Is Feeling Love, Love Itself?

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with a review of some of the many troubling contradictions and confusions that exist about whether feeling love is a feeling or not; the lesson then posits a clarifying and for some a contentious answer to the beginning question; more.

Contradictions And Confusions

“I’m totally baffled!  I don’t know what to believe. Most of my friends seem to think that love is an emotion but some strongly disagree. A teacher I respect says that true love is only the feeling of joyful compassion that leads to lifelong commitment and connection. One book I read said love is a wonderful emotion but like all emotions it is temporary and fading and, therefore, untrustworthy and relatively unimportant. Others say love is a mysterious, emotional power that makes the world go-round, and others suggest that feeling love is just part of the mating drive, while still to others love is just an insignificant but strong feeling you get when you play the ‘game of romance’.

I hear supposed experts saying things like love feelings lead to a parasitic, addictive dependency, best avoided or escaped. I also read love is a powerful, vital, natural, long-lasting and, once started, love is an ongoing psychoneurological process which mostly happens in the unconscious limbic system of the brain. That thought takes some contemplation. I understand that some historians suggest romantic love feelings were, in a sense, artificially invented and continued by Western world culture, starting with the French royals in the 12th century. But I also understand that animals probably feel love because their neurochemical, neurophysiological and neuro-electrical responses have been found to be the same as humans when they are behaving in ways thought to represent love occurring.

To make matters even more complicated my religion teaches me things like “God is love”, “love is everlasting”, “all true love (including couple’s love) comes from and is a manifestation of the Deity’s love”and consequently to think that love is merely an emotion, especially a temporary emotion, can be seen as sinful and heretical.” All those statements originated from a foreign graduate student, working hard to develop a cross-cultural, core understanding of this thing we call love.

So what do you think? Have you been taught, or led to believe, that feeling love is love itself? Is love an emotion? If love is an emotion is it impermanent, temporary, unstable and undependable or even fleeting and fickle? Is love only an emotion and, therefore, is not of much lasting importance?

The Perception of Love

One of the more common, perceptual mistakes people make is to confuse the perception of something internal with the thing itself. If I feel rumblings in my stomach I may be sensing  my digestive system functioning. But the sensing of it is not to be confused with digestion itself. In fact, my digestion mostly goes on without me being consciously aware of it – the natural process of love may work that way too. So, feeling love may be seen as occasionally accessing, or becoming aware of, an inner, ongoing, natural process which may always be there inside us once we truly love.

This understanding goes well with people who say things like “I know that I always love my child (children, spouse, family member or whoever they love)” but I don’t always feel that love”. It also is in accord with people who automatically and powerfully act to protect those they love in the split second of sensing that a loved one is in danger. Actions to save acquaintances and strangers tend to be much slower and less likely.  Does not the quick action to save a loved one tell us that the love is already there inside us and is ready to automatically motivate us to be protective. Also the tendency to risk one’s own life to rescue loved ones is not only far quicker but is far stronger than the tendency risk one’s own life rescuing others we do not love.

Another ‘evidence’ of love having an inner, ongoing and consistent component instead of being a fleeting and/or fading feeling can be seen in this example. John got up from a brief nap grumbling and griping about how hard it was to go to his second job. Later at that job a fellow worker asked him why he took and continued to hold this second job because it was so obvious that it was hard on John. John answered, “I do it to help pay my daughter’s college costs, and I do that simply because I dearly love her.”

Now, examine John’s statement. John is experiencing other emotions than the nice, warm, happy feelings often associated with feeling love. In fact, with his griping and grumbling he might be seen as feeling anti-love feelings. However, John’s negative feelings can be seen as somewhat shallow. Underlying them is a far deeper, pervasive, consistent and powerful process of love which keeps motivating John to do his love-motivated actions year after year.

Accessing Love

It seems that once love is solidly established, the people who truly love always can be aware of that love; they can access it, be motivated by it and bring forth actions that demonstrate it. Sometimes this is associated with having the feelings, or emotions, that go with the word love, and sometimes not as is evidenced in John’s example above. Whether it is felt or not, it is there. There are countless millions of other examples, especially among people  who have had long-term love relationships in which hardship or strong challenge has been faced because of their ongoing love. In sickness and in health, in adversity and stress, in deprivation and defeat, love prevails as nothing else can. If love were but a temporary emotion it would not be consistently accessible and available for motivating the great and heroic acts it does, indeed, motivate. 

Love Labeling

If someone strongly and sincerely says they love you, it would seem that perhaps they have gotten in touch with a strong, natural, inner process which may continue throughout life and actually may produce a great many other emotions along with many thoughts and life-changing actions. It is reasonable to think that it takes a lot more than a mere, temporary emotion to achieve all that.

It is true that a person saying they love you may have what can be called varying and various love feelings for you, along with that love, but there is far more to love than just those feelings. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “I am feeling loving toward you, or for you”. Perhaps it also would be accurate for someone to say “I’m feeling loved” rather than the perfunctory “I love you too” response. After a time, two people in a love relationship may have the emotion of feeling lovable. Feeling lovable, loving and loved are all probably reasonable labels for emotions that flow out of love itself. Those feelings may come and go but the love that underlies them is probably most accurately understood as stable, dependable and consistently present, not temporary.

Evidence That Love Is More Than Emotion

Another source of evidence pointing to love being something other than just emotion comes from the research into love’s physically healing effects. Along with that is the research that shows the lack of love, or the absence of behaviors that convey love, can result in failure to thrive illnesses, psychosocial dwarfism, heightened susceptibility to disease and other physiological maladies. Serious depression and anxiety conditions also are associated with people who insufficiently receive the behaviors that convey love. Then there are the amazing incidents of the presence of a loved one having healthful effects on people in deep, comatose states. There also is accumulating evidence in the brain sciences pointing to love being a deep, usually unconscious, vital, powerful, natural process.

Research in systemic and interactional variables having to do with how two or more people, or animals, interrelate and what that interrelating does to their biological functioning, also shows interesting results concerning love. Some researchers think they have evidence which suggests that two people, or two animals, who are in what can be called ‘a love bonded relationships’ sometimes exhibit very harmonious neuro-electrical and neurochemical synchronicity which apparently does not occur in non-love bonded pairs. Lovers, parents and children, brothers and sisters, twins and others are thought to also sometimes exhibit this phenomenon. Is that evidence of love at the neurophysiological level? Some people think it is. Much more research on this has yet to be done.

Research in comparative animal psychology, social psychology, anthropology, pediatric psychiatry, and even behavioral economics tends to correlate with what the brain sciences have been finding concerning love.  Behaviors that bring about ongoing, close, caring connection, nurturing, protectiveness and healthfulness are all associated with the neurochemistry that seems to be a part of love responses, and love relationships in humans and higher order primates, as well as other members of the animal kingdom.

The Answer

The answer to the question “Is feeling love, love itself?” is no! The preponderance of available evidence from many sources points to love being far more than just a feeling.  It also suggests that when we feel love for someone, an animal or anything else, we actually are just becoming aware of an inner process which is natural, powerful and vital to full, healthful functioning. That process, the evidence also suggests, is something ongoing within us whether we consciously are aware of it, or not.

Therefore, it is sensible to conclude: Love is so much more than a feeling or an emotion.Feeling love is just a sensing of a much greater thing.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who do you know you love, whether you feel that or not at this moment?

Lasting Sex and Lasting Love

Did you know that to keep having good sex in an ongoing, couple’s relationship it almost always takes having ongoing, healthy, real love actively and frequently demonstrated?  It seems people can have good sex, on a short-term basis, without healthy, real love but not in a long-lasting, ongoing, romantic or spousal love relationship.

Did you know that healthy self-love probably needs to be a part of this mix also?  Without healthy self-love couple love may not flourish.  Without sufficient self and couple healthy, real love flourishing a couple’s sex life is likely to fade over time.  So, to have a great, ongoing, couple’s sex life it likely will take having a good, healthy, ongoing love of self and a good, healthy, ongoing couple’s love frequently and actively demonstrated.  That is what I have found and other counselors and therapists like me have concluded after many years of practice working with the sex and love lives of a great many couples.

Naturally it is important not to confuse ‘sex’ and ‘love’ as, unfortunately, so many people do (See entry “Making Love or Having Sex” and explore “The Love Definition Series” in the left column).  Confusing love and sex leads many people to relational disasters.  To really weave sex and love together healthfully it is important to know how extremely different they are from one another.  Learning the different characteristics of healthy sexuality and healthy love can greatly assist individuals and couples to do both well, and to do a good job of weaving them together.  If you confuse love and sex or suspect your beloved does I suggest you both had better work on that.  If you think that your maturing children may confuse love and sex you might want to attend a bit more to their love and sex education.  It also can help to talk with close friends about de-confusing love and sex.

A good, healthy sex life usually means one in which a couple has sex fairly frequently and every so often differs the style, place, time, etc. of their sexual experience.  Differences in sexual behavior are not the only important kind of difference to consider.  Many couples find that differences in mood or attitude can be the most important differences to consider when aiming to have lasting sex with lasting love.

To have lasting loving sex it helps if you consider all the many mood options available.  Sex in which the shared moods include being romantic, naughty, daring, sweet, silly, primitive, crazy, wondrous, adventurous, passionate, nasty, lazy, wild, sacred, mysterious, kinky, base, abandoned, playful, tender and a host of other mood possibilities is highly desirable.  Working to enact these various mood options is frequently far more important than simple, sexual intercourse position options or different methods by which orgasm is achieved.

Frequency of sexuality issues also is important and can vary greatly from one person to the other and from one couple to another.  In addition it is important to consider the frequency of all sexual interactions, not just sexual intercourse.  Erotic kissing, sexy talk, sexually flirtatious behavior and a host of other sexual interactions that do not lead to intercourse and orgasm but rather stand on their own as desirable events help spice up life and have independent value for a couple’s lasting love life.  Quality is more important than quantity but there are too many couples who do not have frequent enough sexual interactions, including intercourse.

There also are a very small number of couples who have sex too often, but from a health professional’s point of view too much sex is a rarer problem than too little sex.  If you have sex so often that you become very raw, bleed a lot, miss work or otherwise malfunction at regular life activities you might be having too much sex.  Since sex is highly healthy in all sorts of different ways, and it gets even far more healthy when it’s mixed with love, having loving sex frequently is a very healthy thing to do biologically and psychologically.  It also may help socially because there is evidence suggesting well sexed and well loved people are easier to get along with and possibly are more interested and active in constructive, social concerns.

In regard to the frequency of orgasms, having between one and three a week, depending on the individual and physical ability or disability, is often regarded as a good regimen for accessing accompanying health benefits.  Perhaps you have heard “a climax a day keeps the physician away”.  Oh, you thought it was an “apple” a day?  Was it the Victorians or the apple industry that changed it? 

In any case, the ‘climax a day’ works for quite a few people while there are others who seem do well with only once a month.  Less than that is highly questionable.  If each orgasm is accompanied with a dose of healthy self-love, with other love and/or love of life and the universe it is likely to be extra healthy.  If orgasms are accompanied with guilt, shame, embarrassment, thoughts or actions that self-denigrate or demean another, with anger, depression, anxiety, or other negative emotions the experience is likely to result in poorer mental and emotional health and be damaging to a couple’s relational health, which also goes against having a good, lengthy love and sex relationship.

Lasting love is greatly assisted by knowing the different ways love can be conveyed and then mixing those ways into your sexuality.  Research has discovered that there are eight distinct groups of behavior which convey love directly, and four others which transmit love indirectly.  I egotistically will say the best thing you can read about the eight direct ways of conveying or giving love is to be found in Part Two of my book, Recovering Love, chapters 5, 6 and 7.  Chapter 8 is about integrating those ways into your sex life and is titled “How Do We Get the Sex Life We Both Want”.

If you want to be a lasting, loving couple with a lasting, full sex life then it is important to study and practice the major ways love is done as you also experiment and explore sexuality together and it’s never ending variety.  There are so many ways to be sexual you can never get around to them all.  You will have your favorites which you can keep going back to but I suggest every once in awhile experiment with something new.

Now, let’s look at healthy self-love and some of its particulars.  Healthy self-love is extremely helpful to lots of couples in lots of ways, and this is especially true when it comes to sexuality.  The same ways you show love to another can provide you with the ways to show love to yourself.  Healthy self-love actions of affirming, protecting, nurturing, gifting and working to lovingly interconnect and harmonize the parts of your psychological self provide examples.  To know more about this you can explore this website looking at the various entries that have to do with communicating love and other entries concerning sex with love issues.

Healthy, real couple’s love usually is greatly complemented and made lasting when couples continue throughout their life together to study love and explore sexuality further.  Generally speaking, the more a couple maintains a fairly high level of varying sexuality and at the same time the more a couple works at being purposefully love-active the more lasting, healthy and happy that couple will be.  However, it takes some good, couple’s teamwork to accomplish that.  If you have trouble with any of these ideas and suggestions you might want to seek an accomplished, love-oriented, couple’s therapists who is trained, experienced and credentialed in both couple’s and sex therapy.

For a lasting, love-filled, erotic, couple’s life together here are a dozen simple questions you and your beloved might want to consider working with.

1.  Do we lovingly talk about sex together?
Lovingly means to talk with kindness, care, understanding, acceptance, and staying open to each other’s feelings and ideas, while not letting egotism, fear, inhibitions, judgmentalism or defensiveness have influence, and never talking in ways that could be interpreted as disrespectful, demeaning, degrading, making fun of, or angrily argumentative.

2.  Do we lovingly ask for what we want sexually, and lovingly hear what our beloved wants?

3.  Do we lovingly handle a hesitancy, reluctance, or our beloved not wanting what we want?

4.  Do we lovingly handle our beloved wanting something very different from what we want sexually?

5.  Do we want to lovingly share our erotic selves with one another, and lovingly participate with our beloved sharing their erotic ways with us?

6.  Are we lovingly open to experimenting and exploring new and different ways to be sexual with one another?

7.  If one or both of us gets erotically carried away and into intense, extreme or wild abandon sex is there still a sense of love pervading our experience?

8.  Are our beloved’s sexual emotional wants, well-being and satisfaction consistently treated as lovingly important as our own?

9.  When we experience sexual difficulty do we handle those difficulties with lots of self disclosure, truth and love?

10.  Do we lovingly work to help each other get past restrictive sexual inhibitions, bad previous sexual experiences, anti-sexual training and subconscious programming, sexual ignorance and sexual inexperience?

11.  Do we lovingly help each other share the fun, excitement, silliness, joy, playfulness, pride and ecstasy of sexuality together?

12.  Do we, at least sometimes, lovingly together strive to grow and experience sexualities that are of spiritual, oceanic, metaphysical and cosmic dimensions?

Couples who can affirmatively respond to most the above questions I see as highly likely to have a lasting, growing and frequently enriched sex and love-filled life together.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Is your all over attitude about sexuality more of a loving, happy, affirmative, thankful it exists attitude, or a conflicted, contradictory and confused attitude, or an aggressive, competitive, loveless attitude, or a mostly emotionally bad feeling, negative attitude?  Then, how do you think your all over attitude about sexuality affects your love relationships, including the one you have with yourself?

Related posts:

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

Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions

Synopsis: Self-love dynamics and importance; the five functions via healthy self-love; living with and without functioning healthy self-love; a healthy self-love self exam.

Consider this understanding of how ‘healthy self-love’ and the ‘five major functions of all forms of love’ work, how it has great importance and how it is something you will do well to know about.

Dynamics and Importance

Healthy, real love serves us and drives us by way of love’s five major functions.  This is true of all types of love including healthy self-love.

Knowing the five major functions of healthy, real love and how to apply them in healthy self-love development can greatly assist a person in growing their healthy self-love.  That can amazingly and significantly assists people in succeeding at all other types of love relationships.

How well couple’s love, family love, friendship love and a great many other kinds of love flourish or perish often depends on sufficient healthy self-love.  The greater one’s healthy self-love the less one tends to operate from fear, insecurity, jealousy, anger, deception and a host of other positions that tend to destroy love relationships.  Greater healthy self-love also results in the development of greater self-confidence, self-reliance, self-esteem, self-understanding, self-directed living, self-trust, self-assurance and self-sufficiency.  All those strongly tend to lead to greater success in all areas of life.  Therefore, I vigorously recommend developing a really good understanding of the major functions of love and what they accomplish when applied to healthy, self-love growth and improvement.

Self-Love and the Five Major Functions of Healthy Real Love

1.  Connection
    It is by love that we are best connected to one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we are best connected with our self.

2.  Nurturing
    It is by love that we best nurture the growth and well-being of each other.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best nurture the growth and well-being of our self.

3.  Protection
    It is by love that we protect and safeguard our loved ones.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we protect and safeguard our self.

4.  Healing
    It is by love that we strive to heal our loved ones when they become afflicted.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best strive to heal our self.

5.  Reward
    It is by love that we best take joy in one another and reward one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best take joy in and reward our self.
So, in these ways let us adhere to the ancient admonition – love others as you love yourself.

Rewards, Survival and Well-Being

Joy (part of the fifth function listed above) rewards and reinforces the actions that stem from the previous four functions.

Each of the functions of love works for our survival, well-being and improvement.  Therefore, our healthy self-love works for our individual survival, well-being and improvement.  This in turn works to keep us going and, therefore, can greatly aid us in acting on behalf of the survival, well-being and improvement of those we love.

Loveless Malfunction

Without love and the functions it provides we malfunction.  When we malfunction we deprive both our self and those we love of the benefits that flow from our love.  Think about each of the five functions not occurring.  When we are not well-connected with our self we tend to live in inner disharmony and often work against our self.  When we do not nurture our self we grow overly dependent on others and may psychosocially starve.  When we are not sufficiently self-protective we live increasingly in danger of being harmed.

When we do not sufficiently act to heal our self when afflicted psychologically and physically we promote our own dysfunction and demise.  When we do not sufficiently take in, digest and revel in the rewarding joys of love we do not reinforce the actions that stem from the first four functions of love and, thus, they go unrewarded.  Unrewarded behavior tends to diminish and disappear.  From the diminishment and cessation of love actions everyone may then suffer.

Greater Self-Love : Better Everything

The better one’s healthy self-love the better the five functions of love tend to operate keeping the self strong, healthy and, therefore, more able to love others.  The better one’s healthy self-love the better one can operate when other sources of love are not available.  The better one’s healthy self-love the more one is likely to attract strong, healthy love from strong, healthy others.  It is true that dependent, needy, weak people also may be attracted hoping that your love and strength will aid (save, rescue, fix and/or ‘adopt’) them.  So, out of love for others one may be healthfully assistive to the weak and needy but only if out of healthy self-love one avoids becoming depleted or enmeshed in a weakness-enabling dynamic.

Self-evaluation

Now, you might want to evaluate yourself.  Here are some questions to help.  Are you becoming appreciatively more knowledgeable of yourself and your many miraculous workings and, therefore, more healthfully inner-connected?  Are you good at nurturing yourself and, therefore, helping your further growth and development?  Are you sufficiently self-protective and safeguarding of your well-being?

When you are sick, or wounded or in any other way afflicted physically or emotionally do you act sufficiently for your own self-healing?  Are you joyous about yourself and the bundle of miracles that you are and, therefore, are self-rewarding enough?  Are you helping those you love and care about grow to where they can answer the above questions in the affirmative for themselves?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
When you were growing up how much were you perhaps taught to regard self-love as a bad thing to be avoided and if you were so taught does that teaching make you a weaker person today?  For help with this see the entry “Loving Others “as” You Love Yourself ???”.

Related posts:

1. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
2. Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away
3. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
4. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
5. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love … 

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?