Teen "in Love", Parents in ? ? ?

Synopsis: Love and your dating teenager; parent options; puppy love or disaster in the making; what are your odds; adolescent brain chemistry; romantic reality; using the loving way; what if the relationship lasts; more.

Love and Your Dating Teenager

“I’m in love and I know it’s the real thing!”

What will you do when your teenager proclaims something like this with total sincerity and you’re quite sure they’re completely mistaken and totally misguided.  Worse, what will you do if they hide it from you and you discover they believe they’re in ‘true love’?  What will you do if you hear some kid you really regard as a surefire loser proclaim love for your offspring and it looks like your offspring is about to fully reciprocate?

These sort of things happen to many parents when they are in no way ready for them.  It can happen whether or not your teenager is dating but more commonly it occurs after they’ve been seeing someone or secretly dating for a while.  It even can happen after a first date with the youngest teens, but more commonly it happens later with older teens who are surprisingly young, naïve, extremely immature or pseudo-mature.  In other words it can happen to your teenager and, therefore, to you and gravely effect your family.

Parent Options

Huge numbers of parents handle their teenagers "falling in love" experiences extremely poorly and sometimes severe tragedy results.  Some try the authoritarian route of banning teens from seeing each other, grounding their own offspring, taking phones and transportation away, and even locking them in their rooms.

Other parents are wimpy and weak not knowing what to do, so they hope and pray nothing will go seriously wrong but they do little else but observe.  Some, along with other family members, tease, embarrass and make fun of their teens mercilessly.  Still other parents go along, denying their own best judgments, and gambling on the belief that ‘whatever will be, will be’ and it’s all out of their hands anyway.  There are those who try a very logical, lecturing depending on reason’s ability to change adolescent, romantic and sexual feelings.  Then there are the parents that get happy believing the magical thing called love has come down from heaven to enrapture their offspring for all eternity, and the only thing to do is celebrate and go along.  However, subconsciously they also could be suffering from a serious case of denial.

Quite a few parents gamble on a combination of luck and subtle, sabotaging manipulation.  They overtly cooperate and covertly attempt to undermine, while looking for something or somebody better to introduce their teenager to.  Depending on the teenager and the way parents carry it off each of these approaches they may work at least a little, may backfire, or may be totally inconsequential.

Puppy Love or Disaster in the Making

Counseling with the families of murdered and suicided youth is among the hardest work I do.  Teenage ‘jealousy murders’ and ‘breakup suicides’ along with substance addictions start-ups and relapses, plus sexual and criminal acting-out, and sudden serious depression are the worst of what, all too commonly, is called “adolescent ‘love’ experiences gone wrong”.  And then there are the unwanted pregnancies, school dropouts, runaways and countless lesser tragedies that sometimes occur.

It is heart wrenching to hear parents who have lost a child say things like, “We thought it was just puppy love” or “We didn’t take it seriously” or “We teased and joked about it but that’s all we did, and now it’s too late”.  Therefore, dear parents, please approach your maybe ‘in love’ teen with as much careful, parent love and knowledge as you can!  Here are things to help you with the knowledge part.

What Are Your Odds?

The odds are on your side.  The vast majority of adolescent "fall in love" and ‘love affair’ experiences are not serious and do not end in tragedy.  Once in a great while one of them actually turns out to be healthy, real love and it lasts, although that is probably the rarest of all the more common outcomes.  Your odds improve if you use early teen infatuations to help your offspring learn about the differences between teenage pseudo-love and more mature, lasting, real love.  Don’t be surprised if it looks like your efforts are "falling on deaf ears" or that your teen thinks you don’t understand; you will have planted the seeds for them to think about on their own.  It’s also a good time to put in some more emotion’s focused sex education.

Adolescent Brain Chemistry

The brain chemistry changes that sometimes occur in adolescents who are having a "fall in love" experience can be deadly.  These bio-chemical changes often are temporary but drastic when a breakup occurs.  These changes can happen to the most balanced and mentally healthy adolescents but are more common in youth who also are having other kinds of problems.  A highly functioning, good loving family, along with family counseling offers the best insurance that everyone will get through a teenager’s brain chemistry "love" storm okay, and may even come out the better for it.  The thing to know is no one is exempt from the possibility of such a brain chemistry storm, and the extreme emotions and agonizing dissonance it can sometimes cause.  Certain medications also may be useful.

Romantic Reality

To protect your children you can teach them the seldom spoken truth that most early, teenage, romantic experiences do not involve real love, don’t last and, at best, are ‘training relationships’ helping youth get ready for the more and better relationships that come later in adulthood.  Again your teenager may scoff at this information and may assume "you just don’t know how they feel"; relate to them compassionately and let them know you do understand, and maybe use some self-disclosure love that reveals times you may have had similar feelings.

We actually used to do a better job at this.  Once upon a time, youth were taught to expect to have short-term "crushes", infatuations, temporary flames, perhaps even a paramour and probably several amorous attachments before the real thing came along.  Today all too many parents support the common, and usually false mythology, that your first love is your real love, and is a love that will last you all your life and into eternity.  This frequently is a set up for heartbreak and serious disappointment.  Remember, Romeo and Juliet did not get even a day of living happily-ever-after.

False Love Training and Protection

One of the best things parents can do with both children and teenagers is to educate them about false love.  It’s sort of like sex education.  It’s best started early but a late start is better than no start.  Talk to your kids in short bursts, telling them how they will likely get enamored, bewitched, bothered and hopefully realize they are bewildered by lust and false love experiences, which will be very easy to confuse with real love.

Such experiences can feel wonderful or very troubling but they are very much, not likely to last.  Help them to know that high-intensity feelings don’t automatically mean long-lasting feeling.  Also introduce the ‘radical idea’ that early romance is "beginner training" for the more and better relationships of their future .  To know about false love go to the Subject Index at this site and see the False Love and Myths category.

What to Avoid

Avoid dictatorial oppression.  In the long-running, Broadway play “The Fantasticks” two fathers secretly decide they want their offspring to marry each other.  So they hit on a very clever strategy.  They absolutely forbid their offspring to have anything to do with each other.  By the end of the play the kids, of course, are marrying each another.  There is a great truth here.  Forbidding can so often get you the opposite result from what you want.   No matter how much you forbid, try to block, or punish kids for connecting in the modern world they usually can find a way to connect.

Avoid lecturing and presenting lots of logical reasons and preaching.  All that usually just gets you is tuned-out and ignored.  Know that things that effect the emotions have to be dealt with emotionally, and pure intellect so often just does not reach the emotional self.  It’s empathy, compassion, concern, sincerely expressed questions and good listening that can make a positive difference.

Avoid embarrassing, making fun of and teasing.  This just helps your offspring want to hide their truths from you.

Avoid a lot of sneaky lies and manipulations to sabotage your teenager’s romantic involvements because these tactics are not likely to convey love and because they can so backfire.  Truth with love is a much better option.

Avoid doing nothing.  Carefully having a love-based influence is likely to help the most.

Using the Loving Way

I remember a father who absolutely hated the boy he found his teenage daughter in bed with.  At first his rage, fury and denouncements resulted in his daughter running off with the boy.  After some parent guidance counseling this parent decided to use his love and his brains.  He contacted them, and with sincere good will invited the boy and his daughter to dinner, offered to fix the boy’s car and then to pay for the boy’s counseling and even included him with their family counseling.  Eight weeks later his daughter was saying, “I can do better than him, and we are going to just be friends”.  It doesn’t always work out quite that quickly or that well, but it can.  A lot of loving listening and putting your ideas mostly into a sort of curious, concerned questioning can help your teenager figure out what you want them to figure out.

When relationships break up be there for your teenager in a supportive, loving and sometimes pleasantly distracting way.  With all love relationship breakups (false or real) there can be a depression and that can bring an increased suicide potential, so be watchful and careful.

What If the Relationship Lasts?

If your teenager and the one they choose stay in an ongoing relationship with each other – embrace it.  The worst thing in family life is an ongoing war making everything worse and worse.  The next worst thing is an ongoing estrangement, full of long-lasting, ongoing heartache.

When we love it is our job to see if we can love, or at least like, or barring that at least tolerate those who we love choose to love.  If you or if anyone in your family cannot do this I suggest individual counseling, parents with teen or adult offspring counseling or family counseling.  It definitely can and often does work wonders.

As one mother put it, “Our son married a woman so opposite to anyone I could accept.  She was of a different race, religion, class, philosophy of life, politics and lifestyle.  For five years I fought her every way I could think of.  Then they wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and for five more years my son was lost to me.  He came back, talked me into family counseling, and now today, so many years later, I love her like the daughter she became to me.  What a fool I was to lose all those years.  I’m grateful though because I have learned that love can conquer even my prejudice”.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Are you good at, or learning to get good at, talking to your kids about love and also about false love?

Related posts:

1. Parenting Series: Paul’s Points On Love For Parents 

Love and Your Body

Mini-Love-Lesson  #256

Synopsis: How experiencing healthy, real love makes your body healthy and how giving and getting love is both healthy for you and those you are doing love with as well as bystanders; how not having love connections is unhealthy; and how living in healthful, real, love networks works best for all concerned is insightfully delved into here.

Body Thriving Love

Love is a great component for a thriving body!  Mounting evidence points to the fact that we mammals are biologically hardwired to seek, make and maintain love connections with others.  One way we benefit from that has to do with our physical health.  Our safety, survival and better health functioning depend on connecting and especially love connecting with others.

Any and all emotional connections can help but it is love connecting that we thrive on.  When we are in good and healthy, getting and giving love relationships, all our body systems tend to work better.  Our circulation, our blood pressure, our digestion, our immunity mechanisms, our metabolism – everything works better once we are established in ongoing, stable, healthy, real, love relationships.  link Love & Survival by Dean Ornish.

Lacking Love Connections

When we do not feel love-connected to others our sense of safety tends to recede and then our physical and psychological stress mounts.  That means parts of our non-conscious brain (amygdala, posterior cingulate, etc.) start sensing a threat.  That triggers the release of stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, etc.) into our bodies.  At first this can, in the short term, help us fight or flee a threat.  However, in the long term, feeling threatened continuously and/or repeatedly can be very damaging to us.  Prolonged stress, tension and threat can cause strokes and heart attacks, hike cancer susceptibility and bring on a host of other serious, physical health problems (see “Connection Matching – A Love Skill” and “Co-Connecting – An Essential Love Team Skill”).

Psycho-neurologically, the dynamics of stress are causally linked to increasing chemical imbalances in the brain, micro brain structure damage causing cognition and emotion control problems, and other serious brain system malfunctions.  These, in turn, are associated with the exacerbation or the cause of a great many different mental, emotional and behavioral problems including addictions, ultra- sensitivity to emotional hurts, hyper-reaction and over-responsiveness to anything perceived and interpreted as personally negative.  All that can, and often does, lead to much interaction failure and relational dysfunction in couples, families, friendships, etc.

A new love connection or a prior love re-connection can greatly help reverse all of the above difficulties.  Increases in healthy self-love with a sense of being better internally-self-connected can often do much the same (see “Wellness: Its Necessity, Healthy Real Love”  and “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”).

On the Positive Side

Physically, when you receive well the behaviors which trigger your brain into feeling well loved, your brain begins to reduce its production of destructive, stress hormones.  That, in turn, triggers increases in your immunity functioning and disease resistance.  It also helps with good digestion, sleep, reduces addictions susceptibility and relapse proneness, plus it increases your ability to heal damaged tissue.  Healthy, real love in your life means you will age slower and probably live longer.

Being healthfully and well loved as well as being loving creates and aids healthfulness in many ways.  Essential to this process is being good at receiving love and going after the love you need and want in successful ways.  With good and sufficient reception of the behaviors that trigger the brain into feeling well loved, every body process operates better.  Receiving love well  also usually leads to more happy, harmonious and cooperative love relating.  Body-wise this means better disease resistance, regenerative tissue growth, blood pleasure balance, illness recovery, good digestive functioning, general resilience, more energy and greater likelihood of longevity (see “How Receiving Love Well Gives Love Better”).

Love Relationships – A Two-Way Thing

Living in two-way, giving and getting love filled and love cycling relationships is physically, mentally and emotionally beneficial for, not only both participants, but also for the people you jointly effect like children and other family members and dear friends.  Such loving relationships benefit everybody.  They produce I win, You win, Everybody wins relating patterns and networks.

Love connection loss is unhealthfully stressful for all mammals, and birds too, and probably for other species as well.  Likewise, insufficient and erratic love also can produce stress and resulting health problems.  When we are infants, a lack of receiving the behaviors of love can physically kill us via failure to thrive syndromes.  That even is true for infants who otherwise are very well taken care of minus the behaviors of love.  When we are adults, love loss and loveless situations can make us more susceptible to disease, addictions, stress illnesses and suicidal depression.  When we are elderly, active healthy love relating of every kind can help us live longer, healthier and happier than we otherwise would.

Living in isolation from love relating, even though surrounded by people, can be quite bad for you.  Some people live lives of giving love but not getting much love, and some try it the other way too.  Such people are not living in love relating networks and they benefit from love but not nearly as well as those in love networks that are really filled with both giving and getting love connections.  Our bodies react very positively to living in a love relating network such as a healthfully loving family, group of close friends, comrade networks, etc.

Giving and Getting Love Both Count

A good number of studies show giving love has many of the same positive effects as getting love.  Even altruistic love actions toward recipients who have no chance of returning positive behaviors is quite healthful.  Love of pets (especially mammals) as well as healthy self-love actions also produce lots of healthful body reactions.  Link “Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”

Having more than one place, or person, to give your love to also is a very helpful thing to do.  Giving love to more than one person, as well as receiving love from more than just one, protects against the damages of losing a one and only love source.  Every love relationship you have can be an enrichment, not only to you but also to all the other love relationships you have.  Consider the concept that love grows on love and love creates more love.  Then there is the idea that love, like ideas, tends to increase the more you give it away.

Having a love-related-purpose in life, or a love-related-cause to pour yourself into, also can be quite useful to one’s own health and well-being, as well as to others.  It is important that you choose carefully.  Some people pour themselves into achievements that make no particular contribution.  Then later they become quite disappointed and depressed because they realize those efforts seem meaningless.

Giving love to pets and receiving love from them (especially it seems with dogs, but also with other mammals and sometimes also with birds) has helped many people through very difficult times (see “Pet Love”).

Giving and getting love from yourself seems a bit strange and baffling to many at first.  However, those who get good at it report very good results.  Remember, there are two sides to the ancient adage “Love others AS you love yourself”  and so, I recommend being quite active about both. 

One More Thing

Will you, and perhaps others, benefit from you talking about all you have just read with other people?  You might want to experiment with that idea.  If so, please mention this site and all of our many mini-love-lessons and help spread some love knowledge into our love-needy world.   Thanks.   

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love Success Question: Your body is made of many miracles so, with healthy self-love do you love, honor and respect it?

Love Does Not Insist on Its Own Way

Mini-Love-Lesson #243

Synopsis: A right to insistence or not; what about different translations; the real meaning of insist on its own way; and the relational psychology of insistence with systemic examples all work to broaden and deepen an understanding of Paul’s seventh item for describing love.

Note: This is the seventh in our series on a New Testament answer to the question What Is Love with additional understandings from relational psychology.

Does Love Give You the Right to Insist?

Some people believe that loving someone gives you the right to insist on a lot of things, make a lot of demands, give orders and mandate rules.  Some believe this is only true for husbands and fathers and other venerable elders.  Paul apparently saw it differently.  By this translation, Paul seems to be telling us love is not a motivator for insisting and demanding behaviors.  That seems especially true when what we are insisting on gives us some type of gain or control over someone we supposedly love.

But wait.  We have some translation problems.  The version or translation of the Scriptures you consult may read differently.

Translation Issues

Paul used the biblical Greek “ou zetei ta eautes” to convey the message describing this important element of love.  It has been translated a number of other ways.  Some examples are: love does not force itself on others, love is not self-seeking, love is not selfish, love does not seek its own advantage, love seeks not its own, love does not demand its own way, love does not seek to aggrandize itself.  There are quite a few other translations, each of which puts a slightly different spin on what Paul was trying to tell us.  Some scholars have suggested a fuller meaning is love does not seek for its own profit and pleasure or edification as a goal in itself.  Love does not strive for one’s own advantage over others is another possibility.

Here we are relying on the widely influential Revised Standard Version and the English Standard Version translations partly because of the enormous amount of scholarship that went into trying to accurately interpreting what Paul meant.

What Does “Insist on Its Own Way” Really Mean?

The understanding here seems to mean love does not motivate us to demand, order, mandate or dictate how those we love should think, act or feel.  The implication seems to be that our loved ones are to be treated democratically and with equanimity.  Therefore, love pushes us to take into account our loved one’s views, feelings, situations, needs and idiosyncrasies.  This necessitates developing good listening skills, seeing through others’ eyes and not being blind or unresponsive to the desires, emotions or ongoing changes occurring in or for our loved ones.  When differences or conflicts occur, working to compromise, or better yet, synthesize differences and working to have an “I win, you win nobody loses” outcome focus is what love requires.

This understanding of love also means not trying to control, predetermine, manipulate or force one’s own desired outcomes but, preferably with love, relying on requesting, trading and negotiating rather than insisting.

Insistence is related to having to be right, anxiety, insecurity, domination and sometimes dependence on sameness.  None of which are thought to be very loving.

The Relational Psychology of Insisting

Frequently insisting and demanding your own way comes across as intrusive, controlling, autocratic, stressful, selfish and unloving.  When it is seen this way, it usually causes the recipient to emotionally move away from the one doing the insisting and thereafter they tend to avoid that person.  Emotional closeness definitely can be prevented or destroyed by too much demanding and insisting.

There are a number of different interaction patterns to insisting things of a loved one.  Some people comply with what is insisted upon while secretly and increasingly becoming more and more resentful.  One result of that is to get even with retaliatory, passive/aggressive sabotage of the one doing the insisting.  Another thing that happens has to do with the suppression/explosion dynamic.  If too much insisting and demanding comes at a person for too long and they keep complying with the demands over and over suppressing their negative feelings about it, they may one day explode in anger and rage.  That has been known to lead to sudden violence and/or surprise abandonment.  Especially if alcohol and certain drugs are involved this can be quite dangerous.

One of the worst of all patterns involves an implosion syndrome.  This is one where one person is repeatedly insisting and demanding and the other surrendering and being compliant until one day they surrender to what another insists on, one too many times, and have a mental or physical breakdown.  Sometimes they even die seemingly to escape a no longer tolerable relationship situation.  It is amazing how many people suffering some form of serious, chronic illness suddenly start getting well after, one way or another, they lose their problematic spouse or they disconnect from their high stress family.

It is important to know that giving-in to demands and insistence rewards the one doing the demanding and insisting, because it works.  This, in turn, increases the likelihood of an increase in insistence behavior.  Some people mistakenly believe that their surrendering to what is insisted upon eventually will get them treated better and their life will get easier, plus they finely will be better loved.  Seldom does that happen.  Anything that works is more likely, not less likely, to be increasingly repeated.

It is very sexually exciting for some people to be in the submissive, surrendering role while their love mate is coming across as strong, domineering, demanding and insisting of much, both inside and outside the realm of the erotic.  So long as this is a game the couple plays where both agree to play with adequate safety features, and it does not develop into a total lifestyle, a couple can be healthy and okay.  However, sometimes things go too far or go on too long.  This is when an alteration from the dominance/submission pattern of behavior needs to occur without any loss of love in the relationship.  That usually takes some careful, loving work.

Another dynamic of the love relationship that has too much insisting going on is the open warfare pattern.  In this, the participants get to battle openly for who will get their way.  This battling can look really awful but actually often is healthier than more covert interaction patterns of behavior.  That probably is because it is more open and cathartic.

Some, mostly quite insecure people, enjoy being ordered around and having a lot of things demanded of them.  It offers reassuring proof to them that they and their compliance is wanted and valued.  The problem often is that the one doing the insisting seems to usually start devaluing the compliant one.  Their surrendering ways become identified as weakness.  This weakness eventually is disrespected and seen as unchallenging and boring.  The other thing that happens in this pattern is that the compliant one grows stronger and gets tired of always complying.  Breakups ensue.

All in all, being an insisting and demanding person in a love relationship usually does not work out well.  Neither does being too much of a submissive, compliant, surrendering person work out well.  That seems to be largely because, as the French Courts of Love ruled in the 1100s, love is best done by equals and not in relationships where one is dominated and the other domineering which they saw as was required to occur in marriage (of that time), and as it is best done in love relationships in our time.

One More Thing.

Lots of people seem to get a lot out of talking-over things religious and scriptural.  Likewise, relational psychology can be pretty intriguing and fascinating for many.  So, you might use what you have just read for such a discussion.  If you do, please mention this site and all that it offers.  Thanks

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Is it true that the more overtly strong a person tries to appear the weaker they must covertly be?

Yourself As a Great Source of Love Gifts

Mini-Love-Lesson  #261

Synopsis: You may be your own best source of behavioral love gifting; what the idea of love gifting yourself to others is all about; and how your love gifts are important to love relating are aptly dealt with here.

Your Most Personal Gift of Love?

Do you agree that the more personal the gift the better is the gift’s love effect?  Do you know that among the most personal of gifts can be the gifts of yourself?  Are you aware that especially this can be true for growing healthy, real, love relationships?

Your finest love gift can be yourself, along with your real self, your growing and improving self and your best self.  Those things can be true because the more you give of yourself to someone who loves you, in a sense, the more they have of you, know about you and the more they can experience love with you.  Also, the more you give of the personal, real you the greater the growth of closeness and heart-felt bonding can occur with you.  Conversely, the more you do not give of yourself the more likely there will be an emotional distancing and disconnection.  So with that in mind, let’s ask two questions.  Do you know much about giving of yourself and do you know what the real you has to offer?

The Real You and Your Many Fine Gifts

Those who would do love with you want to know the real you and experience the real you so they can do real love relating with the real you.  Therefore, if you love someone, the challenge is twofold.  First, is to  be real and not fake.  Second, is to work to become your best self and, as you do that, keep giving of yourself to whomever you would love.

So long as you are truthful and sincere, your words and actions reveal and consequently give of yourself.  Conversely, if you are untruthful and insincere, your words and actions likely will manifest only fake love and make real love less likely.  If this effort to hide the real you is discovered, only a phony you will be revealed.

The many fine gifts you have to offer are accomplished by doing behaviors.  They are done through the behaviors of truthful talking and sincere and/or experimental action-taking.  You are capable of making a lot of different love-giving, truthful statements plus doing a great variety of sincere and experimental loving actions.  This enables you to do a lot of different kinds of love gifting.  So, let’s take a brief look at just five of the less thought about gifts of love you have to offer (see “Love Active Enough?”).

The Gift of Affirmation

You give this gift by first looking for what you can honestly see as worthy, of value and/or positive in another.  Then spend a little time appreciating what you have observed and time to find the words you can use to speak of it.  Then with those words you can give honest praise, compliments and perhaps thankful statements to the person you are gifting with your affirmational love.  This can be done privately, or in front of others or in the form of a possible keepsake type note.

Affirmation is one of the most important ways to love a great many people especially if they could use some increase in self-valuing.  By the way, whatever you find to appreciate in another reveals a certain amount of your own, inner workings and so that is a gift of yourself (see the “Affirmation Love” chapter in Recovering Love).

The Gift of Listening with Love

Have you heard the old saying that proclaims we were given two ears and only one mouth because listening is twice as important as talking?  This especially has relevance when a loved one seems to need or want to tell us something, share their emotions or just know by experiencing it that they are being heard.

It is very important to know loving listening can not be done just mentally.  It must have heart in it.  This heart-full quality must be well and often expressed via quiet but very active expressional love behaviors, via facial expressions, gestures posture changes, voice tones, etc.  Passive, inactive, blank and stone face listening can be quite anti-loving.  Link “Listening with Love”  Link “Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions”

The Gift of Loving Touch

Whether it is a gentle, soft caressing or a good solid, full-body hug, a simple comforting hand holding, a one arm buddy hug or a loving full body massage – love via touch is known to change our body and brain chemistry for the better.  Loving touch brings closeness, relational love bonding and is very assistive in both physical and emotional healing processes.  When loving touch is done well and often, the research shows it to be quite assistive in life lengthening (see “50 Varieties of Love Touch” and “Touching With and For Love – A Super Important Love Skill”).

The Gift of Receiving Love Well

It is a gift to receive a gift of love well.  This means focusing on it, appreciating it and what went into it to come into your life, as well as the thoughts and feelings behind it.  Gifts come in several categories.  Object gifts basically are things, experience gifts are like a surprise birthday party, favors and assistance gifts are like someone paying off your student debt, and gifts of yourself are like what we are focusing on here.  It is important for the health of love relationships to notice, sincerely appreciate and actively receive them all.  This is the gift of good reception (“How Receiving Love Well Gives Love Better”, “Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully” and the “Receptional Love” chapter in Recovering Love ).

The Gift of Self Disclosure

Letting someone you love know you in personal, intimate ways is one of the finest of love gifts.  It is essential for growing closeness and for creating some of the deepest of love experiences, plus it often comes with a very sweet joyfulness.  Letting someone know your private, personal, not usually shared thoughts, feelings, behaviors, know the positives and negatives of your past, present and possible future and every other little and large thing about you is some of what is giving the gift of self-disclosure for love.  Of course, it is important that you receive with love the self-disclosures of those you would do love with.

If you have been taught to think poorly of yourself and what you have to offer, or you just have not discovered what a bundle of miracles you are, you may not realize how much you have to offer and how much it is needed and wanted.  Perhaps the want and need for what you have to offer is in other circles than the ones you are traveling in now (see “Intimate Love”, “Intimate Love, What Everyone Needs to Know”, “Growing Closeness – A Love Skill” and the “Self-Disclosure Love” chapter in Recovering Love).

Manifesting Yourself Where and With Whom?

If those you focus on now do not seem to care much about you or what you have to offer, you have some choices to consider.  You can try to get through to them in new, bigger, more powerful ways.  You can go looking for others who will want to see and relate to you in deeper ways, value you, and grow to love you as you do love with them better.  You can learn to love yourself better and in more self-dependent ways if needed.  You also can do all three of these, or any two.  It is also important that you self-disclose to yourself the many miracles that make you up and the many ways you can experience the good of yourself, along with the many fine ways you can come to be.  The better you do this the better you can do well with others and the better they are likely to do with you.

One More Little Thing

You might want to go looking for compatible others to talk over what you have just read.  That may take some searching in new and different places, or perhaps not.  In any case, if you do talk this over with others please mention this site and its many mini-love-lessons.  We are grateful and thank you for that.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Quotable Question: If you don’t give of yourself to others you love, how much are they likely to give of themselves to you?

The Fourth Key Is Love

Synopsis: First we introduce the four wondrous, summation keys for a full long life; then we talk about ‘Aiming’ your love; unlearning issues; the biggest love lie; a great truth about love; and finally, paths by which to love more.

Four Keys to a Good, Long Life

Are you Interested in living a full, long, healthy life?

There are four keys, according to Dr. Dean Ornish, a much noted physician whose research and many publications, including his excellent book Love and Survival, focuses on living healthfully longer and having a high-quality, enriched life. After reviewing a huge number of studies, he concluded that living well and longer can be boiled down to four major areas in which your actions can make an enormous difference. There are two big areas to do more of and two other big areas to do less of.

For people in the developed world, the number one key is eat less, the number two key is move more, the number three key is stress less and the fourth key is love more! The next issue to ponder is how to do well in each of those four, big, key areas? There are lots of subcomponents you can learn about from many sources concerning diet, exercise and stress management. But what about love? Well, if you have been reading many entries on site you know that there are many components, factors and applications you can learn concerning love, and that is what we are focusing on here.

Aiming to Love More

Loving more is probably going to take you thinking more about love, actively studying more about love and, most of all, practicing love actions more. It also helps to have a lot of love questions to ask yourself, and maybe talk them over with others. Questions like: Who and what are you going to love more? How much do you know about all the actions that convey love? What do you do about receiving love? What is your involvement with altruistic love? Are you good at love adventures? How much do you know about the differences between real and false love? Indeed, there are at least 1000 more questions to get excited about, and enriched by, as you search and find answers. You might want to start by thinking of where is it best for you to begin to aim your love efforts? Also, exactly how will you increase your love studying and learning?

Unlearning May Also Be Necessary

Unfortunately, there are many false teachings, destructive cultural messages, misleading traditions and counterproductive societal norms which may have gotten into your head concerning love. All those may lead you to fail at love. It seems we are just now beginning to start understanding what makes healthy, real love. Interestingly, down through the ages there are many ‘wisdom Masters’ who seem to have known all along what science is just now discovering. Then there is false love and its several syndromes lurking there to lead you astray. You may have to examine what has gotten into your head that you might need to unlearn. Without unlearning the falsehoods you can’t go freely onto the better knowledge about ‘loving more’. (To help you with that, look at the entries on this site, in the Subject Index under Love Myths).

The Biggest Lie About Love

One false teaching or understanding about love deserves special attention. It comes in lots of different variations. Basically, it is the myth that says “love is all done by mysterious, perhaps supernatural magic which is out of your control and, therefore, there is nothing you can really do about love. It is all done by luck, fate, the stars, one deity or another, or who knows what. If you are a ‘star-crossed lover’, or just unlucky at love, well too bad, you lose, and that is all there is to it.” However, I suspect you don’t really believe that or you would not be reading this right now.

If you even subconsciously or semi-consciously sort of think that big lie might be true, you can be in danger of that belief (or suspicion) becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even worse, that myth might guide you away from learning all the many, wonderful things there are to learn about love which actually work, and which can help you grow your own great love successes.

A Great Truth About The Fourth Key

Love is natural but how to get it, give it, grow it and share it is learned. Some people are lucky enough to grow up in a very loving family, and they subconsciously learn all this at an early age because love-success actions were repeatedly modeled for them throughout their upbringing. The rest of us can consciously work to learn how to love well and love more, much like we learn everything else important. We purposely study it, and we explore it, and experiment with it to find what works for us, and then we practice, practice, practice! Both modern science and the wisdom of the ancients point to this truth about love.

Love like food is natural but there’s a tremendous amount you can learn to do about it. Teaching how to love better and more is a major component in the great religions of the world. The natural phenomenon of love is increasingly becoming evident in the brain and other medical related sciences. Learning to love well and more also can increasingly be seen in the behavioral sciences. Even in behavioral economics, love is being studied so it can be understood and accomplished better and more. (Read The Psychology and Economics of Happiness Love, Life And Positive Living by Prof. Lok Sang Ho, head of the Department of Economics at Lingnan University, Hong Kong).

Paths to Loving More

First of all you can do what you doing right now, and that is read. There is a lot written about love and some of it is pretty worthwhile. Another thing you can do is join with other people who have a love-centered orientation or involvement. That could mean a really deep, loving, friendship network; a voluntary effort trying to lovingly assist some group of people who need one sort of help or another; joining with those involved in a life betterment cause and for which love provides a method or some form of real “ministry”.

Meditation and prayer have provided many people with a sort of core loving approach which then stretches out to all they contact. Applying yourself in multiple kinds of love, of which there are quite a few, works well for many. You can start by reading entries at this site on kinds of love which is found in the Subject Index. Learning to center yourself in love, and come from love toward each major area of your life is another kind of path toward loving more.

Deciding to enlarge the number of ways you show love, choosing to magnifying the intensity of your demonstrations of love, and refining and elaborating the quality by which you do love actions, all can get you on a path toward loving more. Some people keep expanding their number of love targets, but remember one of your love targets needs to be yourself. Part of healthy self-love can be striving to eat less, move more and stress less and, thus, you will be using all four keys to a good, long life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Of all the people, creatures and other entities you personally have involvement with, which would be your best target for loving more first?