

Can you follow Ricardo’s example if you are struggling with loneliness?  I suspect you can, and hopefully you will if you need to.  It would be a healthy act of self-love and self-care, if loneliness is pushing at you, to do something rather similar to what Ricardo did.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

Are you willing to be a good friend so as to do your share of having a good, friendship love relationship?