For Failing Love: Avoid, or Convert, or Escape?

Mini-Love-Lesson #191

Synopsis: Briefly introduced here are three approaches for dealing with the enormously destructive issue of failing love and how to choose and then get started on each.

Three Strategies for a Huge Problem

Love relationships that fail are a monumentally tragic life-harming and life-destroying problem for countless millions all over the world!  Agonizing breakups, anxiety filled separations, divorce resulting depression, loveless ongoing mutual-misery marriages, addiction relapses, relationship suicides and murders, wounded children, relational related abuse, loneliness, empty life problems and much more – all common outcomes of failing love.
What to do about failing love baffles and confounds so many people.  Perhaps you are one of them or someone dear to you struggles with this issue.

To help cut through the enormous confusion about failing love here are three basic strategies or approaches known to help people think more clearly to get past failing love and then go on to successful, healthy love.

Avoid

If you are not now in a heart–mate type love relationship, or if you think you are in love and do not want it to turn into a failing love, or if you have couple troubles and do not wish to go further into failure here are some things you can do.  Learn to identify and avoid what leads into failure.  Do not just study what goes wrong but discover what leads up to and precedes failure.  You can do this both in small-scale and large-scale ways as well as for short-term and long-term patterns and situations.  Do not forget to look at your own preceding contributions to triggering or causing failure events.  Major love failures are often built out of a series of mini-love-failures which possibly could have been avoided.

I am biased but I heartily recommend you and your loved ones study the dozen, big, false love patterns found in our book, Real Love False Love , so you can be sure to avoid them.  As you are right now, you can keep studying the free mini-love-lessons that have to do with identifying and avoiding the traps and tragedies of love gone wrong found at this site.  We especially recommend working on identifying and avoiding anti-love, pseudo-love and non-love communications and behaviors.

Who to avoid and why also is an important area of study and learning that is an act of healthy self-love.  Sadly, some people subconsciously are programmed to be attracted to, and to fall in false love with only those who will hurt, harm and destroy them.  Sharpening your own personal love knowledge of who you might be vulnerable to and how to avoid dangerous, self-sabotaging situations can be love-protective and life-protective.  Lots of people get into bad-for-them relationships and have repeating love failures because they don’t do this.

Probably most major love failures, traps and tragedies could have been and can be avoided by those who learn how to identify and avoid.  So work on your failure avoidance skills and free yourself to go on to the wonders, marvels and happiness of healthy, real and successful love.

Convert

A great many people in failing love relationships find they can convert failure to success if they work at it in the right ways, hard enough and long enough.  Sadly, a great many other people do not do this.  That also is true for every type of love relationship: parent, child, friend, family, comrade, self, etc. –  all forms of love can improve with work.  By way of recent really good research, we finally are learning what truly works to make love success.  You can learn that too, and you are started or are progressing on that love learning path right now because you are reading this.

The feedback we get tells us many of our mini-love-lessons have helped a large number of individuals, couples, families and others convert failing love to successful love.  Also, I am proud to say our book, Recovering Love,  is about converting failing love to successful love and for years has been helping couples, and also especially couples facing addiction issues.  Furthermore, the third major section of Real Love False Love contains some powerful how to’s for converting false love to real love.

Lots of other books, classes, retreats, workshops, couple’s counseling groups, and support groups, couple’s counselors and family therapists are very beneficial in helping people discover what it takes to convert failing love to successful love.  Consider availing yourself of any and all of that.
Lots of people give up too soon or they just do not go about the work of learning and practicing what works for healthy, real, love relating.

Ovid, the great Roman poet and teacher of love, in the year 01 taught two things that apply here.  First “if you would be loved – be lovable” and second “lasting love requires skill”.  So, if you would convert love failure to love success, get busy developing your love skills and do not ever quit.

Escape

If you are in a failing love relationship that keeps failing in spite of you and your spouse’s or heart mate’s best efforts over time, if the relationship is physically and/or psychologically increasingly debilitating and/or dangerous and destructive, healthy self-love demands that you consider escaping.  Trying endlessly in a deteriorating, destructive situation probably will just harm or destroy you, wound kids if they are involved, hurt or harm some others and likely enable your spouse’s dysfunction and decline.

Escape allows recovery and repair, followed by doing yourself and others more good than if you had remained in a destructive trap.  You might even go back to him or her some day, but don’t unless you and hopefully your ex are far stronger and more powerfully love skilled.

Escaping a failing love relationship almost always is hard, painful conflicted and confusing but, if it means survival and not wasting your life, it could be the only healthy thing to do.  It also often can be the only way to help children, family, friends and even the other person in the relationship.

At this site, there is lots of totally free information that can help in making a healthful for all concerned escape.  Furthermore, in the last third of Real Love False Love there is a very helpful, strong section on healthful escape.

After escape from a destructive and failing love relationship, you may do best to engage in a lot of healthy, self-love, recovery work.  Do not just stay wounded forever like some do.  We humans are meant to heal and go on to more and better living.  After escape, study how to avoid love failures in the future.  If you escape from a seriously failing love relationship do you really want to go through getting into another similar situation from which you need to escape again?

I hope you will go on to a love-successful life enriched by all that love can bring.  So, do your homework, study love and make that more likely.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Exactly what will you do next for learning more about how to avoid failing love, convert failing love to successful love, or escape toxic, destructive, failing and false love?

Related posts:

1. Can Love Overcome Incompatibility?
2. Destroyers of Love – the 7 Big D’s Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships
3. Heartbreak Mending and The Deep, Multi-Love Remedy
4. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
5. Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines

Critiquing without Criticizing

Synopsis: This mini love lesson presents attracting or repulsing speech; critiquing and criticizing differences; headed toward bonding or breaking up; and what’s coming at you.

Attracting or Repulsing Speech

Which of these statements will you be more likely to make to a loved one:

1. “That was really dumb of you.  How could you have been so stupid?  You never learn do you!  If you just weren’t such an idiot.”
Or 2. “I could’ve made that same mistake.  That just proves were both human and we don’t always get it right.  Do you want to figure out how to fix it on your own?  Or, do you want some help?  By the way we can use this slip-up to learn from so we can avoid this problem in the future.”

The first statement ‘puts down’ both of you psychologically and the speaker probably creates emotional distancing and probably projects a sense of the listener being alone with the problem.  In the second statement the speaker emotionally works to join with listener and to avoid giving a put down message, yet acknowledges a mistake has been made and a want to fix it. You might want to examine which of those two statements is closer to how you learned to talk growing up.  You also might want to think about the people in your life who talk more like the first statement and those who talk more like the second and what influences they might have had.

Here are a couple more statements to examine:

1. “Let’s look at what’s best and worst about what you just did.  Then let’s look at how to improve it.”
Or 2. What you just did is all crap!  There are so many things wrong with it I’m not even going to bother trying to tell you how to correct it.”

Which of these two statements would you rather receive?  Which would be more typical of the way you communicate, especially to loved ones?  The first statement has to do with the speaker and the listener together critiquing something that was done.  By acknowledging that what was done has both ‘a best’ and ‘a worst’ it offers what can be regarded as a critique instead of a criticism.

Critique and Criticism Differences

Criticism is a word with a connotation of tearing down self-concept, personally attacking, searching for and pointing out what’s wrong, and paying no attention to what might be right.  Modern dictionaries now define criticism as fault-finding, disapproving, and unfavorably evaluating.  Criticism at one time just meant analyzing with knowledge.  In some circles that definition still holds true.  Relationally ‘connotation’ often is more important than definition.

Critiquing means to examine with a view to determining something’s nature and qualities. A critique used to be defined as an act of criticism.  However, critique is coming to have the connotation of giving a balanced evaluation without likelihood of emotional dissonance.  Of course, some people can take anything badly and feel wronged by the statement, no matter what.  This is where saying things with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions and gestures usually helps to carry a connotation of critique instead of criticism.

Critiquing is evaluating with knowledge, hopefully without the negatives of criticism.  It’s not enough just to change your style from criticizing to critiquing, you also need to make an attitudinal change from blame to one that can be a benefit to both people in a love relationship (this includes to children, family, friends and other love relationships).

Heading toward Bonding Or Breaking up?

Being demeaning with putdowns, complaints, fault-finding, derogatory remarks, etc. is increasingly taken to mean a person is criticizing.  This is the number two reason for couple’s breakups (the number one reason is insufficiently loving) according to some research.  Criticism helps love relationships break apart. Critiquing, as a rule, helps love relationships address issues in a balanced, positive way.

There are some exceptions. There are people who have grown up thinking all positive speech is sugar-coating and only negative, critical speech can be trusted.  There is a type of masochism in which a person feels very uncomfortable hearing anything positive.  Barring things like that, critiquing works a whole lot better with loved ones than does criticism.

If you find it a lot easier talking about what’s wrong rather than what’s right with someone you supposedly love, something may be amiss in your way of going about love.. It just can be that you grew up around people programming you to talk more negative than positive.  In any case, there’s a whole lot of research saying focusing on and talking about the positive more than the negative helps you stay physically and psychologically healthy and is good for love relationships.

What’s Coming at You?

Do you hear lots of criticism coming at you?  There are several possibilities about that. One is ‘you have been programmed to filter out the positive and only hear the negative’ and you possibly may give negative interpretations to neutral and positive statements coming your way.  Another is you are encountering  too many people who would rather talk about the ‘weeds’ rather than the ‘flowers’ in everybody’s psychological garden.

Both of these possibilities can be true.  Then there is the possibility that you are way too much of a noxious influence on others and, therefore, what’s coming at you is appropriate. That too can be fixed with the help of a good counselor or therapist.  If nothing negative ever comes at you suspect that you are surrounded by people who give ‘false positives’ or everybody’s too afraid of you to give you their truth.

If you hear more critical than critiquing talk, it may be time to change some things.  Ask yourself, are the people in your life more negative or positive?  Do some really love you and, if so, do they know how to love well?  Are you unknowingly rewarding them for criticizing you and, thus, reinforcing their tendencies to do criticism more than critique?  Is your interpretation system in need of improvement?   Are you really counting the positive things that are said to you, or are you discounting them, or even not really hearing them at all?  Most important, are you figuring out what to do about these things?

If you let criticism come your way more than critiquing, it can do you and your love relationships a lot of harm.  Are you going to help your loved ones who criticize a bit too much change to a more critiquing style?  With some work, anyone can make critiquing with love a most effective and rewarding love skill.  You might want to read related topics at this site in the Subject Index under the Communication heading: “Communicating Better with Love”, “Love Complaints versus Love Requests”, “Love Positive Talking” and others.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Which are you better at saying to yourself and others: putdowns or praises, compliments or complaints, criticizing or congratulating?

Love Is a Performance Art

Mini-Love-Lesson  #257

Synopsis:  Addressing love as the performance of an art; feelings guided love; is love now learnable?;  what’s to learn; and a comprehensive yet clear and simplified look at the major behaviors of love in only three categories and 12 kinds of action – all are explored here.

Loving Your Art of Love

Some say they truly and dearly love dance.  Others that it is just in them to act and that they love their life in the theater.  Still others insist that they love music and especially performing, and it is just something they feel they cannot live without doing.  Let us suppose that what they say is true.  Now there arises some questions.  Will strong feelings be enough for attaining a degree of competence?  Will it perhaps take strong feelings plus talent to do well at their art?  If someone wants to get good or better at their art, what must they do besides have strong feelings and some talent?

One answer to that question comes from research that concluded they must put in 10,000 hours of learning, practicing and performing.  If they want to be really good, maybe more.  However, if they are unusually talented maybe it will only take 7000 hours.

Why should it be any different for love?  The art of love or loving is a phrase and a title that repeatedly shows up in many of the writings of the great sages, wisdom masters and great students of love down through the ages.  So many emphasize the doing of love and not just the feelings of love.  Even many of the luminaries of love understanding who do not use the phrase "art of love" emphasize the work of doing love as being necessary to succeed at love.

At the feelings level, one’s love of an art motivates involvement in that art.  However, feelings are never enough.  Continuous learning, practicing, experimenting for improvement and a host of other doing it things must be added to be able to do one's art well.

So it is with love.  Yes, love feelings come naturally but mounting evidence shows that good love relating takes learning, practicing, perfecting and performing the actions that send and receive love.  If you want to do love well with a heart-mate, a child, a family member, a friend, with yourself, your deity or anything else, it probably will take learning, studying, practicing and performing the behaviors that "do" love.

A good number of spiritual leaders, philosophers, savants, etc. down through the ages have tried to teach that love is not love at all without the doing.  And now in addition come  results  from a sizable number of social and behavioral scientists doing studies in a wide variety of fields, along with the work of some brain scientists and a considerable number of practitioners of couples counseling, family therapy, and other forms of relational therapy – some who do some pretty good research themselves.  Those results pretty much agree that if you work at a love relationship learning, and practicing the identified successful behaviors of love, you can do it remarkably better.  Even the animal psychologists have data showing much the same thing in primates and several other species.  Higher-order animals that do not learn and practice the showing and receiving behaviors of love almost invariably fail at their relationships with others and become isolates or outcasts among their own kind.

What About Love Guided by Feelings Only?

Lots of people do their love life guided mainly only by their feelings.  They seem to have bought into the romantic myth that love is automatic, and it is all a matter of nature and feelings and perhaps fate or luck or something like that.  Therefore, for many of them, love is cognitively unknowable and unlearnable and they often think feelings will provide all the guidance needed.  Many also believe that trying to learn love will just get in the way.

The success rate of people who do love by those ideas is not encouraging.  That is especially true when compared to the record of people who live by the you have to work at it approach to love.  If you grew up in a highly, healthfully, loving family, you may have subconsciously learned quite a lot about doing love well, and have a pretty good chance of doing so.  If you were not lucky enough to grow up in such a family, purposefully learning and getting good at the "how too’s" of love gives you your best chance.  Remember, about 50% of many Western world countries’ marriages end in divorce, and it is thought that another 25% could be doing far better than they are.  There are similar results for parent-child relationships, family relationships, friendships which do somewhat better and then there is healthy self-love relating for which the results are not good either, except for those who work it (see “Is Love Ignorance The Problem?”).

Do We Know Enough About Love to Make It Learnable?

If love was so unknowable, why did St. Paul write so much about what is love and what is not love?  Why did Ovid in the year one write about how to make love lasting, and Buddha kept emphasizing living by love’s Four Immeasurable Mindsets, Aristotle taught the ways of love have to do with compassion, virtue, affection and kindness, Rumi spend his life writing poetry about love and its ways?  And in more modern times, why did such widely diverse leaders of modern thought such as Eric Fromme, Soren Kierkegaard, Harry Harlow and Thich Nhat Hahn work so hard to discover and teach the ways of doing love?

Not long ago in Russia it was decided that we finally know so much about love that the field of loveology was officially certified as a legitimate field of study in which you could get undergraduate and graduate degrees (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology?”).  In Europe, the US and several South American countries, graduate-level institutes are sponsoring "love studies" in a wide array of fields ranging from anthropology to zoology.  Especially in the brain sciences there are research projects going on investigating brain processes and love.  Already a great deal has been discovered which has opened the door to many new questions and avenues for further study never before explored or, in some cases, never before even thought about.
So, the answer is yes; we know more than enough about love to make it learnable though there is yet so much more to learn.

What Must Be Learned About Love?

From a psychological point of view, there are three, big, integrated areas that are to be focused on.  Those three areas are: #1) to be able to do constructive thinking about love, #2) to be able to have healthy awareness of love’s many emotions and how they usefully inform us, and #3) to have knowledge of and practice, i.e. do, the major behaviors that accomplish love.  Number three is the one that has to do with the performance Art of love and, for our purposes here, is the most important one.  However, let us first briefly touch into the feelings or emotional aspects of love and then the thinking aspect.

Right now, can you quietly and internally search deep into your psychological heart and sense your loving feelings toward someone you have love for?  If so, what are those feelings like right now?  Are they tender, powerful, uplifting, sad, protective, nurturing, heavy, light, or what?  If they have a message, can you hear what that message is?

It is OK if nothing comes right now, it may come later.  That is a sort of exercise that uses mindfulness for tapping into the love you have for someone and the feelings that come from that love.  Love is not a feeling but it gives us feelings of many types including loving, loved and lovable, along with a great many others.  It shows how the love within you might be usefully available and purposefully accessed.

Let's take a quick glance at thinking about love.  Try focusing on the thought that love can be done by you as a wonderful performance art that you are going to greatly enjoy learning about and participating in.  Think how developing that mindset might lead you into some greatly enriching experiences.

Now, for the performance part – the most important part for our purposes here and the part I suggest you focus  most on.  It is the actions or behaviors of love that accomplish the most.  It is what you do or perform that fulfills the five major functions of love (see “A Functional Definition of Love” ). Like any performance art, it is the actual performing of the behaviors of the art that are the art.
To help you with that, here is my favorite simplified outline of the major behaviors of love to learn about, and start practicing and working to improve.

THE MAJOR BEHAVIORS OF LOVE

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Love can be understood to be accomplished at three levels, each of which have four major components.  They are as follows:

I.   Basic Core Love Actions

1. Tactile Love
Touch love is the first and most basic way of giving and receiving love.  One can endlessly learn new and better ways to touch with love.

2. Expressional Love 
Facial expressions, gestures, posture changes, voice modulations, proximity shifts, etc. can, and do, send love messages often far better and more powerfully than words.  They also have infinite variations.

3. Verbal Love
Artfully delivered words of love sometimes can be the most meaningful and most magnificent way to deliver love’s most impactful communications.  Work with words of love for depth, height and breadth of love expression and more lasting effect.

4. Gifting Love
One can give objects, experiences and favors significantly showing love.  All three can be of enormous importance and made special by personal variation and design.

II. Higher Functioning Love Actions

5. Affirmational Love

Love behaviors and words that affirm the high value and importance of the loved.  These often are essential for building up, strengthening and actively appreciating the loved.  Thus, they often bringing out the best in a loved one.

6. Self-disclosure Love
Often essential for deep core connecting, growing closeness and creating intimacy.  This involves the self revealing of personal thoughts, feelings (both physical and emotional), behaviors history, hopes, fears, failures and successes and everything personal and private.

7. Tolerational Love
Tolerating the less pleasant and sometimes harder to accept aspects of the loved but not to the point of harm, or self-destruction, or enabling a loved one's self harm or self-destruction.

8. Receptional Love
Acting to lovingly, appreciatively and positively receive acts and words showing love and positiveness toward you.  This is essential for love cycling in ongoing relationships, growing love mutually and a sense of bonded connectedness.

III. Cardinal Love Actions

9. Connecting Love
Actions that cause and promote heartfelt connection feelings with the loved, including bonding behaviors and experiences, feelings of having ongoing unity, deep attachment, strong allegiance and loyalty with one or more networked loved ones.

10. Nurturing Love
An interacting group of behaviors that act to promote, aid, assist, motivate and reward (A) the healthful growth, positive development and constructive advancement, (B) the maintenance and sustaining of ongoing well-being, and when needed the repair, restoration and healing of the loved.

11. Protective Love
Any and all behaviors that aim to safeguard, defendant or, if needed, rescue the loved from harm, reduced well-being, useless hurt and destructive occurrences while also aiming to not be overprotective and, thus, block growth for improvement and strengthening.

12. Metaphysical Love
All healthful actions that are done to spiritually, meditatively and/or metaphysically promote and support the well-being of the loved.

One More Thing:  There's a lot here you might want to enjoy talking over with others to help your own thoughts and understandings go further.  If you do that, please be so kind as to mention this site and our many mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love.

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If you are not happily hungry to learn about love a lot, are you maybe condemned to only learn from your love mistakes – or not at all?

Can Love at First Sight Be Real Love?

People often ask me “Dr. Cookerly, can love at first sight be the real thing”?  The answer according to most of the research I’m aware of and the knowledgeable thinking on this question is “No, love at first sight probably does not and can not involve real love”.  “What is it then?” is usually the next question.  Love at first sight most often is a case of Imprint Mating.  Here is how Imprint Mating and the whole love at first sight thing is thought to usually work.

It seems that in early childhood we go through critical periods where we are naturally open to things having really strong effects upon us.  In some of these critical periods we become highly susceptible to certain images that have to do with love sources being powerfully imprinted into our deep non-conscious brain.  These images are of people who give us love or from whom we want our love to come during those critical periods.

Much later we encounter people who look, act, smell and perhaps sound like those images we imprinted.  When that happens we automatically project onto these people a false recognition response.  We subconsciously sense we are encountering someone to love, and to be loved by and to whom we already are love connected.  This often causes excitement and positive feelings similar to reconnecting with a long-lost, very important loved one.

Most commonly it is thought our imprinted images come from how we perceived and experienced our mother, or father (or an integration of both parents) before our fifth birthday.  Usually that means in our subconscious we are seeing a person similar to how one or both parents looked, sounded, acted, etc. when they were younger adults.  Sometimes it is not our parents but an aunt or uncle, or someone else who was a possible source of love which we imprinted at a highly impressionable critical period.

Once we project onto another person and ‘see’ in them our imprinted image, it triggers our deep built in ‘mating drive’ which makes us want to ‘mate’ with that person we feel ‘love at first sight’ with.  It’s kind of like, at that moment, that person is a screen onto whom we are putting our projected image.  Therefore, we are falsely seeing who we want to see, and are basically blind to who is really there, at least for awhile.  Mating, by the way, means much more than just having sex.  Our built in mating drive frequently pushes us to much more totally ‘mate’ with that person usually for at least several months.

Another fact quite vital to understanding the love at first sight phenomenon is to know that attraction and love are two very different things.  We can be attracted strongly and quite quickly to people we will never love.  We also can deeply and powerfully love people we do not find necessarily attractive.

Most love at first sight relationships don’t last very long.  Unfortunately some people who strongly rely on first sight love discover those relationships sometimes end in life damaging disappointment and heartbreak.  Others keep missing out on real love because they continue looking for the love at first sight false thing mistakenly thinking it is the real thing. Still others just give up on romantic love entirely.

Does all this mean that ‘love at first sight’ never leads to a lasting, healthy, real mate-type love relationship?  No, not at all.  There are those who grow a real love relationship after getting their relationship started with Imprint Mating.  That’s probably what keeps people believing in love at first sight; there are just enough people succeeding with a love at first sight start-up to keep people believing in it.  Also, it is a very pretty romantic myth, even though it probably causes more hurt and harm than it causes good.  Thus, love at first sight is best regarded as a form of false love which, nonetheless, could (but probably won’t) lead to a lasting, good love relationship.

What is the best thing to do if you feel like you have a love at first sight experience?   I like to suggest that the best thing to do is to operate from the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “love is patient”.  Therefore, taking lots of time to get to know who is really there usually works best.  Look long and hard for what is behind your projections and beneath your first impressions.  If real love is going to happen and grow, it will show itself to be real in time.  So, give it enough time.  Most forms of false love die out within a year.  Some can last a lot longer but usually don’t.  Proceed cautiously but also enjoy all the adventure and excitement of a first sight love experience, while getting to know the real person who is there over time.

Real love may develop but it will take exploration, experience and time to know if that is what’s happening.  If and when a first sight relationship ends you may know that you have had a good, and hopefully growthful love related experience.  Now, with this forewarning and knowledge you will know not to count on it too much, and hopefully you will avoid most of the hurt and all of the harm potential in a love at first sight experience.  Good luck!

As always – Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Image credits: “The Binocular Bunch” by Flickr user Supagroova.
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Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome
2. Is “I Can’t Live without You” Real Love?
3. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
4. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
5. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments 

Isolated and Doing Love Anyway

               

Mini-Love-Lesson  #268

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

Isolated Alone or Together

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

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

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

How To Love Well in the Time of Pandemic Isolation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Healthy, Self-Love Actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn More about Love

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

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

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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