Are You Talking About Love Enough?

“I just realized all we ever really intimately talk about is what’s wrong!  This is supposed to be a love relationship were having, so why aren’t we talking about our love and about love itself”?  Darma stated this to her husband, Antonio, in a worried and perplexed way.

Antonio replied, “Sometimes we talk about sex but you know, Darma, I think you’re right except I’m not at all sure I know how to talk about love.  When you talk about love what all do you talk about”?  Darma responded with a pause and a sort of stammer then said, “Maybe I don’t know how to talk about it very well either but I think we need to try.”

Antonio and Darma share a common problem that afflicts and contributes to the destruction of many a couple, also some families and some friendships.  They don’t talk about love enough.  Because of that insufficiency the love in those relationships may go undeveloped, unrepaired, may wane, become stagnant, weaken, deteriorate and if there are other troubles – may die.  Those who love each other have a much better chance of keeping their love alive, healthy and growing if they learn to talk about their love and about love itself.

Unfortunately our English-speaking heritage is particularly deficient in teaching us how to effectively talk about love.  Part of this comes from a time in which the English peoples feared love meant sex, and sex meant sin, and sin was bad so they thought they shouldn’t and, therefore, wouldn’t talk about love.  Consequently our English-speaking customs didn’t develop or include much of a language for love itself.  Another part of our poor love-talk-ability comes from the wrong headed, destructive, macho training of men for whom love was mistakenly thought of as a weakness and a far too feminine thing. Thus, it became unmanly to be anything but silent on the topic of love.

For a time English-speaking churches talked about love but then they abandoned that for talking about faith, and correct belief, even though the New Testament clearly teaches love is greater and more important than faith.  Love as a word having to do with great and powerful caring, compassion, courage , nurturing, protection and high joy was surrendered to those who wanted a ‘nicer’ synonym for sex.  Sadly for some our inability to talk about love has led them to believe love does not exist, or can’t be understood, or it has led them into very mistaken, destructive understandings of love (see the entries “Love’s Definition series” in the left column, and the “False Love series” in the Site Index under ‘F’).

Many couples, families and friendships don’t do very well at the naturally needed maintenance, repair, nurturing, healing and development type of talk required to keep their love relationships healthy.  So many couples talk only about love when a love relationship starts to go wrong or already is in deep trouble.  Others may get some ‘love subjects’ talk done but they may not do enough love talking to really keep their love lively and growing.  Some talk is better than none, but learning the wide range of important love related topics available and talking about them all is far better.

To help you with talking love and doing a good job of it here are a dozen guidance questions containing various love topics for you and those you love to practice talking about.  I suggest you go to a loved one and say, “Let’s talk about one or more of these” and, thereby, see if you can work toward the highly rewarding and enjoyable goal of really being able to talk constructively about your love relationship and love itself.

1.  Do you talk about how exactly those you love want to be touched, i.e. harder or softer, higher or lower, faster or slower, etc. when you’re trying to convey love to them? (See the entry “50 Varieties of Love Touch”).

2.  Do you know which of the eight major groups of behavior that convey or demonstrate love is most important to you and to those closest to you?  (Read Recovering Love Part Two, a book by yours truly).

3.  When a loved one talks to you about a problem in their life do you know how much they want you to respond with empathy, advice, expressions of care, instructions, commiseration, reasoning, sympathy, suggestions, hugs, silence, solutions, cheerleading or anger at who or what they are angry about?  (See the entry “Love Positive Talking”).

4.  Do you and your loved ones talk about how affirmational you want your verbal interchanges to be, i.e. filled with praise, compliments, thanks, appreciation, and other positive remarks?
5.  Can you talk to someone that loves you about how much and how well you do or don’t go about healthful self-loving self-talk?

6.  With those you love do you talk about how to work together to avoid speaking in ways that harm your love relationship and then about the love words you really want to hear?

7.  Can you identify, label and speak clearly about at least a dozen enjoyable emotions love can help you feel, and then can you identify and talk about the guidance messages brought to you by each of those emotions  (See “Emotional Intercourse”)?

8.  Do you and your romantic love interest do well at initiating and carrying on intimate, precious, tender, love talk?

9.  How well and how often do you and your romantic love interest ask for what you want when it comes to showing each other love?

10.  Are you doing a good job of sharing your love history, your love thinking, your love actions, your love hopes and the various emotions love causes you to feel?

11.  Do you talk with those you love about love’s compassion, love’s affection, about feeling cherished, about the bravery of love, love’s preciousness, love and trust, love’s rapture, love’s healing ability, love’s spirituality, love’s kindness, along with the ways of lasting love, mature love, healthy love, protective love and enriching love (read Dr. Bell Hooks’ book All About Love)?

12.  Do you and those you love talk about how you can grow your love, conquer with love, heal with love, survive with love (read Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish), nurture with love, teach love, enrich life with love, worship with love, inspire with love and do sex with love (see the entry “Making Love or Having Sex?).

Hopefully that’s enough to get you started on ‘talking about love enough’ if you’re not already doing so.  Let me suggest you set yourself a goal of talking about love with someone at least once a week.  It’s also good to read about love at least that often.  Doing that is likely to assist you and those you love in becoming far more love oriented, love empowered, love effective and life victorious  (read Dr. Helen Fisher’s book Anatomy of Love and Dr. Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you good at enjoying talking love?

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This website may receive  compensation for some of the product links in this post and elsewhere  on this website.

Related posts:

1. Love Positive Talking
2. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
3. Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking
4. Additive Talking – A Love Skill
5. Talking Styles That Hurt and Help Love 

False Form of Love: Nympholepsia

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with a getting to know Nympholepsia; then discusses unrequited love; a typical case; getting the accurate picture; confusions; sex and Nympholepsia; not wanting what’s wanted; ever seeking and never finding; and what’s to be done about this False Form of Love.

Getting to know Nympholepsia

Nympholepsia is one of the most interesting forms of false love.  Sometimes it is like being in love without having to go to the trouble of actually having any relationship at all. It even can be a love-like relationship with someone who doesn’t even exist.  Nevertheless, the emotions involved can be extremely intense, the behaviors involved quite complicated and sometimes the outcome is quite devastating.

Judge Roy Bean, of “The Law West to the Pecos” fame, is thought to have had a pretty bad nympholeptic problem focused on the greatest actress of his time, Lily Langtry.  He went to all sorts of trouble concerning her, including even renaming a town for her, Langtry Texas.  However, he never had any but the most formal personal contact with her.  One of America’s greatest salonnières and the female who was declared the World’s First, Great, New Age Woman, Mabel Dodge Luhan, is said to have had a terrible nympholeptic relationship with John Reid, the amazing young chronicler of both Poncho Villa and the Communist revolution in Russia and who wrote the incredibly influential “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

Unrequited Love

In the age of chivalry, knights who were supposed to chastely and platonically ‘pine for’ unattainable Royal ladies, who were above their own rank and station, may have been being led to suffer from Nympholepsia (also known as nymphlepsy).  The same condition is thought to affect a fair number of the thousands who go into frenzies when adoring the rock star of the moment.  Then there are those who learn of some hero or heroine of a past time and are quite sure they have hopelessly fallen in love with that person who is no longer counted among the living.

Tragically some of those even suicide so as to have a chance to find their love-interest in the hereafter.  Others swear they meet their paramour in their dreams, while others testify strongly to having had wonderful sex with their favorite lover ghosts.  Some even claim to be madly in love with literary characters that never existed in real life.  Most who suffer from this false form of love do so in a more ordinary way, but that doesn’t make their suffering any less intense.

A Typical Case

Chastity was brought to counseling by her husband who said she cannot sleep, won’t eat and is in a frenzy about everything, but can’t tell anyone what is wrong and we are all very worried about her.  Talking to her alone Chastity frantically fidgeted, got up and paced around and showed many other signs of agitation.  After miscellaneous comments she began to blush and whisper that her condition began right after she learned her pastor was moving to another church in a distant city.  Slowly it all came out. She had become enamored of her pastor soon after he arrived at their church some six years ago.

He was a popular, handsome, charismatic figure that many women found intensely attractive. Chastity quickly came to secretly worship him from afar.  At the church she volunteered for everything that would put her in contact with him.  At night she dreamed romantic but never erotic dreams of him and never let anyone know her true feelings.  She gave him and his wife and their children very nice appropriate gifts, did them favors and never strayed over the lines of propriety.  It was enough for her to just serve him and be in his shadow, though her actions slowly became more and more frenetic.

Her husband, and her children, and later even her parents occasionally complained that her church activities seemed a bit too much but that’s all they did.  But now that the pastor was going to be even more completely unattainable than before she was in a frenzy of uncontrollable, rapidly changing, very difficult to handle emotions.  In time with therapy and some medication she did become healthier.

Chastity came to see she actually did not have an adult, real, romantic relationship with her pastor but rather she was fixated on the fantasy of him loving her.  By being valued by him in her fantasies she too became valuable.  In real life he would often thank her, praise her, compliment her, and make laudatory remarks about her to others.  This gave her meaning, purpose and fulfillment for a time.  Later she figured out that all had to do with her childhood and her father who never was very loving, seldom praising and almost never thankful.  She saw that she didn’t want her pastor to respond to her erotically or even very romantically because those actions would be too different from a father to a daughter.

These dynamics are not common to everyone who suffers from Nympholepsia but they were her dynamics.  Today she is well past all that and has actually grown from the experience but she would not want to go through it again.

Getting the Accurate Picture

The two most important words for understanding Nympholepsia are ‘frenzy’ and ‘unattainable.  The condition throws people into a frenzy of emotions, and scrambled thoughts and sometimes peculiar behaviors.  The dynamics often involve seeking or even feeling one has love for and/or from that which is unattainable.

In the worst cases some people ‘go crazy’ trying to attain the unattainable and then fall into the pits of depression or even psychosis.  In the 1800’s the condition was thought to frequently cause convulsions and seizures, along with other somatic symptoms.

The word Nympholepsia comes from the Greek ‘nympholeptos’ which means to have been caught and bewitched, or entranced by a naked, highly erotic, attractive nymph or Sprite who was by definition unattainable to humans.  This, it was thought, drove people into an emotional frenzy causing them to spend their lives in hopeless pursuit of the nymphs and finally to wither and die.

In mythology and Catholic theology the term meant accidentally seeing a naked nymph and being driven into a frenzy of ecstasy, never again to be satisfied by a mere mortal human.  The only salvation from this demonic possession required a full-fledged exorcism.  Today the term refers to going into an emotional frenzy while trying to obtain something or someone unable to be obtained and being destructively effected in the process.

Confusions

Nympholepsia sometimes is confused with pedophilia because it often involves people of rather different ages being attracted to each other or one to another.  It also has been confused with the ‘Lolita complex’ and misidentified as something that mostly men do with younger females.
It, furthermore, has been confused with nymphomania, probably partly because it has the prefix nymph and partly because it has to do with romantic-like relationship situations and dynamics.  It also has been misidentified as something young girls do toward and with older men.

Some of the people thought to suffer from this false form of love have been known to be quite fixated, and obsessive and occasionally even violent in their acting out of their passion.  The ones in this condition who are highly sexed sometimes are confused with having a sex addiction and the nonsexual ones with having a neurotic or, more recently, with having a sexual desire problem.
It’s interesting that some therapists seem to think this condition mostly occurs only in males and others think it mainly shows up in females.  In my experience it’s pretty gender even.  It also seems to occur in homosexuals, bisexuals, older people, younger people, all races, all socio-economic classes and every other category I know, although there are those that disagree with me about that.

Sex and Nympholepsia

With this condition there can be people who have no sexual desire nor even any sex feelings involved in their nympholeptic condition.  With others there is a great deal of sex especially frenzied, passionate sex.  Sometimes the sex is with a surrogate and sometimes with the target of their passions, and if that target is unattainable sublimation may occur.  A common complaint goes something like “he (or she) professes lots of love for me, has great sex with me, but won’t stay with me, marry me and won’t stop going off with others, or won’t stop doing big, long, involved things that have nothing to do with me and don’t including me”.  Another common complaint is that she (or he) is emotionally unavailable while at the same time being very sexually available.

Some nympholeptics have serial sex.  I once counseled a girl who just knew she was truly, and deeply, and incredibly in love with one drummer after another.  She had all-consuming, frenzied emotions with each drummer right up to the morning after a wild, passionate night of sex together.  Then she would have the realization that the drummer would be going on to others and never really be hers at a heart level, and he just would be like the last several drummers and probably like the next one, which essentially was that he would be unavailable for a healthy, real, love relationship.  In her case the background cause was very poor self love and very musical parents.

For some people suffering this condition it all can change if the female becomes pregnant.  At that point they often lose interest in the other person and it’s all over. This leads some of my evolutional psychology friends to suspect the whole condition has something to do with genetic survival mechanisms.

Not Wanting What’s Wanted

Some people suffering from Nympholepsia are quite secretly and safely satisfied if the unattainable person remains unattainable, though they still suffer about it.  By longing for someone they can’t have, they have a relationship without having a relationship. They can tell people that they love someone and often can tell a great deal about their romantic feelings, but when they want to do something as a single they are completely free to do it.  This accounts for some of the people who marry a prisoner serving a life sentence or serving a very long sentence.  They can say they’re married, they can send love-like messages back and forth, they even can visit, and they can have romantic, long-suffering experiences which brings the drama of romance to their life but with very little of the trouble.

This may be a sort of pseudo-Nympholepsia or just another form of it.  Sometimes people in this variation of Nympholepsia panic and run away if their ‘romantic target’ suddenly becomes available or somehow actually comes into their real life.  Others truly pine away and, to a large degree, either dysfunction or excuse their dysfunction with their unrequited love situation.

Ever Seeking Never Finding

A fair number of people repeatedly go after the unattainable lover, and for a long time they just won’t quit.  This wears them out, drains them, distracts them from healthy productive living, causes a lot of agony, depletes their self-confidence, generally wastes a lot of life, and sometimes gets them to turn to various addictions, become depressed and sometimes suicidal.

Some of these people keep going after the same person over and over, and others keep going after ‘versions of the same person’ but either way they never really get what they’re after.  That’s because what they’re after is truly unattainable.  Do they subconsciously know this?  Some therapists think so, others think not.

Interestingly for many with Nympholepsia if they actually do seem to attain the lover they are after, one of two things happens.  They either have finally won the prize and don’t need to go after it anymore, so they basically sort of say “thank you, goodbye” and go on to something healthier.
The other outcome is that what they have attained turns out not to be all that desirable after all.  In both cases the relationship comes to an end.

In its milder forms Nympholepsia is like a ‘crush’ or ‘the idealization’ phase of an IFD False Form of Love pattern, maybe without the F and D stages. (See False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome)   In a stronger form, the frenzy can get quite destructive and the lack of attainment can be very deeply frustrating and depleting.  All forms of Nympholepsia generally are thought to have a tendency to block people from having healthy, real, love relationships develop.

What’s to be done?

Some form of fairly deep psychotherapy usually is what’s needed to cure this affliction if it is severe.  There are those who seem to ‘mature out of it’.  Some who are good at insight and redirecting themselves, figure it out and learn about healthy, real love and go after that instead.  Knowledge about this condition helps people avoid it, especially in its earlier stages.  If a friend or family member seems to be headed toward suffering from Nympholepsia I suggest you encourage them to read this mini love lesson and then direct them toward a therapist known to be able to do deep, psychotherapeutic work.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Are you now or have you ever set yourself up for love failure by desiring the unattainable?  If so, are you likely to do that again?

Related posts:

1. Fatal Attraction Syndrome – A False Form of Love
2. False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies
3. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
4. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
5. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome 

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Illustration: Nymph by Blanche Paymal-Amouroux, French, 1899, public domain, thanks Wikimedia Commons.

Do You Want To Say 'Love' When You Mean 'Sex'?

Did you know that using the word love when sex is meant leads to children not being sufficiently told they are loved in certain families?  When parents are vaguely aware the word ‘love’ can sometimes mean ‘sex’ they are less prone to use the word love with their children according to some.

This is not just a problem with children.  Sadly in family therapy I have often heard adult children say to their older parents, “You never told me you loved me”.  Their parent’s reply usually includes something like ‘the word love is too intimate, or personal, or uncomfortably sort of sexual’ if they can articulate their inner prohibition.

Then there is the situation with certain couples where using the word love can lead to marital mis-communication and disharmony.  This can happen when he says, “I love you” and means to convey a message of heartfelt love for her but she interprets it like “He doesn’t really love me, he is just after sex again”.  Are you aware that if certain people hear or speak the word ‘love’ to each other enough they may convince themselves that having both unprotected sex and sex that lacks love is okay?  That’s where the urban folk saying “to get someone to have sex with you just use the word love a lot” comes from.

Sex and love are two very different things, although they mix well.  For some years now it has been popular to use the word love when sex is the real subject matter.  Lots of people say “let’s make love” when “let’s have sex” is what is really meant.  Many books have been published with the word love in the title when the book is really only about sex.  Somewhat sex phobic people find the word love less offensive or more a polite term to use when needing to say something about sex.  You may think, “Why not use the word love when talking or writing about sex”?  Here are some of the main possible ‘why’s’.

Using the word love when meaning sex brings about a mental detour from clearly and precisely seeing love as a unique, extremely significant, and an entirely different subject than sex.  It also has the effect of subtly diminishing our understanding of love’s extraordinary importance.  Furthermore, it causes love to be less attended to in its own right, thus, subtly decreasing how much we think, act, and center on love in our lives.

Another issue is that saying the word love when meaning sex is just inaccurate.  Inaccuracy causes confused thinking and leads to mistakes, some of which may be serious.  Also using the word love for sex is frequently deceptive and manipulative.  If when we hear the word love we are conditioned to focus on sexuality we are diverted from thinking of all the other important types, aspects and factors involved with love itself.  Certainly sexual love is an important topic but it’s not the only, or the first topic one might think of when hearing the word love.

Did it ever cross your mind that the two groups that seem to use the word love the most are the promoters of religion and the promoters of pornography?  Spiritual love and sexual love are strongly related in the theology of many religions but using the word love for sex only seems to blind us from seeing that relationship.

From this therapist’s point of view our world just might come to be a bit more loving and a little less love-starved if whenever we said the word love we meant the real thing and not sexuality, or anything else for that matter.  So, let me suggest you consider your own use of these two words and give some thought to how you really want to deal with them in your life and in your relationships.

Always – Grow in love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Image credits: “Hotel beds at 9am” by Flickr user .guilty.
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Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Making Love OR Having Sex?
3. Listening with Love
4. Sex Fears Mastered with Love
5. Monogamy for Love & Monogamy for Sex 

Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson is all about people making a second marriage (or love-mated relationship) and later attempts at couple’s love to succeed better than most people do.  It introduces the concept of “team love” as crucial to second and later effort success, and presents what are NOT the right answers times seven.

Second Failures and Second Successes

Second marriages, second marriages to the same person, try again relationships, re-contacts after breakups, joining up after years apart, living together again with an ex – they all start with the danger of the past repeating itself.  They also face a statistical worse chance of staying together than does a first time, committed relationship.  Even so, all these second attempts are on the rise throughout the developed world.

The good news is there is a growing group of couples (maybe up to about 30+ percent ?) who are making second goes at love, marriage, etc work and, not only that, but making them work far better than their first attempts.  Another good news factor is we are beginning to have some ideas, some understandings, some research and some new and apparently more helpful concepts about what makes second goes at couple’s love work and what makes them fail.

It is still true that most second, third, fourth, etc. marriages and other couple’s unions fail at greater rates than do first time marriages, etc. but it does not have to be that way.  This is demonstrated by a number of second marriage couples exhibiting their second-time-around as far more successful, more healthy, more happy and more lasting than their first.

I literally have worked with hundreds of second time couples.  On follow-up survey research, most of them report getting better and better at being a loving couple.  I heard from one of them just yesterday. They told about how they were before and after they came to do love-centered, team oriented, couple’s counseling. Collectively they had previously made five marriage type attempts, all ending in agonizing failure.  That was years ago before they got together and started learning what it really takes to make a second attempt, couple’s love have lasting success (defined as 10 or more years).  Furthermore, I personally know this because I am in such a second relationship which Kathleen which we have made work better and better for over 40 years.

What Is NOT the Answer Times 7!

Before we look at what does work, let’s look at some of what we can learn from second attempt failures.

1.    Relying on doing a love relationship the same way you did it before likely will not work any better the second time than it did the first.  You must do different to get different results.  Those who succeed at a second go at couple’s love usually learn to do the second relationship very differently than they did their first.  There are some exceptions but not many.

2.    Relying on finding the perfect mate who treats you just right, just about guarantees failure.  One reason is because that puts almost all the pressure and weight of succeeding on your love-mate and little or none on yourself, or on your joint team love system which often turns out to be a crucial factor.

3.    Relying on the magic of love to make every thing work right this second time is like a farmer relying on the magic of nature alone to produce a healthy, abundant harvest.  No, it is going to take a lot of new love knowledge and team work along with the magical nature of love.

For example think of acrobats and their incredible teamwork to keep each other tumbling and sailing through the air safely.  Then think of any well coordinated team artfully running plays and patterns in cooperation and harmony, so as to make scores and win the game.  Now think of couple’s love like a team sport; you don’t know yet how to play very well.  So, it is going to take a lot of joint learning and joint practicing to get good at it together.  Love’s magical nature may get you started but from there on its sheer conjoint team effort and increasing love skill that wins the day.

4.    Do NOT rely on falling in love, feeling like you are in love, or being sure you are in love now that you think you have found the single, right person for you because several forms of false love can give you pretty much the very same initial feelings.

5.    Do NOT rely on manipulation games, relating by deceptions, relational trickery, other people’s rules for romance, hiding your less pleasant truths, phoniness or any other lack of realness because while those things might get you married falsehood, likely will not keep you mated that way or get you into healthy, real love.

6.    Do NOT rely on blaming of your ex, or of yourself or anything else to help you know how to go on to second love success.  And while you are thinking about past failures do not spend too much time on what went wrong because usually that will not lead you to what you must do right or what you must skillfully learn to do well.  Remember, knowing 3 is not the answer to 2+2 does not tell you the answer is 4.  Plus, it leaves you open to the mistakes of answering 5, 6, 7, etc.  However, it usually is useful to study what and how you could have done better.

7.    Do NOT rush into your next, heavy duty relationship.  Start light and don’t specialize in any one person too soon.  Sample broadly, let the best emerge and grow into it slowly.  Take a year and preferably two, once you think something is working really well.  As Paul told us, “ love is patient”.  It usually is false love that is in a hurry.

A New Understanding of Second Love Success

Second attempts at spousal love may go better, even much better than first marriages, non-marriages, unions, etc. because the couple learns to work at doing love itself better as a team.  Team love, much like any teamwork, requires a coordinated interaction of sending love and receiving love more skillfully and more completely than might have occurred in first marriages and other love attempts.  It appears that is because successful second marriage couples jointly tend to go looking for the how-to’s of doing love better than they did before.  They may not consciously know they are doing this, then again sometimes they do.  Also being aware that they can fail appears to help them be much more careful right from the start of a new relationship.

Those who succeed seem to interact in cooperative coordination using the behaviors of love much more often and much more readily than in previous relationships.  In doing so, they continually develop and hone their team love skills.  Such couples become increasingly better at working together in unison and jointly uniting to produce positive effects.  They learn to act in much more loving concert with each other pulling together, acting side-by-side, joining their forces together and siding with each other when facing opposition or difficulty.

These couples make efforts jointly and concurrently, growing their common love connection and with it a strengthening team spirit.  Their approach is exemplified by the statement “when I win you win, and when either of us loses so does the other and so does our relationship”.  They assist each other to be individuals but that too they do with team harmony.  Sometimes they do fall into disharmony and dissonance.  When that happens it is not long before they are trying to come back together in the teamwork of healing and conjointly reconnecting.  With their success, comes a joint shared joy and motivation to succeed again together even better.

More technically, successful second time couples are thought to build a much better systemic, love-active series of positive and jointly developed interaction patterns.  When one makes a little bid for a love connection with a glance, a sound, a gesture or anything, the other one picks up on it and smoothly and quickly acts in kind.  When one directly asks for any particular show of love, the other one also smoothly and quickly is responsive in kind.  The teamwork truly is a duet of love-responsive-interaction.

Much like superb, well practiced dancers, their actions, even when very different from one another, integrate with each other to produce a synergetic, singular whole.  Their support is mutual as is their respect for one another and their affirmation is solid and frequently freely evident as is a tolerance when things do not go well.  They do sometimes clash, sometimes quite vehemently, but never nearly as much as they harmonize and demonstrate how much they value one another and the importance of their coupleness.

It is important to know that this systemic team love concept for many people is hard to understand and also not easily researched.  It is hard enough for a lot of people to comprehend the ways of an individual let alone the interaction patterns of a couple acting in loving concert with one another.
To help you with that, here is a double example.  Al stays at the office later and later because he knows that when he gets home he will be met with his angry, disappointed, complaining wife, Barb.  So, Al stays later and later to avoid that.  He secretly hopes that Barb will get the idea that being nice would get him home sooner.  Barb waiting at home gets angrier, increasingly disappointed and prone to intense complaining the longer and longer it takes for Al to get home.  She secretly hopes her demonstrable unhappiness will get her husband to start coming home sooner.

Both Al and Barb’s actions are having the opposite of the desired effect.  Neither of them sees that what they are doing, trying to make it better, makes it worse; nor do they see that it is a cyclical pattern they both jointly are creating.  Next-door, Carl works to get home as quickly as he can because his wife, Debbie, is so pleasant to come home to.  Debbie is pleasant because Carl always arrives home greeting her with happy love.  They too are creating a joint interaction, cyclical pattern but one that has a positive, team love effect instead of an anti-love, negative one. Might it be that Al and Barb are in a first marriage and Carl and Debbie in a second, having learned better from their first?

In or Going toward a Second, Big, Committed Effort at Love?

If you are already in or going toward a second, big, committed effort at couple’s love, let me suggest you get a really strong TEAM focus.  As a team, together study, discuss and practice the behaviors of love  “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”, the understandings of love’s workings, the things that are known to help couple’s teamwork and those that do not help.  Learn how to avoid the traps of false love and the skills it takes to grow healthy, real love also can be part of your team focus.  Of course, we recommend this website and its 200+ mini-love-lessons, the books mentioned here, along with everything else you can find that looks like it might be worthy of your joint attention.  Classes, workshops, retreats, and being around loving people, especially loving couples, often can do wonders.  There is lots more but that will have to do for now.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: When, where and with whom have you done your best teamwork, and can you see how to apply what you did there to growing a couple’s team love?

Related posts:

1. What Makes Love Last?
2. Trust Recovery and Love
3. Yellow Love: Are You Suffering from It and Don’t Know It?
4. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Spirituality And Love Great and Grand

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with love’s spiritual mystery; then explores central questions by surveying what the wisdom masters of old taught; the spiritual goodness of love; religion, spirituality and love; erotic spiritual love; and more.

Love’s Spiritual Mystery

On the beach a couple with arms around each other, under a full moon, looking out over the vastness of the ocean’s rolling waves feels they are awesomely, spiritually connected in love with each other and the universe.

A family surrounding the mother and the just born, new member of their family feel much the same, wondrous effect.  Dear, close friends also experience this standing together at the edge of the Grand Canyon as the sun sets magnificently behind the cliffs.  High atop a mountain, a lone individual looks out over a vastness of snow capped peaks and the mountain hiker feels spiritually and superbly loved by an unknown something he or she does not care or need to define.  What is this mysterious, yet great and grand, sense of the ‘spiritual’ that sometimes comes with a sense that one is permeated by a high and wondrous love?

Essential Questions

Do you see love as spiritual?

Many people around the world and throughout history have described love as a spiritual phenomenon.  For many love is the spiritual force in the universe.  It is proclaimed that whether it be love of a newborn baby, a mate, a family, a people, love of country, or art, or music, or nature, or humanity, or life itself, or even existence, love is a mystical, grand, and glorious spiritual thing inspiring individuals and relationships to the best of what they can become.  Do you see it this way?
Some say that because love is a spiritual force it, more than anything else, inspires our best and greatest actions.  Especially might this be true for actions involving connection, cooperation, collaboration and unified effort.

Others suggest that the spiritual force of love is what makes it able to inspire great individual acts of risk, protection, dedication, loyalty and courage.  That it is the spiritual force of love that’s behind the great acts of compassion and kindness in the universe is also a common teaching.  Is that your view?  Is love for you a great and grand, spiritual thing? If so, are all your love relationships spiritual?  Are all love relationships in the world spiritual?  Do we best deal with love by seeing it as essentially spiritual?

What The Wisdom Masters of Old Teach

There is an ancient Hindu teaching that says before there was anything there was just love.  Love because of its nature had to create, so in an incredible, explosive burst love gave birth to all that exists, the heavenly spheres, time, space, everything.  From that came life itself and all beings both heavenly and earth bound.  From that Hindu teaching flows the concept that all that exists flows with love and we, therefore, best flow with love in all that we do.

Buddhism teaches that our life is to sing the song of compassionate love divine.  Judaism, and later Jesus taught that we are to love God and love others as we love ourselves.  John of the Epistles simply proclaimed “God is love”.  Taoism puts forth erotic love as a supreme, spiritual love.  Rumi, the great Sufi master of Islam, taught the ways of love are the ways of Allah and, therefore, are above and beyond all else.  Furthermore, each and every form of true love is in fact but a manifestations of Allah’s love.  Therefore, all true love is spiritual in its essential nature.

The ancient Egyptian Scriptures of Hathor and Isis, the Great Mother spiritual teachings of the Fertile Crescent and beyond, all hold love to be the greatest spiritual existence, practice and blessing.  Again and again  all the way back to the dawn of history  love is exalted as a phenomenon of spirituality.  In philosophy Plato’s great Symposium on Love speaks to love’s mysterious, mystical and metaphysical essence, as do philosophers in many ages and from many lands.

What is Spirituality?

Explaining spirituality is not the easiest thing to do.  To help your understanding and my comprehension of what spirituality is, let’s look at some different and some similar ideas.

1. Spirituality is that which connects you to both your essential, innermost, core self and at the same time to the awesome ‘all’ that is beyond all of us.

2. Spirituality is a way of relating and living with that which is greater than ourselves and ultimately with the greatest of all that is.

3. Spirituality is that which enables you to have some knowledge of the unknowable.

4. Spirituality is a mysterious awareness bringing us into connection, harmony and unity with that which is both serenely awesome and intimately colossal.

5. Spirituality is that which makes us feel safe at home in a frighteningly infinite universe.
6. Spirituality is our way of connecting with divine love.

Technically spirituality has to do with that which is of the spirit, i.e. the breath of life.  Originally spirituality meant something more or less like being in-spirited or inspired by the breath of life which was the spiritual force and a gift of the gods or God.  To be spiritually inspired was to commune with the eternal and universal or to be filled with the active essence of Divine love. Spirituality has commonly been seen as the way to be in connection with divinity, one’s higher power, the great spirit, the Saints, the jinns or spirit world, the great Goddess or the omnipresent, omniscient, great God – depending on one’s personal theology.

Non-Religious Spiritual Love

It is important to note that philosophically one can be spiritual and at the same time agnostic or even atheist.  In this case, spirituality is not seen as being dependent on religious belief but rather on having a reverential appreciation of anything more grand and greater than the one’s self, such as life, or existence, or beauty or love itself, etc.  With this understanding one’s love can be seen as a highly spiritual entity or phenomenon no matter what one’s religious belief system is.

Understanding Love

To find answers to the question “What is Love?”, I want to refer you back to the Definitions and discussions, and especially the Working Definition of Love already available at this site.

What Is Spiritual Love and What Does It Do for Us?

If you haven’t already perceived or experienced it, imagine feeling loved by the cosmos, the life force, the universe, some great, transcendental, metaphysical entity, or by whatever so many people call God.  That experience can be magnificently empowering, healing, motivating and for many, most of all, inspiring.  It also can be enormously reassuring, comforting, caring and intimately, personally inspiring in a whole different way than anything else.  Now imagine that the love connection you have with anyone and everyone you love, is linked to and saturated with a great and grand spiritual, power of love.

With a sense of that can you also then think that through love you are or you can be spiritually united with yourself and feel amazingly whole? For many people that seems to be their truth.  Furthermore, through the spiritual force in love can you have a sense of being connected to all people, and creatures and spirits who genuinely love?

Spirituality and its essential love-based nature often is the lifeline that keeps people alive when nothing else would.  Spirituality also is something that helps people let go of their biological life when staying physically alive is no longer tenable.  Love, when recognized and sensed as a spiritual force, brings us what some call the Konos experience.   That is when two or more people are gathered together in the spirit of love; they also can be united with something far greater and grander than the sum of their collected selves.  This is reported to be experienced as awesome beyond imagination.

The Spiritual Goodness of Love

By seeing a spiritual dimension to love, any healthy, real, love relationship can be seen, as at least partially if not wholly, a true goodness.  By identifying love as a spiritual entity or phenomenon one can associate it with goodness and distance it from the purely selfish, or the destructive mentality that promotes ideas like “all’s fair in love and war” and the unethical corrupting mindset that proclaims “winning is the only thing that counts”.  By comprehending love as a great, spiritual marvel one conceptually takes love to a higher plane, removing it from the trivial, the mundane and the lesser important factors in life.

Compassionate love, as the Buddhists teach, especially works against crass commercialism, common dishonesty and deception, against the power for power’s sake mindset, money hungry forces and the “dog eat dog” approach to business practices.  The spiritual nature of love is seen to inspire higher order behavior, bring out empathetic and altruistic action, inspire  lifelong dedication, and move people to great cooperative action in the service of all sorts of humanitarian and democratic causes.  The spiritual component in love also  sometimes is given credit for helping us move toward beauty and away from spiritless ugliness, toward natural wonder and away from lifeless, impersonal mechanization.

Love lived as a spiritual blessing can help lead to soaring actualization, improved lives and saved lives, and can help lead to the defeat of anti-human and anti-natural destructive forces.

Religion, Spirituality and Love

Great numbers of people find their lessons about love and spirituality via religion and they benefit from doing so.  Also unfortunately a lot of religion seems to get in the way of spirituality and, as sometimes practiced, leads away from healthy, real love.  While some religions are quite healthfully love-centered and love-focused, sadly, there are others that seem to operate just the opposite.
See if you think this is true. “Spirituality without love does not exist.  If this is true it proves ‘loveless religion’ to be ‘false religion’ because it is devoid of true spirituality”.

Some people’s religion primarily is guilt and shame dominated.  Other people’s religion mostly is about escaping damnation (‘fire insurance religion’).  For a great many people religion is just a great big “I’m okay  you’re not” game (unless, of course, you are in my religion and behaving ever so correctly, as I think you should).  For others it’s just a pleasant way of socializing or achieving status, or living in the safety of conformity.

I suggest none of this is spiritually love-focused.  I like to recommend to people I counsel that when they are looking for a religious or spiritual involvement with others, check out the amount of love emphasis actually going on with those others.  If the love emphasis is high it may be mentally healthy and if not, probably not.

Erotic Spiritual Love

A couple silently lays naked together after lovemaking and feels mystically, spiritually united with one another and with all space and time, and with all who have ever felt deep, spiritual love.  Have you had this experience or something like it?

For many in the world spirituality and sex are seen as each other’s enemy.  But this is not true for a great many others.  For the Taoist many of the ways of being sexual are the ways of being spiritual.  For Tantric practicing Buddhists, and Hindus, and certain branches of Wicca, along with particular Eastern Orthodox sects sexual ecstasy weaves together with spiritual ecstasy quite well.

It is thought that at the dawn of history, in the worship of the Great Mother, sexual feelings were considered her sacred, inspiring gift to humans and were, therefore, spiritual and sacred.  This made rape and many other less than healthy forms of sexual behavior greatly chastised and to be avoided or one might be cursed by the Great Mother and have to live a life of sexless agony.

So with these thoughts in mind, might you live in a way that integrates your love, your sexuality and your spirituality?

What To Do

Perhaps you would like to worshipfully pray or meditate on these matters.  A lively discussion with others may be a desirable possibility.  Reading about love and spirituality can be an option. Taking classes, going to workshops and seminars, and diligently studying the issues involved might be a way of productively dealing with all this.  Deciding to approach all love relationships with a certain amount of spirituality may yield good results.  Letting all this germinate in your subconscious and waiting to see what may unfold or emerge is another good possibility.  What do you suppose will be your way?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Is healthy self-love a spiritual practice and if you see it as such how will you practice it?