Climate Change and More Love Problems for Everyone

Mini-Love-Lesson  #255

Synopsis: How worsening weather is and will likely seriously impact all love relationships, even good ones; getting ready for it and what we can do is a bit frighteningly but succinctly well covered here.

ALL Love Relationships To Be Impacted!

The harmful consequences of worsening weather on love relationships of all types have already begun and it is going to get worse.  The research is predicting couples, families (large and small, nuclear and extended), parents and offspring of all ages, siblings, friendships of all depths, comrades in service, even our love relationships with our pets and ourselves are headed toward the damaging stressors of extreme weather.

It is not just the monster floods, destructive hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards and firestorms but it also is the rising temperatures and humidity, shrinking water sources, droughts, bug infestations and spreading tropical diseases that will plague us.  It is the psychological effects of trying to cope with all the above.  Higher rates of depression and anxiety conditions are expected.  Furthermore, as temperatures get uncomfortably high many people become more irritable, aggravated and aggravating, fatigued, slow, dispirited, inefficient and uncooperative.  All that is expected to have a negative impact on love relationships around the world (see “Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips”).

Especially hard hit may be parent/child love relationships, adolescent/adult relationships and already stressed and troubled heart-mate relationships.  Care-givers for disabled, injured and aged loved ones are likely to become more stressed and less attentive.  Couple and family violence episodes are thought likely to increase.

It’s Started – It’s Now – It’s Spreading!

Recent studies published by the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) show rising temperatures and the increasing rate of threatening, catastrophic weather events are associated with rising stress and serious related mental, emotional and behavioral health problems.  Those, in turn, cause more stress reactions and stress illnesses like strokes and heart attacks to occur.  Evidence suggests that as stress increases, people in every type of love relationship act with love less often and with less well expressed love.

It seems that as people have to cope with more and more stressors and heightened stress feelings they tend to show love less frequently and less ably.  As the behaviors which show and deliver love occur less, love relationship problems become much more likely to occur.  Fights, violence, break-ups, relapses, co-parenting conflicts, spouse abuse and even spousal murder and suicide are all expected to rise as love relationship functioning sinks with worsening weather stressors (see “Anger and Love”). Wherever weather is at its worst, these trends are already beginning to be documented by the UN, WHO, NAS, US-CDC and various university research projects.  The existence and spreading of worsening weather is being documented by every major, national weather bureau around the world.

Still Very Good but Less Good

Lots of love relationships that are very good will stay good but not as good.  The time and energy that would have been spent on loving interactions, restorative serenity, playfulness, sex, sharing fun projects, little intimacies, etc. may be spent on getting over heat exhaustion, hydration needs, fatigue recovery and preparing or coping with weather related stressors.  Love works both like a food and a medicine.  With worsening weather, everybody may get less of the medicine and the nourishment love provides.

Are You Ready for Greater Love Needs?

As the weather related stress on love relationships grows, the need for actions that skillfully show and give love also will need to grow.  Love that delivers aid, support, tolerance, acceptance, rescue, and forgiveness challenges us to both rebound and re-bond and will be crucial to relational survival.

Ovid, in the year one, told us that skill is required for love to be lasting.  This is especially true when the pressure, tension and stress are mounting and spirits are drained.  Will your love getting and giving skills be able to meet the challenge?  Ovid might ask “are you practicing and honing your love skills” for they will be needed?

What We Can Do!

I suggest consider working with the following five, simple, action ideas.

1. Love feelings come naturally.  Love relating is learned and must be practiced, honed and skillfully developed.  The more you learn and practice the how-to’s of giving and getting healthy, real love the more you will be prepared to weather the storm of extreme weather and it’s impact on your love relationships (see “Behaviors That Give Love: The Basic Core Four”).

2. See if you can get others in your love network of friends and family to do the same learning and practicing of giving the behaviors that can skillfully send love when others may need it.

3. Love your planet by lobbying your politicians and community leaders to work for weather improving practices to become standard and/or mandatory. Support, campaign and vote for those who help and not those who hinder and harm nature.

4. Perhaps join or form support and activist groups who work for cooperative, love-based solutions to both relationship and ecological challenges.

5. Don’t waste time and energy fighting directly with head-in-the-sand eco-ostriches.  Worsening weather eventually will convert them, or worse.  Instead, work for the changes that can make things better and with those who are doing the same.

One More Thing

You might enjoy talking over what you have just read with one or more others.  If you do that, we very much would like it if you mentioned this site and its many mini-love-lessons.  Thank you.


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


Quotable Question: Which is the safer gamble, to go with the scientists and doing all we can to ameliorate climate change or to go with the deniers and not do anything at all?