Making Love OR Having Sex?

25 Ways to Answer “Is It Love or Is It Just Sex?”

1. It may be “making love” if both people’s entire bodies are loved on.  It may be only “having sex” if it’s mostly about the genitals and what’s done with them.

2. If all sorts of different emotions are felt during a sexual encounter, these emotions can be shared and also empathized with its more likely to be “making love”.  If only sexual feelings are felt and shown it’s more likely to be “having sex”.

3. Possibly it’s “making love” when there is the inclusion of the very tender, the closely intimate, and the sweetly precious along with the passionate and the powerful.  Possibly it’s “having sex” when it’s all simple, raw, quick, rough or boring sex.

4. It may be “about love” if “No” is an OK answer to a sexual request.  It may be just “having power trip sex” if sexual desires are expressed as demands, followed by punishing rejection if the demands are not complied with.

5. If before during and after a sexual episode you feel a pleasing sense of warmth and a happy sense of bonding it could be “making love”.  If these or similar feelings are lacking, even if it was fantastically great sex, it may not have been making love but rather “having sex”.

6. In an ongoing series of sexual events with a partner it’s more likely to be “making love” if there is a fairly wide variety in the intensity, amount of time, and amount of energy involved and, therefore, lazy sex, silly sex, mental sex, sleepy sex, and no climax sex can all be part of the ongoing picture.  It’s more likely to be “having sex” if it’s usually pretty much the same experience over and over again.

7. When having sex makes you want to know and experience your partner more, be increasingly close, and do more of life together it is more likely to be “making love”.  If having sex results ends with just a feeling of being finished and wanting to get on with something else apart from your partner it could be just “having sex”.

8. If following sex there is an inner dialogue of self-demeaning focus or partner-demeaning focus, criticism, derogatory thoughts, etc. it’s more likely to have been just a form of poor conflicted “having sex”.  If, however, after sex there is an inner and outer dialogue of affirmation, appreciation, honoring and celebration it may have been “making love”.

9. It may be “making love” if there is lots of responding in kind to each loving touch, movement, word, kiss, sound, caress, look, etc..  It may be “having sex” if there is only short, mild, or no responsiveness, or if responses are made only to that which is blatantly sexual.

10. It could be about “making love” if whatever you want, or don’t want, can be talked about freely and lovingly.  It may be “having poor or restricted sex” if there are earnest putdowns, critical remarks, rejection statements, or shaming words and actions given for expressing different sexual thoughts or desires.

11. It could be making love if there is as much, or more focus on pleasuring as being  pleasured.  It’s more likely just to be having sex if satisfaction of the self is the prime goal.

12. ‘Wild sex’, ‘kinky sex’, ‘dirty sex’, etc. all can be part of making love if there is real care and concern for a sex partner’s happiness and well-being along with adequate safeguarding.  All the many forms of sexuality without loving care and concern as an integrated part just may be different ways to be having sex.

13. It really could be making love if all levels and types of one’s physical sexual response and reaction system are acceptable and lovingly treated.  If the physical sexual system of the self, or of the partner, does not respond as desired and that leads to emotional and/or relational dissonance it probably is more about sex than love.

14. It is more likely to be love making if there are a lot of mutual all over gentle caresses, tender kisses, terms of endearment, cuddles, and loving looks leading up to, during and especially following orgasms or following a nap after orgasm.  It might be having sex if all that’s going on are actions that directly assist getting to a climax.

15. Making love more likely is occurring when there are feelings of deep connectedness, high appreciation and high valuing of the unique personal aspects of the partner and of the relationship with the partner.  If there are worries about what the partner is thinking of you, of your sexual expertise, of your masculinity or femininity, of your attractiveness, etc. then maybe it’s more about having insecure sex.

16. If there are repeated insistences or demands for certain sex practices (including intercourse and climax), and without those practices bad feelings and relationship troubles occur it might be more about having sex than making love.  If there is a free-flowing variety of sexual requests with alternates being lovingly accepted then it’s more likely to be about making love.

17. It’s much more likely to be about love making when sexual encounters lead to a greater love of life, general sense of being uplifted, sense of awe, appreciation of beauty and higher self love.  If the experience leads to a sense of lowered self worth, to  indifference, to a desire to get away, to a sense of lonely aloneness or despair, etc. it may have been having unfulfilling sex.

18. When there is a sense of conquest, scoring, using, defeating, proving potency or self importance, of lowering another’s value, getting even, etc. it’s not likely to be about making love.  When there is a sense of mutual enrichment, shared joy, giving and getting benefit, and having done a really good, natural thing then it’s much more likely to be making love.

19. If there are restrictions on verbal or behavioral expressions of strong, vigorous, powerful, potent sexuality along with insistence on only verbally expressing reassurance, commitment, devotion, or tender love and on all sex actions being mild it could be that having insecurity filled sex is what’s really happening.  When a wide variety of expressions of sexuality along with free-flowing expressions of love are being enjoyed lovemaking with eroticism is more likely.

20. Feeling proud, blessed, delighted, cherished, sublime, glorious, excellent, and of course well loved tends to go with quality love making.  Feeling raunchy reverie, glorious debauchery, carnal passion, lovely lust, beautiful lasciviousness, wanton satiation, thoroughly eroticized, saturated with shameless sexual pleasure, and ecstatically exhausted goes with having great sex, all of which and can be mixed into making fantastic love or not.

21. If there is a lot of guilt, shame, disgust, fear, depression, anxiety, repulsion, etc. then it seems there probably is not enough healthy self-love and self care happening while having sex.  If there is a sense of healthy self fulfillment, mixed with care and concern for a partner’s pleasure, well-being and fulfillment then love making more likely is occurring.

22. If when contemplating a sexual encounter there is a fear of failing, performing inadequately, not living up to a standard, or somehow being insufficient then perhaps it’s about having ‘performance’ sex.  When whatever happens is okay and able to be treated with mutual lovingness and fun, and when there is a continuance of sensuous and loving actions even when there is a ‘oops’ then good healthy making love more probably is in evidence.

23. It probably just was having great sex if wonderful erotic excitement, intense pleasure and saturating satisfaction resulted.  However, if there also was added feelings of marvelous union, cosmic connection and spiritual elation then possibly it was great sex with great love making.

24. It’s probably making love when there is a high valuing of the partner, the erotic experience of the partner, and the all over relationship with the partner.  It’s probably having sex if the sexual experience itself is the only thing being valued.

25. When there is a mutual sense of great connection, the people involved are safeguarding each other, there is a sense of natural improvement from the experience, plus a sense of healthfulness exists, and there is rewarding joy it’s very likely to be that a true lovemaking experience is what’s happening.  When emotional disconnection, true danger, unnaturalness, and unhealthfulness, and one type or another of emotional agony results it’s pretty likely that having loveless sex was all that was happening.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Image credits: “Close up of The Thinker” by Flickr user Brian Hillegas, “The Thinker (female version)” by Flickr user Dave Hogg.
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Related posts:

1. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
2. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love …
3. Sex Fears Mastered with Love
4. Monogamy for Love & Monogamy for Sex
5. Sexual Love Laces 

Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!

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

About Happier Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Limbic Love & Why You Will Do Well to Know about It

Mini-love-lesson #184

Synopsis: What your limbic system is and how it is important to your life of love and love relationships; what makes it unhealthy and how you can do three important things to make it healthier and in return get a healthier and more successful life of love is quickly covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Limbic Love: Love and Your Limbic System

Do you know that your psychological heart lives mostly in the limbic system of your brain?  Furthermore, your success at love may depend on the health of your limbic system.  Your limbic system is a big part of your deeper brain that processes love and guides your ways of doing love relationships.  It also gives you your higher more positive emotions, your ability to play and experience joy, plus much of what you do in all types of human interaction.  It sits under your conscious thinking brain, or cerebral cortex, and largely above your ancient brain.  Your ancient brain is the one which handles basic, physical functioning, simple and mostly negative emotions and rudimentary, impulsive and automatic behaviors. Thus our subject, “limbic love”.

Increasingly scientists suspect that the limbic system is one of the most important parts of our brain.  That is because it processes, motivates and guides our connections with others and pushes us toward cooperative advancements and improvements in of all kinds in all areas of life.  It is our limbic system that guides us toward who and what to get interested in, connect with, enjoy and get involved with more deeply.  It also processes our love of spouse, children, family, good friends, pets and our relationship with ourselves.  It helps us feel connected and belonging, feel compassion, intimacy, altruism and empathy –  all of which are involved in not only our cooperative survival but also in our team efforts toward mutual improvements, curiosity-based discovery and achievement.

In science, increasingly our limbic system and its love processing is suspected of being the primary reason mammals advanced and became ascendant, surpassing so many other other types of life.  Although the avian species also demonstrate love behaviors as did their ancestors the dinosaurs 200 million years ago; and many species have limbic systems.

What Makes Our Limbic System Unhealthy?

We are just beginning to learn about our limbic system’s health and what influences it.  We have learned that our psychological way of going about life can have a strong influence on the physical functioning, biological operation and neurochemistry of everyone’s limbic system.  This in return influences our psychological way of going about life.  This can create a deterioration or ascension cycle strongly influencing our all over health.  Certainly genetics plays a role and in some people a really huge role.  There are those that are born with very unhealthy limbic system functioning which then causes severe emotional and mental illness.  Such illnesses are becoming increasingly treatable neurochemically and psychotherapeutically.

Love problems including inadequate love, the failings of false love, deeply painful love loss, non-love and overt anti-love training, covert subconscious anti-love programming and non-love life modeling especially in childhood but also in adolescence and adulthood, loneliness and isolation all are thought to have very negative effects on the health of a person’s limbic system.

Unhealthy influences on the limbic system also include a number of other factors.  Undue prolonged stress, physical and psychological abuse, psychological trauma, chemical and some behavioral addictions, physical injuries to the limbic system, prolonged severe insecurity, over-reliance on reason and/or focus on power acquirement, negativism and similar psychosocial things all are suspected of being unhealthful for the neurochemistry of our limbic system and its functioning.  That is according to growing research evidence and our current, science-based understanding.

How Can We Make Our Limbic System Healthier?

Probably the biggest way to help yourself have a healthy functioning limbic system has to do with purposely going after and succeeding in attaining healthy, real love relationships.  To accomplish such “limbic love”, following three things are strongly suggested.

1. (A) Study and learn all you can about how to productively think about love.  That includes how to identify real from false love, give and receive healthy real love, detox from anti-love influences, develop multiple types of love including healthy real self-love, spiritual love, altruistic love, and the knowledge of the behaviors that demonstrate, healthfully give, create and grow love.

(B) As part of your love learning process, behaviorally experiment with using what you’ve been learning.  As you learn more, work to hone your love skills and your enjoyment in using them.  Celebrate your victories and learn from your failures realizing that love failures are best used as learning opportunities and are part of the natural love process.  Then practice, practice, practice with actual actions always.

2. As part of your healthy, real self-love, develop living via positivity.  Positivity has to do with having a realistic, positive, appreciative mindset, mood and approach to most of life and everyone in it.  All sorts of research including brain chemistry and body health studies show that the more realistically positive and real love oriented people are more the real winners in life, health and most everything else.  Negative and neutral just does not pay off in health and happiness, in most interactions with others and especially not in love relationships.  You might want to Google Positive Psychology, read Positivity by Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson and Dr. Victor Frankel’s famous work Man’s Search for Meaning which tells how positivity saved lives even in a Nazi death camp.

3. Actively reach out to others for social connection and purposely go after building your love network with some of the people you meet when you reach out.  Don’t put all your love eggs in the lover, spouse, marriage love basket.  All kinds of love can give healthy, enriching life to your existence.  But, of course, love with a love mate or partner can be very important, and so can parent/child, family and deep friendship loves.  Be sure that at least some of your love efforts are altruistic which, by the way, is turning out to be a biologic, limbic system, natural, love drive born within us.  Positive connections with others are proving to be essential for limbic system health.  Healthy, real love connections are the most healthful.  Living like a hermit can be a prescription for love starvation.

Living healthfully physically by way of healthful exercise, healthy diet, healthy environment, healthful behaviors and good healthcare also are quite important for having a healthy limbic system.  Taking care of those factors can be seen as important ways for you to do healthy self-love as well as ways to assist your loved ones to live healthfully and happily (see  Self-love – What Is It, Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions and Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love).

So, help your limbic system function healthfully and the likelihood is it will help your love life to be more fully successful, happier and more fulfilled.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who are you going to talk over this mini-love-lesson with because doing that helps you to better accomplish number 1. (A) above?

Related posts:

1. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
2. Living Well via Loving Well
3. Self-Love – What Is It?
4. Unselfish Self-Love
5. Loneliness and Love 

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?