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

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

What Is Infidelity Really?

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

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

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

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

New World Infidelity

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

Is It the Act or the Agreement?

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

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

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

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

A Loving Approach to Another’s Infidelity

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Loving Approach to Your Own Infidelity

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

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

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

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

A Dozen Common Reasons That Infidelity Happens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should a Couple Breakup over Infidelity?

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

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

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

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

What About Forgiveness?

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

Learn More

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

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

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

Sex Drive Differences and Love

Synopsis: What is usual; going from differences to disastrous dysfunction; love making the difference in differences; small step sex with love; examples; sex drive differences as a good thing; and handling sexual mis-steps are all discussed in this mini-love-lesson.

What Is Usual

Everybody has a natural, inborn drive for sex.  That is part of being a healthy human.  Like everything else human, the strength of that drive varies from person to person.  Sex drives also tend to naturally and healthfully vary in a number of other ways. Sex drive differences are normal and natural as well.

It is quite common for couples to have rather different drives for sex, urges for sex at different times, desires for different kinds of sexuality and differing     turn-on’s.  Not only that but the strength and frequency of sex drives tends to vary up and down over time.  Sex drives also can vary according to a multitude of sundry circumstances.  Furthermore, what may heighten one person’s sex desires at one time may dampen them at another time.  These sex drive variations may or may not at times have no relationship to what is happening with a person’s partner.

The number of couples who are well matched and, therefore, sexually highly compatible on all these factors turns out to be minuscule.  Most couples, sooner or later, have some sort of sexual compatibility problem often related to differences in their changing sex drives.  No wonder so many lovers complain that their beloved wants sex more or less often, or very differently than they do.

From Sexual Drive Difference to Disastrous Dysfunction

For no small number of couples the sex drive, related differences cause serious difficulties, numerous disappointments and sometimes emotionally excruciating dysfunction.  One partner who has a much stronger sex drive than the other can be a contributing factor to secret sex outside a primary love relationship, full-fledged affairs, breakups, divorce, violence, fits of depression, anxiety attacks and worse.  For larger numbers of people these differences in sex drive only cause minor to medium, relational dysfunctions along with a hampering of shared happiness.  But none of this need be true for couples who have a good, love-centered system for handling such difference difficulties.

How Love Can Make the Difference in Differences

Suppose your beloved wants to have sex a whole lot more often than you do.  What can you do?  Give in and go along?  Make excuses and dodge as often as possible?  Have lots of big, horrible fights?  Force your beloved away with cold rejection?  Run away?  Get resentful and passive/aggressive?  As you probably know, none of those work very well and may cause more trouble than they prevent.

Now suppose your beloved wants to have sex a whole lot less often than you do.  Do you try to cajole, guilt trip, shame, beg, harass, force, seduce, argue, cause fights, tolerate, accept and sacrifice your wants, become embittered, be passive/aggressive, look for other secret sex partners, or what?  Those ways also have a lot of drawbacks and ways of making things worse.

So, what to do?  Let me suggest this.  It is ‘love’ well expressed, probably quite frequently that is going to make progress possible when dealing with difficult, sex drive differences.  It is love in words and actions that will motivate taking steps toward overcoming whatever is in the way.  It is love shown compassionately that will heal wounds, relieve emotional pain and keep or retrieve emotional closeness.  It is the giving and receiving of love actions, when continuously mixed with certain small sexual actions, that will fix the problem of sexual drive differences.

Now, you don’t have to believe any of this, you just have to do it – ‘experimentally’ – to find out whether or not it will work.  You see, it is not a ‘true believer system’ but rather a ‘heart-centered, action system’ that has been known to work time and time again.

Small Step Sex with Love

Here is what may work best.  First, meditatively center  yourself in love (see the Love Centering mini-love-lesson) and ask your beloved to do the same thing.  Decide that you are going to ‘come from love’ and also with truth, in how you talk and act to your beloved about these differences.  Then, have a kind, loving but very truthful talk in which you listen as much as you talk.  Remember, Paul who told us love is kind, not rude, love is patient, etc. (First Corinthians 13).

Next, as lovingly as possible, talk about experimenting with very, small steps in moving toward more of what each of you wants sexually.  For example: If one of you wants tender kisses in intimate places, why not start to add at least a few more tender kisses near intimate places.  Then do more and closer over time.  If the other one wants raunchy, dirty talk why not begin to add some naughty words and statements so as to move in that direction.  Then do more and more over time.  Ask your beloved to be patient, and kind and anything else you want as you keep making small, experimental steps forward.  Mentally open yourself to the idea this may help you increase your own enjoyment and desire, as well as helping your beloved with their desires and enjoyment.  Compliment all steps toward improvement and criticize nothing.

Work to enjoy the journey.  If anything seems extra difficult in any way, you probably need to divide it into smaller steps.  Give and ask for praise, and thank you’s for each step attempted.  When things wrong, keep going, don’t stop.  Remember not to play the evil, ego game called “strike one, you’re out, and the game is over”.  Add fun whenever you can but do not make derogatory fun of your beloved or of yourself.

Examples To Consider

Listen to these five sentences which were made by people solving their issues concerning sex drive differences.  See if they give you ideas of what you might want to shoot for in your own sexual relationship.

“Dearest, let me try having sex with you more often, like you want, and you try doing some things I ask for that might help me get more turned-on.  And let’s be sure we both do it all in good spirits and with love whether it works or not.”

“Honey, I don’t really feel like having intercourse right now but I’d be glad to snuggle next to you as you masturbate, and I’d really enjoy helping you along as you do that.”

“Sweetheart, how about we do sex the way you like and want it this time, and the way I especially like it a little later?”

“Darling, I will be glad to try role-playing having sex the way you want but actually doing it hurts too much, so the best I can do is pretend – okay?”

“I want us to have a very sweet, tender, loving, caressing, cuddling, holding couple of hours together without having sex.  I want us both to ‘get into’ really enjoying all that ‘on its own’ without it having to lead to intercourse or a climax.  It’s okay if we get horny but this time let’s not do anything about it.  Every so often that’s what I want.  Will you help me have that?  Will you also try hard to enjoy it like I will?  If you could do that, I’ll feel really loved by you and I’ll very much want to do it all your way soon”.

With healthy, real love there is a desire, motivating actions toward helping those you love experience what they want to experience.  With healthy self-love there is a desire for healthy self-care.  Sometimes these two seem to clash.  However, with loving cooperation and the small steps approach, couples can help each other do at least some of both.  That often leads to a synthesis type solution, or at least a sort of taking turns compromise.

Unless something is distinctly harmful or destructive, or seems likely to be so, it usually is best to attempt some of whatever your beloved sexually wants.  At the same time, be sure and be asking for whatever you want.  Some of that can seem scary, weird or even repugnant at first, but then with small step experiments, done with love, it can turn into new ways to have excitement and much more mutual pleasure.  The rule is to avoid harm and to get into things lovingly and by way of small, sometimes very small, slow steps.

Sex Drive Differences As A Good Thing

Having sex drive differences can be a good thing when handled with enough love and with a small step, ‘experimental’ approach.  Two people can softly, but clearly, put forth what they want sexually and be as open as possible to hearing what their beloved wants.  Then both can experiment slowly, carefully and with small steps toward each other’s desires all of which can be done while being very loving.  This is what works for a great many couples.  This approach can lead to all sorts of sexual enrichment, new sexually and emotionally enjoyable experiences, new discoveries and a wider shared life experience.  It is especially great when a couple works to add to each other’s experience rather than to be limiting or subtractive.

Some people mistakenly think that starting out with high, sexual compatibility and staying that way is required to have a good, couples relationship.  That really is not true.  Remember, you do not need a copy of yourself.  It is better when you work at learning to enjoy what your beloved enjoys in every area, including sex.  In that way you add to each other, grow as a couple and grow as individuals.  This loving, small steps approach also helps get over sexual ignorance, sexual hang-ups, sexual fears, sexual narrowness, anti-sexual training and sexual blocks in subconscious programming.

Handling Sexual Miss- Steps

Know that some of your experimental step taking will lead to some stumbling, awkwardness, fumbling, etc..  Mis-coordination is certain to occur.  Especially, each first effort at something new is not likely to work.  The trick is to put some more love into it, and keep going.  Try, try, try again and don’t take any of it too seriously.  Doing it all with love and being love-centered is the more important thing.  Making love more important, and more commonly enacted than sex, makes the sexuality improved.  Making the sex more important than the love tends to make it much harder to sexually succeed.

Remember, there are two kinds of love involved.  Love of your beloved and healthy self-love.  Keep doing both as you keep taking small steps toward a greater, love-filled, sex life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Have you been learning as much about love you as you have about sex, and are you endeavoring to learn more about both?

Related posts:

1. Age Differences and Romantic Love
2. Making Love OR Having Sex?
3. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
4. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
5. Sex Fears Mastered with Love 

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

Intimate Love, What Everyone Needs to Know!

       

Mini-Love-Lesson  # 259

Synopsis:  We start with the experience of intimate love; move on to what is intimacy and intimate love; the main two pathways to intimate love; its widespread healthfulness; the question “Is risking realness required” and then end with the wonders of intimate love via emotional intercourse.

The Experience of Intimate Love!

Close and personal, special and private, connecting and bonding, free and trusting, revealing and exposed yet safe and secure, known and accepted, miniscule and precious, cherished and soaring, erotic and sacred, tender and powerful, idyllic and serene, delicate and cosmic, warm and ebullient, core sharing and soul touching -- these are but some of the words people used to describe their experience of intimate love in a couples workshop on advanced intimacy and love.

Do some of these words resonate with you?  Would you use others and, if so, what?  What is your experience so far with intimate love?  Do you seek, wish for, long for, or work to create more intimate love in your life?  Are you good  at intimacy cooperation and intimate love teamwork?  Do you tend to eagerly welcome or more often dodge experiences of intimacy?  Do you tend to linger with intimate love or cut it a bit short like so many do?  In your future, what part will intimate love play?

What Is Intimacy?

Those who research intimacy tend to see it as a process of interaction in which, most commonly, two or sometimes a small group of people reveal and share their real, deeper , more personal and private thoughts, emotional and physical feelings, behaviors and sometimes their sexuality, thereby, letting themselves be more mutually and idiosyncratically known and experienced.  In doing so, intense forms of mutual feelings of closeness, bonding, joy, being preciously connected and valued can result.

Sometimes smaller, intimate experiences produce feelings of simple closeness and strong, shared appreciation along with cherished memories of the experience.  There is often a sense of conjoined caring, mutual understanding and dual affirmation resulting from shared intimacy experiences.

What Is Intimate Love?

Intimate love combines everything you have just read about intimacy with, for, and in the expression of authentic love.  Love simply is defined as a powerful, vital, and natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the loved (see The Definition of Love Series “The Definitions of Love”). Intimate love therefore, is a major, close, personal way of doing just those things.

At the same time, intimate love is a marvelous process for accomplishing the five major functions of love.  In brief, they are (1) to connect us, (2) to nurture us, (3) to protect us, (4) to heal us and (5) to reward us for enacting the behaviors of love.  Intimate love often provides profound connectedness, nurturing, healing and rewarding experiences frequently in a wonderful sense of happy safety and, thus, facilitating all five major functions of love.

The Main Path to Intimate Love

The primary path to intimate love is self-disclosure and, with it, self-disclosure love (see “Self-Disclosure Love”, a chapter in my book Recovering Love). It is an act of love to disclose yourself to someone you love.  It lets them know who you are in intimate detail.  Ongoing self-disclosure shares your personal self with another so that they can understand who you are in many differing ways, enjoy you and much more fully experience the unique you.

Self-disclosure can be done by revealing your body, your way of being sexual, your physical feelings, your positive, negative and mixed emotions, your history (both bad and good) your ordinary past, your hopes and aspirations, fears, weaknesses, strengths, excesses, deficiencies, victories and failures, personal thoughts, areas of knowledge and ignorance, your troubles and triumphs, mediocrity, ugliness and beautiful parts, along with where you need healing and growth, your deficiencies and attributes, guilty aspects, shame, pride, enjoyments, proclivities, idiosyncrasies, and ways of just being yourself.

Do not forget to reveal your ways of being fair, decent, kind and ways of having pleasure.  Very important are your perceptions, understandings, conceptions and misconceptions, preferences, moods, attitudes, judgments and quandaries.  Even more important are your fears, anxieties, secret hopes and hidden desires.  In other words, share as much as you can and, while you are at it, enjoy your beloved sharing themselves with you (see “Growing Closeness -- A Love Skill”).

The Second but Equal Path to Intimate Love

The second great path to intimate love is touch or tactile love, both sexual and affectionate (mostly nonsexual).   Everything from one finger, tender, superlight touch to full body bear hugs and full body massage-type touching is included here.  When you fully, really love someone touching them in every loving way and on every loved part is a great way to create an intimate love, experience.  Likewise, letting yourself be touched every way and everywhere is a grand way to share yourself with someone and let yourself be intimately loved.

Passionate embraces and tender eyelid kisses, being vigorously lifted then swung around or super gently caressed, having your feet rubbed with scented oils or your back scratched -- they all can convey, enhance and embody intimate love.  So too does all types of wanted sexuality.  Experimenting with new types of sexuality, always done with shared love and without judgment or anything critical, can produce a wonderful sense of an intimate love experience.  That is true even if the sex part does not work out so well (see“50 Varieties of Love Touch”).

Intimate Love Is So Healthy -- Physically and Psychologically

There is quite a bit of research showing that high levels and frequency of intimacy resulted in higher levels of happiness, good mental health, better immune system functioning, less stress hormones in the blood, as much as eight years of greater longevity, greater general enjoyment of life, better body systems functioning, far better relational functioning and a host of other goodies.

Is Risking Realness Required?

Many people fear self-disclosure, intimacy and intimate love itself though still desiring it.  There are lots of different reasons for those fears.  For some, it is a fear of being judged and rejected, others have been trained to be ashamed, embarrassed or have a sense of being sinful when they reveal certain parts of themselves, while still others have very painful memories of betrayal stemming from the last time they risked being real.  Then there are those who rely on their social act and persona mask so much that they just can't bring themselves to do honest self-disclosure without embellishment and social deception.

If you self-disclose some intimate truth about yourself and it goes badly,  in one way that is a good thing.  It helps you know that the person you did the self-disclosure with probably is not a good person to do self-disclosure with, and consequently, is more likely to be a poor candidate for carrying out most kinds of love relationship with.  Thus, whatever went wrong is likely to be a message to consider ruling them out and to go looking for someone more tolerant, accepting, empathetic, less critical or whatever.

If you choose not to be self-disclosing, that can be quite a barrier to intimacy and intimate love occurring.  Some people do not do well at self-disclosure just because they were brought up that way.  Frequently they have been subconsciously programmed to mold themselves into strong silent types.  This especially is true for a lot of men in several cultures where showing your emotions is not considered manly.

Then there are those, women mostly, who have been subconsciously programmed to be attracted to the strong, silent types.  Strong can be okay but silent, not so much.  Silence is a prescription for emotional distance and loneliness.  It is done mostly for safety but, in reality, for love relationships it is not safe at all.  Whenever there is too much emotional distance in a romantic relationship love hunger tends to grow, as does, the likelihood of secret affairs.

Can you risk being seen psychologically naked?  If you are rejected, or have fled from or retreated from being criticized and condemned, can you be strong enough to be okay with the probability that you and that person may not be a good match -- which is a good thing to know sooner than later.  Risking revealing yourself is the only way to really find out if the real you and the whole you is loved.  Hopefully you have enough healthy self-love to both risk and survive going for intimate love.  Likewise, will you do well with self-disclosure coming your way?  Toleration love often is required for a love relationship to be good and lasting (see “Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).

Emotional Intercourse

Having emotional intercourse fairly frequently is absolutely great for making intimate love experiences happen and for keeping heart-mate love relationships interesting and enriching.  How do you have emotional intercourse?  Well, you do it by taking your positive and negative emotions about anything and everything and showing them, not just telling them to a loved one who can take them in with good listening and love reception skills.  It is sort of like living them with you as you share and self-disclose them (see “Listening with Love”).

Then, with good listening and love reception skills, you do the same as they share and self-disclose their emotions about anything and everything to you (“Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).   Emotional intercourse usually is fairly active though sometimes subtle.  Intimately looking into each other's eyes, while holding each other, while both have very loving facial expressions can be great emotional intercourse.  Emotional intercourse can occur at the same time as sexual intercourse if very free-form, active expression of what is being felt emotionally and sexually is occurring and is being observed with enjoyment and maybe with awe (see “Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill” and “Emotional Intercourse”).

One More Thing: With another, talking over what you have just read and sharing your feelings about it, as well as your thoughts, might lead to a bit of an intimate experience.  If you do that, please mention this site and our many mini-love-lessons.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If you go emotionally naked and have emotional intercourse with someone and they, likewise with you, will you not, in one way or another, come to love each other?

Touch Only with Love: an Anti-Violence Tool

Some people grow up learning to physically hit, shake, punch, shove and do other acts of physical violence to others when upset.

Many do these things when they feel attacked physically, verbally or any other way.  Others become physically violence-prone when they get frustrated and others when they are mad.
Still others strikeout physically when they feel threatened and some others when just about any negative feeling occurs.  Many males, especially, have been well trained to physically ‘hit back’ when they feel ‘hit’, even though what hit them was only words.  No small number of females do the same thing.  Then there are those who ‘hit’ others in playfulness but they may do it too hard, too often, too much, in the wrong way, or in a wrong place or wrong time for others to ‘playfully’ accept it.  All of this can have very anti-love effects and, therefore, can have quite a destructive effect on a love relationship.

One common reaction is to tell the person who is acting physically rough or violent to “stop that”.  Be aware that quite frequently it does not work to tell someone what not to do.  It may only work to tell them what to do.  Saying things like “don’t hit, stop hitting, don’t ever hit him, or her, or me again”, etc. for long-range results often is almost useless.  It works far better to tell a person what to do instead of what they’ve been doing.  Until someone knows ‘what new behavior to replace an old behavior with’ there is a high likelihood that they will, by practiced tendency and habit, return to responding with the old behavior.  Until you know a replacement behavior you likely will keep doing what you’re used to doing until you learn what to do instead of what you have been doing.  It sort of is like being told what not to do creates a vacuum into which something will rush to fill that vacuum, just like in the physical world.  The easiest thing that fills that vacuum is the behavior you are used to doing.

So, what’s going to replace hitting or a physically violent activity that we want to stop? The answer can be becoming trained, practiced and committed to a ‘Touch Only with Love’ way of acting toward your loved ones and perhaps others.  This is not the only thing but it is a tool which can help a lot.  This tool can be made to work quite well with both children and adults.  Couples, family members and friends who get into physical fights with each other can commit to a ‘Touch Only with Love’ strategy to replace their physically violent reactions to one another.  Making a commitment to such a strategy often is a tipping point for creating a very important improvement.

Why does a person, who supposedly loves another, sometimes try to physically hurt or harm that person?  Here are some background factors about that.  Siblings who physically fought a lot when young are in danger of suddenly striking their spouses when feeling attacked.  Parents who were struck a lot as children are in danger of reactively striking their children, especially when they get tired, stressed or angry.  Those who grew up around adults who physically abused those around them unfortunately may have been subconsciously programmed to do the same. Those who grew up in neighborhoods or other environments where there was a lot of physical violence are more likely to be physically violent.

Growing up in any environment in which physical violence is praised, honored or seen as the right thing to do later may endanger subsequent loved ones to physical abuse because rewarded behavior tends to continue or re-emerge. Children who are not corrected for being physically violent in their youth might have been accidentally reinforced for being violent and often are more prone to become physically abusive in their adulthood.  The chronically immature can sometimes have similar permission giving, subconscious programming for violence.  As you can see, many people are programmed subconsciously to have a tendency toward being violent.  However, reprogramming is very possible and committing to the ‘touch your loved ones only with love’ approach can help accomplish that reprogramming.

With commitment, and training, and sufficient practice you can make a new habit dominant over an old one, therefore, replacing it.  ‘Touch only with love’ can be your new habit.  Adolescents who get into physical fights can be helped to form a ‘touch only with love’ habit by judicious use of rewarding them for the desired behavior.  Children can be shown and taught that soft, more gentle touches, hugs, etc. are the desired and rewarded way to touch each other.  Fighting families can draw up and agree to help each other abide by ‘touch only with love’ contracts.  Individuals who want to get past physical violence tendencies can commit to and then through role-playing practice a “I will only touch others with love” behavioral strategy.

I’m not saying reprogramming yourself is easy, I’m saying it is very worth the effort.  When you feel angry, frustrated, impatient, stressed or any time you might feel like lashing out physically toward a loved one say to yourself something like, “I’m not going to let my old violence training control me.  I’ve committed to ‘touch only with love’ so I’m going for a walk around the block to cool down” or “I’m going to take a couple calming breaths to relax some of this inner tension” or “I’m going outside to throw ice cubes at a wall to let off some steam” or “I’m going to the bedroom to beat on a pillow until I simmer down.

And when I return I’ll be more able to handle this and touch only with love” – or say something that works for you.  Amazingly this usually changes the whole dynamic of the interaction and makes room for positives.  You and your loved one both can benefit from your work to replace the old habit with one dominated by ‘touch only with love’.  

A commitment to or a contract between people to touch only with love has helped warring couples break their violence cycles.  Role-playing new behaviors in scenarios where you have previously struck someone, starting with reminding yourself that you’re committed to ‘touch only with love’, has helped a lot of people.  Adding a ‘re-direction of your actions’ strategy to the ‘touch only with love’ approach often is wise.  However, you really must work at remembering to tell yourself “I’m committed to touching loved ones, (others, etc.) only with love”.  Families and couples who contract with each other for a “touch only with love” agreement can plot out rewards for living up to their pledge, and also penalties for relapses.

A lot can go very wrong when people get physically aggressive, especially to a loved one.  Reminding oneself that in the modern world relationships involving physical abuse and violence usually end poorly and sometimes end tragically.  There is a lot of evidence pointing to repeated physical violence in a relationship almost inevitably leads to the relationship being either severely harmed or destroyed.  Violence in couple’s relationships is extremely prone to escalate causing real physical damage and sometimes even death.  Also with escalation there is the likelihood of lengthy, complicated, costly, judicial system involvement and possible imprisonment.

Increasingly parents who physical punish their children, much like they themselves were punished, are being found guilty of physical abuse and often have their children taken from them as well as facing possible imprisonment.  In lesser cases having to attend parenting classes or parent guidance counseling also may be involved.  So you can see there are lots of good reasons to develop a ‘touch only with love’ approach to those you love.

The very best reason to ‘touch those you love only with love’ is because that is the loving thing to do.  There are some other important concepts to understand which provide a foundation for understanding the importance of this tool.  Some people mistakenly think love causes or even justifies physical violence.  “If I killed her doesn’t that mean I really loved her?” is the infamous quote exemplifying an enormous, wrong understanding of love.  ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is another one which has been used to justify physical abuse of children for ages.  The truth, according to the scholars in ancient times, is that the rod referred to was used to gently guide and never hit sheep, goats or cattle.

We now understand that physical violence toward our loved ones does not come from love.  That’s because healthy, real love fundamentally works to motivate us toward being protective not harmful to our loved ones.  Only false forms of love involve people being seriously hurtful or harmful to a loved one.  (See blog entries concerning “False Forms of Love”).  Thus, ‘touch only with love’ works as a tool for enacting and ensuring healthy, real love.

This tool can be used in a number of ways.  An individual can just dedicate his or herself to ‘touching only with love’ and that usually means touching softly, gently and with a love-centered ‘heart’ attitude (see blog entry “Love Centering Yourself”).  Any group of people (family, couple, friends, etc.) can contract with each other that their way of relating physically to one another will be governed by the rule of ‘touch only with love’.  Any group of people can agree to encourage, praise, compliment and thank each other every time there is a difficulty in which they adhere to their pledge to abide by this rule.  If penalties for violation of the rule are involved they need to be rendered via self-denial or deprivation of something, and not anything involving physical pain.

In rare situations some loving touch could conceivably require restraining someone from self harm or from harming another.  In some cases other strong touch actions might be loving but probably not the purposeful, selfish harming of another.  People who more or less automatically turn to violent physical action when they feel frustrated, unfairly treated, betrayed, jealous, misused, maligned or otherwise demeaned often find this tool especially useful.  ‘Touch only with love’ can be coupled with other anti-physical violence tools and strategies for a more comprehensive approach.

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Is there always love in the ways you touch your loved ones?

Related posts:

1. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
2. 50 Varieties of Love Touch
3. The Anti-Love Forces Are Out to Get You
4. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
5. Anti-Love Myth # 2: You Will Have Eyes Only for Me