Co-Connecting -- An Essential Love Team Skill

Mini-Love-Lesson #225

Synopsis:  Introduce yourself to love teams and love’s teamwork; co-connecting with love for love relationships that really work; love advancement via co-connecting; and learning to see your circular system in this rich and enriching mini-love-lesson.

The Love Team Basic

For having a love relationship that really works, the people in the love relationship come to operate as a high functioning love team.  So, what do you know about being a good love team member?  Unfortunately the bad news is lots of people have not been trained to be a good team members of anything, let alone a love team.  The good news is you can learn and even enjoy the learning as you grow your love team skills.  Whether you are already good, or not, at love team skills, I suspect this mini-love-lesson is likely to help you get better.  So, here is a basic:

                Feeling Love Is Natural
Doing Love Takes Work – and –
Doing Love Together with Another Takes Teamwork

We do not learn and do teamwork by ourselves.  Love’s teamwork is learned and done jointly.  It takes some learning new ways, some unlearning old ways and lots of practicing better ways.  All sorts of jointly learning and jointly practicing better ways of loving in areas like communication, coordination, cooperation, compromising/synthesizing, companioning, concurring, concordant interacting, comradeship, conjoint pleasuring skills and play are involved.  One of the best things to learn for doing love’s teamwork well and better has to do with co-connecting.

Co-Connecting for a Love That Works

Connection is one of the five major functions of love link “A Functional Definition of Love”.  Co-connection skills are a major factor in what makes love become and keeps love being an ongoing, successful, relationship of love.  Without co-connection, love encounters and loving incidents can occur and exist for a while but they will not make a full-fledged, love relationship.  How often co-connection occurs and the quality of the co-connection has a lot to do with the strength and health of a love relationship.  People can feel love connected but unless they act in love’s co-connecting ways they are not likely to develop much of the full potential of a well-functioning and advancing love relationship.

What Is Co-Connecting with Love?

To understand co-connecting with love, think of two people doing a good job of lovingly hugging each other.  First they have to become aware of each other, then turn and move toward each other, then coordinate making their physical contact, followed by mindfully letting the feel of the hug mentally and emotionally soak in.  Then they might add some extra squeezing, caressing, fondling and other movements and maybe make some pleasurable sounds and comments as they savor the experience.  All those parts, or steps, go into two people co-connecting.  The steps are (1) focused awareness of each other, (2) emotionally and physically turning toward and moving toward each other, (3) emotionally making coordinated contact with each other, (4) mindfully and emotionally soaking up the feelings of that contact, then (5) adding embellishments and elaborations of the co-connection, and (6) savoring the love experience together.

If only one of the hugging people attempts to do these things and the other is limp, or stiff or in other ways nonresponsive, it does not work.  They are not two people co-connecting in joint, love action teamwork.

Now, think of a baby and its mother.  The mother holds the baby and the baby looks up and smiles maybe making a happy sound or wiggle which the mother sees and feels good with, and then she smiles back bigger at the infant, and then the infant does the same.  Love’s natural co-connecting is occurring.  In the brains of both the baby and mom, hormones are being released that facilitate love bonding and feeling good together.  Sadly there are some rare brain disorders and psychiatric conditions which make some moms and some babies unable to accomplish this co-connecting.  Also there are those that go through the overt touching and holding actions but it is not genuine and the brain does not make the chemicals that process the bonding or the good feelings.

Love’s co-connecting only happens when two or more are rather simultaneously giving and receiving each other’s love via the acts that convey love.  They, in effect, are cycling love and in the process generating more love.

With practice and artistry as a unified team, we can come to send and receive love actions in a wonderful co-functioning and co-connecting manner.  This is somewhat comparable to dancing the tango.  Each person moves with strong individuality but in harmonious, highly coordinated wholeness.  Either person making the same movements alone might be interesting but not as magnificent and amazing as the two harmoniously together.  The movements of the tango are revealing and representative of interacting with intimate passions and often the interconnecting emotions of a deeply felt, concurrent, co-connecting love relationship.  Both the tango and co-connecting via love can be erotically beautiful to behold and even better to participate in.

Co-Connecting For Love Advancement

We call it co-connecting, not just connecting, for a good reason. This is because in some love relationships only one person, or animal, is enacting the behaviors that bring about the sense of being love connected.  Co-connecting love is accomplished by two or more in a systemic, coordinated, interacting teamwork.  Together they form a joint system with various, repeated, behavioral patterns for giving, receiving, creating, using and enjoying love together.  Think of both a dance company and an American football team.  They both have people doing sometimes different and sometimes similar things individually but with interweaving patterns of behavior.  These patterns, when well executed, advance the cause and reason for the existence of both groups.  Likewise, it is with those in love who co-connect well.  (This also is true of many counselors and therapists and whether or not they become good at couple, family or conjoint therapy.)

Now, there is a problem.  Most people are not well-trained at seeing interaction patterns or all-over systemic functioning.  It is hard enough to understand the patterns of one person’s behavior let alone two, as in a couple, or more than two as in a family.  Many people who, for the first time, attend a modern dance troupe performance or a football game just see a lot of individuals moving around in peculiar ways.  They do not see the rhyme or reason, that is the patterns and systems forming and reforming, nor do they see the artful, and often beautiful and even astounding accomplishments of perfected teamwork going on before their eyes.  For first-timers, they may only see chaos and have no idea why at various times other watchers are clapping or cheering wildly.  When there is good, love-based, co-connection teamwork in couples, families, close friendships and comrade networks, similar amazing advancements and accomplishments can be achieved.  For people in a love relationship to make these advancements, it helps to see the larger picture of interaction patterns and the even bigger systems governing what is happening.     

If you only see individuals and never their interrelationship system, you may never see your own system and how it influences your own conjoint behavior.  It is extremely useful to see how you yourself and those you love behave in both healthy and unhealthy, circular patterns of interacting.  It also is quite difficult, especially at first.  But if you can learn to see your joint patterns and systems, you also can discover all sorts of ways to make life advancements, not to mention experiencing the joys they provide.  Here, we have space only to introduce you to this concept of systemic relating and how it is confluent with teamwork love and co-connecting love.  We encourage you to think with these concepts, apply them to your own life and see what you come up with.

One more thing, see what happens when you talk these ideas over with others, and while you are at it, we will thank you for mentioning this site to others so they also might have a bit more to do with and about love in their life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

A Quotable Question about Love
Do not all love connections involve risk and, therefore, require at least some courage? (So, are you and yours – love courageous?)