Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers six important ways recent research in behavioral economics and the emotions of economic decisions have discovered, which can help people in love relationships be happier together.

About Happier Love

Is your love life getting happier?  By love we don’t just mean sex but that is definitely included.  We mean, are you doing love in such a way as it makes you and those you love smile, grin, laugh and have a sense of shared joy and, maybe once in a while, even have a sense of oceanic rapture together?  Whether you are a couple, a family or are really close, loving friends, you ‘together’ can learn and practice certain behaviors which researchers have discovered may assist us in growing happier as we go about love together.

1.  Savor more and more together!
Any good, joint experience is worth lingering in, so enjoy and share it longer and more fully.  So often we cut short our joy in order to get to the ‘next thing’.  Usually the ‘next thing’ could have waited a bit longer and wasn’t really that good, important or as necessary as you might have first thought.  Jointly sharing and, in essence, saturating yourselves longer in any positive experience likely will do you and your love relationship more good than whatever you are about to hurry on to.  Savoring any positive experience together can double your joy, strengthen your relationship and help you be more physically and mentally healthy.

Savoring basically is accomplished by purposely focusing longer on, and sort of soaking up, or emotionally digesting further the experience and it’s various elements.  Then for doing it more fully together, you can share what you focused on and the feelings that brought you.

2.  Be jointly open to flexibility!
Do you push to have the excellent date, set the just right scene, produce the most superb romantic dinner, create outstanding and incredible sex, have the finest time ever, give the perfect party or even just have a super clean house before company comes.  Well, doing all that often makes for way too much pressure, tension and stress for happiness to have much of a chance.  At best you may get a sense of pride and a sense of relief when it’s all over.

The more perfectionistic the goals and standards, and the more elaborate and picky the plans, the greater the likelihood of insufficient mental flexibility for shared elation to occur.  With flexibility and tolerational love, shared merrymaking has a much better opportunity to happen.  The ability to laugh together at various foul-ups, jointly appreciate odd occurrences, be united in humorous tolerance for deviations from the plan, and celebrate the unexpected as a loving team, the more you are likely to create great, happy memories and fine togetherness.

3.  Schedule fun including sexual fun frequently.
Most good and happy times occur because they were on somebody’s schedule to make happen.  Even if an experience seems spontaneous it is likely at least part of it was planned.  By its very nature, spontaneity can help provide some wonderful times together but it cannot be counted on to provide all the recreation (re– creation) fun love relationships need.

I suggest you abide by the principle that says ‘it won’t happen unless it’s given a time and it’s on your calendar’.  Enjoy whatever else comes along but don’t depend on it to fulfill your minimum, regular quotient of quality love experiences.  That requires scheduling.  Those who do this are found to have a lot more happy times, have greater experiences together and consistently grow their love better than those who don’t.  By the way, shared experiences usually bring more happiness than most acquired objects.

4.  Grow your mindfulness sharing.
Mindfulness means focusing on what you are experiencing right now, in thought and feeling.  It also means not letting your focus switch to anything in or from the past, the future or anywhere besides the ‘here and now’.  Mindfulness sharing means doing the same thing but sharing your ‘here and now’ awareness with someone you love.  It can involve verbally expressing the thoughts and feelings you are having right now about and with each other.  That works especially well if the mindfulness has to do with appreciation and affirmation.

Sharing mindfulness also can be done nonverbally with the expressional communications of touch, lovingly looking into each other’s eyes, facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures and posture changes, and just being physically close while experiencing emotional connectedness as you experience what is happening around you.  Think of standing together holding hands and feeling awe together as you both look at a truly awesome sunset, over and equally awesome land or seascape.

Now if for example, you are there but your mind has wandered off to some issue at work, checking your e-mails, or worrying that you didn’t lock the door back home, you have lost a “precious now” and are no longer receiving and sharing the “present” of the present.  Love’s intimacy, closeness and bonding will all be less.  When that happens I suggest you practice ‘mind yanking’ back to the ‘existential now’ and lose yourself in it together.

5.  Go for shared, serene joy as much, or more, as you go for jubilant excitement!
Shared calm serenity, simple easy-going non-demand comfort, quiet awesomeness, and the grand mystical togetherness feelings of deep, joyful love often bring much greater happiness than momentary ecstasy, or the highs of adrenaline-filled adventure.  Relaxed, peaceful, ongoing joy and happiness often is the best of love, although elation surprises and experiences also can be great.  Go for both.

6.  Enjoy emotional intercourse every day you can!
Emotional intercourse happens when you empathetically feel whatever a loved one is feeling emotionally, and they know or sense you are feeling something very similar to what they are feeling.  It can happen mildly to moderately, or in wonderfully strong and powerful ways.  If you ever feel like you really are inside each other, or you have melded together, or in ecstasy you exploded together and have become one with the universe, you have experienced great, emotional intercourse.

If you feel comforted and safe, pleasantly but deeply with, peacefully connected and just right with someone you love, you may be having the very excellent, more moderate form of emotional intercourse.  And if you have moments where you just are showing and feeling care for someone and they for you, that might be one of the milder, emotional intercourse experiences occurring.  There is great individual difference in these, but they all are very good.

To have emotional intercourse, focus on your loved one and what is going on in their heart and gut as much, or more than what is coming from their mind.  Enjoy their enjoyment.  Then center yourself in care or loving appreciation.  Do this especially when they are happy, or up, about something as well as when they are down.  In happy experiences be sure all your attention does not go outwardly to the experience and what is happening there, but also that some of you attention, or a lot of it, goes to the one you love and sharing the joy, or whatever feeling they are having.

At the same time share your own concurrent emotional experiences.  Then keep going back and forth in the sharing of feelings with them, responding with your thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings.  Notice and share each emotion you are having when your loved one relates an emotion they are having.  This back and forth sharing of emotions of both of you, especially the happy ones, is the emotional intercourse that jointly grows happy love. (See the mini-love-lesson “Emotional Intercourse”).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of the idea of becoming ‘a happy love farmer’?

Related posts:

1. Other Ways to Say I Love You
2. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
3. Emotional Intercourse
4. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

Limbic Love & Why You Will Do Well to Know about It

Mini-love-lesson #184

Synopsis: What your limbic system is and how it is important to your life of love and love relationships; what makes it unhealthy and how you can do three important things to make it healthier and in return get a healthier and more successful life of love is quickly covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Limbic Love: Love and Your Limbic System

Do you know that your psychological heart lives mostly in the limbic system of your brain?  Furthermore, your success at love may depend on the health of your limbic system.  Your limbic system is a big part of your deeper brain that processes love and guides your ways of doing love relationships.  It also gives you your higher more positive emotions, your ability to play and experience joy, plus much of what you do in all types of human interaction.  It sits under your conscious thinking brain, or cerebral cortex, and largely above your ancient brain.  Your ancient brain is the one which handles basic, physical functioning, simple and mostly negative emotions and rudimentary, impulsive and automatic behaviors. Thus our subject, “limbic love”.

Increasingly scientists suspect that the limbic system is one of the most important parts of our brain.  That is because it processes, motivates and guides our connections with others and pushes us toward cooperative advancements and improvements in of all kinds in all areas of life.  It is our limbic system that guides us toward who and what to get interested in, connect with, enjoy and get involved with more deeply.  It also processes our love of spouse, children, family, good friends, pets and our relationship with ourselves.  It helps us feel connected and belonging, feel compassion, intimacy, altruism and empathy –  all of which are involved in not only our cooperative survival but also in our team efforts toward mutual improvements, curiosity-based discovery and achievement.

In science, increasingly our limbic system and its love processing is suspected of being the primary reason mammals advanced and became ascendant, surpassing so many other other types of life.  Although the avian species also demonstrate love behaviors as did their ancestors the dinosaurs 200 million years ago; and many species have limbic systems.

What Makes Our Limbic System Unhealthy?

We are just beginning to learn about our limbic system’s health and what influences it.  We have learned that our psychological way of going about life can have a strong influence on the physical functioning, biological operation and neurochemistry of everyone’s limbic system.  This in return influences our psychological way of going about life.  This can create a deterioration or ascension cycle strongly influencing our all over health.  Certainly genetics plays a role and in some people a really huge role.  There are those that are born with very unhealthy limbic system functioning which then causes severe emotional and mental illness.  Such illnesses are becoming increasingly treatable neurochemically and psychotherapeutically.

Love problems including inadequate love, the failings of false love, deeply painful love loss, non-love and overt anti-love training, covert subconscious anti-love programming and non-love life modeling especially in childhood but also in adolescence and adulthood, loneliness and isolation all are thought to have very negative effects on the health of a person’s limbic system.

Unhealthy influences on the limbic system also include a number of other factors.  Undue prolonged stress, physical and psychological abuse, psychological trauma, chemical and some behavioral addictions, physical injuries to the limbic system, prolonged severe insecurity, over-reliance on reason and/or focus on power acquirement, negativism and similar psychosocial things all are suspected of being unhealthful for the neurochemistry of our limbic system and its functioning.  That is according to growing research evidence and our current, science-based understanding.

How Can We Make Our Limbic System Healthier?

Probably the biggest way to help yourself have a healthy functioning limbic system has to do with purposely going after and succeeding in attaining healthy, real love relationships.  To accomplish such “limbic love”, following three things are strongly suggested.

1. (A) Study and learn all you can about how to productively think about love.  That includes how to identify real from false love, give and receive healthy real love, detox from anti-love influences, develop multiple types of love including healthy real self-love, spiritual love, altruistic love, and the knowledge of the behaviors that demonstrate, healthfully give, create and grow love.

(B) As part of your love learning process, behaviorally experiment with using what you’ve been learning.  As you learn more, work to hone your love skills and your enjoyment in using them.  Celebrate your victories and learn from your failures realizing that love failures are best used as learning opportunities and are part of the natural love process.  Then practice, practice, practice with actual actions always.

2. As part of your healthy, real self-love, develop living via positivity.  Positivity has to do with having a realistic, positive, appreciative mindset, mood and approach to most of life and everyone in it.  All sorts of research including brain chemistry and body health studies show that the more realistically positive and real love oriented people are more the real winners in life, health and most everything else.  Negative and neutral just does not pay off in health and happiness, in most interactions with others and especially not in love relationships.  You might want to Google Positive Psychology, read Positivity by Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson and Dr. Victor Frankel’s famous work Man’s Search for Meaning which tells how positivity saved lives even in a Nazi death camp.

3. Actively reach out to others for social connection and purposely go after building your love network with some of the people you meet when you reach out.  Don’t put all your love eggs in the lover, spouse, marriage love basket.  All kinds of love can give healthy, enriching life to your existence.  But, of course, love with a love mate or partner can be very important, and so can parent/child, family and deep friendship loves.  Be sure that at least some of your love efforts are altruistic which, by the way, is turning out to be a biologic, limbic system, natural, love drive born within us.  Positive connections with others are proving to be essential for limbic system health.  Healthy, real love connections are the most healthful.  Living like a hermit can be a prescription for love starvation.

Living healthfully physically by way of healthful exercise, healthy diet, healthy environment, healthful behaviors and good healthcare also are quite important for having a healthy limbic system.  Taking care of those factors can be seen as important ways for you to do healthy self-love as well as ways to assist your loved ones to live healthfully and happily (see  Self-love – What Is It, Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions and Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love).

So, help your limbic system function healthfully and the likelihood is it will help your love life to be more fully successful, happier and more fulfilled.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who are you going to talk over this mini-love-lesson with because doing that helps you to better accomplish number 1. (A) above?

Related posts:

1. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
2. Living Well via Loving Well
3. Self-Love – What Is It?
4. Unselfish Self-Love
5. Loneliness and Love 

For Failing Love: Avoid, or Convert, or Escape?

Mini-Love-Lesson #191

Synopsis: Briefly introduced here are three approaches for dealing with the enormously destructive issue of failing love and how to choose and then get started on each.

Three Strategies for a Huge Problem

Love relationships that fail are a monumentally tragic life-harming and life-destroying problem for countless millions all over the world!  Agonizing breakups, anxiety filled separations, divorce resulting depression, loveless ongoing mutual-misery marriages, addiction relapses, relationship suicides and murders, wounded children, relational related abuse, loneliness, empty life problems and much more – all common outcomes of failing love.
What to do about failing love baffles and confounds so many people.  Perhaps you are one of them or someone dear to you struggles with this issue.

To help cut through the enormous confusion about failing love here are three basic strategies or approaches known to help people think more clearly to get past failing love and then go on to successful, healthy love.

Avoid

If you are not now in a heart–mate type love relationship, or if you think you are in love and do not want it to turn into a failing love, or if you have couple troubles and do not wish to go further into failure here are some things you can do.  Learn to identify and avoid what leads into failure.  Do not just study what goes wrong but discover what leads up to and precedes failure.  You can do this both in small-scale and large-scale ways as well as for short-term and long-term patterns and situations.  Do not forget to look at your own preceding contributions to triggering or causing failure events.  Major love failures are often built out of a series of mini-love-failures which possibly could have been avoided.

I am biased but I heartily recommend you and your loved ones study the dozen, big, false love patterns found in our book, Real Love False Love , so you can be sure to avoid them.  As you are right now, you can keep studying the free mini-love-lessons that have to do with identifying and avoiding the traps and tragedies of love gone wrong found at this site.  We especially recommend working on identifying and avoiding anti-love, pseudo-love and non-love communications and behaviors.

Who to avoid and why also is an important area of study and learning that is an act of healthy self-love.  Sadly, some people subconsciously are programmed to be attracted to, and to fall in false love with only those who will hurt, harm and destroy them.  Sharpening your own personal love knowledge of who you might be vulnerable to and how to avoid dangerous, self-sabotaging situations can be love-protective and life-protective.  Lots of people get into bad-for-them relationships and have repeating love failures because they don’t do this.

Probably most major love failures, traps and tragedies could have been and can be avoided by those who learn how to identify and avoid.  So work on your failure avoidance skills and free yourself to go on to the wonders, marvels and happiness of healthy, real and successful love.

Convert

A great many people in failing love relationships find they can convert failure to success if they work at it in the right ways, hard enough and long enough.  Sadly, a great many other people do not do this.  That also is true for every type of love relationship: parent, child, friend, family, comrade, self, etc. –  all forms of love can improve with work.  By way of recent really good research, we finally are learning what truly works to make love success.  You can learn that too, and you are started or are progressing on that love learning path right now because you are reading this.

The feedback we get tells us many of our mini-love-lessons have helped a large number of individuals, couples, families and others convert failing love to successful love.  Also, I am proud to say our book, Recovering Love,  is about converting failing love to successful love and for years has been helping couples, and also especially couples facing addiction issues.  Furthermore, the third major section of Real Love False Love contains some powerful how to’s for converting false love to real love.

Lots of other books, classes, retreats, workshops, couple’s counseling groups, and support groups, couple’s counselors and family therapists are very beneficial in helping people discover what it takes to convert failing love to successful love.  Consider availing yourself of any and all of that.
Lots of people give up too soon or they just do not go about the work of learning and practicing what works for healthy, real, love relating.

Ovid, the great Roman poet and teacher of love, in the year 01 taught two things that apply here.  First “if you would be loved – be lovable” and second “lasting love requires skill”.  So, if you would convert love failure to love success, get busy developing your love skills and do not ever quit.

Escape

If you are in a failing love relationship that keeps failing in spite of you and your spouse’s or heart mate’s best efforts over time, if the relationship is physically and/or psychologically increasingly debilitating and/or dangerous and destructive, healthy self-love demands that you consider escaping.  Trying endlessly in a deteriorating, destructive situation probably will just harm or destroy you, wound kids if they are involved, hurt or harm some others and likely enable your spouse’s dysfunction and decline.

Escape allows recovery and repair, followed by doing yourself and others more good than if you had remained in a destructive trap.  You might even go back to him or her some day, but don’t unless you and hopefully your ex are far stronger and more powerfully love skilled.

Escaping a failing love relationship almost always is hard, painful conflicted and confusing but, if it means survival and not wasting your life, it could be the only healthy thing to do.  It also often can be the only way to help children, family, friends and even the other person in the relationship.

At this site, there is lots of totally free information that can help in making a healthful for all concerned escape.  Furthermore, in the last third of Real Love False Love there is a very helpful, strong section on healthful escape.

After escape from a destructive and failing love relationship, you may do best to engage in a lot of healthy, self-love, recovery work.  Do not just stay wounded forever like some do.  We humans are meant to heal and go on to more and better living.  After escape, study how to avoid love failures in the future.  If you escape from a seriously failing love relationship do you really want to go through getting into another similar situation from which you need to escape again?

I hope you will go on to a love-successful life enriched by all that love can bring.  So, do your homework, study love and make that more likely.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Exactly what will you do next for learning more about how to avoid failing love, convert failing love to successful love, or escape toxic, destructive, failing and false love?

Related posts:

1. Can Love Overcome Incompatibility?
2. Destroyers of Love – the 7 Big D’s Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships
3. Heartbreak Mending and The Deep, Multi-Love Remedy
4. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
5. Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines

Critiquing without Criticizing

Synopsis: This mini love lesson presents attracting or repulsing speech; critiquing and criticizing differences; headed toward bonding or breaking up; and what’s coming at you.

Attracting or Repulsing Speech

Which of these statements will you be more likely to make to a loved one:

1. “That was really dumb of you.  How could you have been so stupid?  You never learn do you!  If you just weren’t such an idiot.”
Or 2. “I could’ve made that same mistake.  That just proves were both human and we don’t always get it right.  Do you want to figure out how to fix it on your own?  Or, do you want some help?  By the way we can use this slip-up to learn from so we can avoid this problem in the future.”

The first statement ‘puts down’ both of you psychologically and the speaker probably creates emotional distancing and probably projects a sense of the listener being alone with the problem.  In the second statement the speaker emotionally works to join with listener and to avoid giving a put down message, yet acknowledges a mistake has been made and a want to fix it. You might want to examine which of those two statements is closer to how you learned to talk growing up.  You also might want to think about the people in your life who talk more like the first statement and those who talk more like the second and what influences they might have had.

Here are a couple more statements to examine:

1. “Let’s look at what’s best and worst about what you just did.  Then let’s look at how to improve it.”
Or 2. What you just did is all crap!  There are so many things wrong with it I’m not even going to bother trying to tell you how to correct it.”

Which of these two statements would you rather receive?  Which would be more typical of the way you communicate, especially to loved ones?  The first statement has to do with the speaker and the listener together critiquing something that was done.  By acknowledging that what was done has both ‘a best’ and ‘a worst’ it offers what can be regarded as a critique instead of a criticism.

Critique and Criticism Differences

Criticism is a word with a connotation of tearing down self-concept, personally attacking, searching for and pointing out what’s wrong, and paying no attention to what might be right.  Modern dictionaries now define criticism as fault-finding, disapproving, and unfavorably evaluating.  Criticism at one time just meant analyzing with knowledge.  In some circles that definition still holds true.  Relationally ‘connotation’ often is more important than definition.

Critiquing means to examine with a view to determining something’s nature and qualities. A critique used to be defined as an act of criticism.  However, critique is coming to have the connotation of giving a balanced evaluation without likelihood of emotional dissonance.  Of course, some people can take anything badly and feel wronged by the statement, no matter what.  This is where saying things with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions and gestures usually helps to carry a connotation of critique instead of criticism.

Critiquing is evaluating with knowledge, hopefully without the negatives of criticism.  It’s not enough just to change your style from criticizing to critiquing, you also need to make an attitudinal change from blame to one that can be a benefit to both people in a love relationship (this includes to children, family, friends and other love relationships).

Heading toward Bonding Or Breaking up?

Being demeaning with putdowns, complaints, fault-finding, derogatory remarks, etc. is increasingly taken to mean a person is criticizing.  This is the number two reason for couple’s breakups (the number one reason is insufficiently loving) according to some research.  Criticism helps love relationships break apart. Critiquing, as a rule, helps love relationships address issues in a balanced, positive way.

There are some exceptions. There are people who have grown up thinking all positive speech is sugar-coating and only negative, critical speech can be trusted.  There is a type of masochism in which a person feels very uncomfortable hearing anything positive.  Barring things like that, critiquing works a whole lot better with loved ones than does criticism.

If you find it a lot easier talking about what’s wrong rather than what’s right with someone you supposedly love, something may be amiss in your way of going about love.. It just can be that you grew up around people programming you to talk more negative than positive.  In any case, there’s a whole lot of research saying focusing on and talking about the positive more than the negative helps you stay physically and psychologically healthy and is good for love relationships.

What’s Coming at You?

Do you hear lots of criticism coming at you?  There are several possibilities about that. One is ‘you have been programmed to filter out the positive and only hear the negative’ and you possibly may give negative interpretations to neutral and positive statements coming your way.  Another is you are encountering  too many people who would rather talk about the ‘weeds’ rather than the ‘flowers’ in everybody’s psychological garden.

Both of these possibilities can be true.  Then there is the possibility that you are way too much of a noxious influence on others and, therefore, what’s coming at you is appropriate. That too can be fixed with the help of a good counselor or therapist.  If nothing negative ever comes at you suspect that you are surrounded by people who give ‘false positives’ or everybody’s too afraid of you to give you their truth.

If you hear more critical than critiquing talk, it may be time to change some things.  Ask yourself, are the people in your life more negative or positive?  Do some really love you and, if so, do they know how to love well?  Are you unknowingly rewarding them for criticizing you and, thus, reinforcing their tendencies to do criticism more than critique?  Is your interpretation system in need of improvement?   Are you really counting the positive things that are said to you, or are you discounting them, or even not really hearing them at all?  Most important, are you figuring out what to do about these things?

If you let criticism come your way more than critiquing, it can do you and your love relationships a lot of harm.  Are you going to help your loved ones who criticize a bit too much change to a more critiquing style?  With some work, anyone can make critiquing with love a most effective and rewarding love skill.  You might want to read related topics at this site in the Subject Index under the Communication heading: “Communicating Better with Love”, “Love Complaints versus Love Requests”, “Love Positive Talking” and others.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Which are you better at saying to yourself and others: putdowns or praises, compliments or complaints, criticizing or congratulating?

Love Is a Performance Art

Mini-Love-Lesson  #257

Synopsis:  Addressing love as the performance of an art; feelings guided love; is love now learnable?;  what’s to learn; and a comprehensive yet clear and simplified look at the major behaviors of love in only three categories and 12 kinds of action – all are explored here.

Loving Your Art of Love

Some say they truly and dearly love dance.  Others that it is just in them to act and that they love their life in the theater.  Still others insist that they love music and especially performing, and it is just something they feel they cannot live without doing.  Let us suppose that what they say is true.  Now there arises some questions.  Will strong feelings be enough for attaining a degree of competence?  Will it perhaps take strong feelings plus talent to do well at their art?  If someone wants to get good or better at their art, what must they do besides have strong feelings and some talent?

One answer to that question comes from research that concluded they must put in 10,000 hours of learning, practicing and performing.  If they want to be really good, maybe more.  However, if they are unusually talented maybe it will only take 7000 hours.

Why should it be any different for love?  The art of love or loving is a phrase and a title that repeatedly shows up in many of the writings of the great sages, wisdom masters and great students of love down through the ages.  So many emphasize the doing of love and not just the feelings of love.  Even many of the luminaries of love understanding who do not use the phrase "art of love" emphasize the work of doing love as being necessary to succeed at love.

At the feelings level, one’s love of an art motivates involvement in that art.  However, feelings are never enough.  Continuous learning, practicing, experimenting for improvement and a host of other doing it things must be added to be able to do one's art well.

So it is with love.  Yes, love feelings come naturally but mounting evidence shows that good love relating takes learning, practicing, perfecting and performing the actions that send and receive love.  If you want to do love well with a heart-mate, a child, a family member, a friend, with yourself, your deity or anything else, it probably will take learning, studying, practicing and performing the behaviors that "do" love.

A good number of spiritual leaders, philosophers, savants, etc. down through the ages have tried to teach that love is not love at all without the doing.  And now in addition come  results  from a sizable number of social and behavioral scientists doing studies in a wide variety of fields, along with the work of some brain scientists and a considerable number of practitioners of couples counseling, family therapy, and other forms of relational therapy – some who do some pretty good research themselves.  Those results pretty much agree that if you work at a love relationship learning, and practicing the identified successful behaviors of love, you can do it remarkably better.  Even the animal psychologists have data showing much the same thing in primates and several other species.  Higher-order animals that do not learn and practice the showing and receiving behaviors of love almost invariably fail at their relationships with others and become isolates or outcasts among their own kind.

What About Love Guided by Feelings Only?

Lots of people do their love life guided mainly only by their feelings.  They seem to have bought into the romantic myth that love is automatic, and it is all a matter of nature and feelings and perhaps fate or luck or something like that.  Therefore, for many of them, love is cognitively unknowable and unlearnable and they often think feelings will provide all the guidance needed.  Many also believe that trying to learn love will just get in the way.

The success rate of people who do love by those ideas is not encouraging.  That is especially true when compared to the record of people who live by the you have to work at it approach to love.  If you grew up in a highly, healthfully, loving family, you may have subconsciously learned quite a lot about doing love well, and have a pretty good chance of doing so.  If you were not lucky enough to grow up in such a family, purposefully learning and getting good at the "how too’s" of love gives you your best chance.  Remember, about 50% of many Western world countries’ marriages end in divorce, and it is thought that another 25% could be doing far better than they are.  There are similar results for parent-child relationships, family relationships, friendships which do somewhat better and then there is healthy self-love relating for which the results are not good either, except for those who work it (see “Is Love Ignorance The Problem?”).

Do We Know Enough About Love to Make It Learnable?

If love was so unknowable, why did St. Paul write so much about what is love and what is not love?  Why did Ovid in the year one write about how to make love lasting, and Buddha kept emphasizing living by love’s Four Immeasurable Mindsets, Aristotle taught the ways of love have to do with compassion, virtue, affection and kindness, Rumi spend his life writing poetry about love and its ways?  And in more modern times, why did such widely diverse leaders of modern thought such as Eric Fromme, Soren Kierkegaard, Harry Harlow and Thich Nhat Hahn work so hard to discover and teach the ways of doing love?

Not long ago in Russia it was decided that we finally know so much about love that the field of loveology was officially certified as a legitimate field of study in which you could get undergraduate and graduate degrees (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology?”).  In Europe, the US and several South American countries, graduate-level institutes are sponsoring "love studies" in a wide array of fields ranging from anthropology to zoology.  Especially in the brain sciences there are research projects going on investigating brain processes and love.  Already a great deal has been discovered which has opened the door to many new questions and avenues for further study never before explored or, in some cases, never before even thought about.
So, the answer is yes; we know more than enough about love to make it learnable though there is yet so much more to learn.

What Must Be Learned About Love?

From a psychological point of view, there are three, big, integrated areas that are to be focused on.  Those three areas are: #1) to be able to do constructive thinking about love, #2) to be able to have healthy awareness of love’s many emotions and how they usefully inform us, and #3) to have knowledge of and practice, i.e. do, the major behaviors that accomplish love.  Number three is the one that has to do with the performance Art of love and, for our purposes here, is the most important one.  However, let us first briefly touch into the feelings or emotional aspects of love and then the thinking aspect.

Right now, can you quietly and internally search deep into your psychological heart and sense your loving feelings toward someone you have love for?  If so, what are those feelings like right now?  Are they tender, powerful, uplifting, sad, protective, nurturing, heavy, light, or what?  If they have a message, can you hear what that message is?

It is OK if nothing comes right now, it may come later.  That is a sort of exercise that uses mindfulness for tapping into the love you have for someone and the feelings that come from that love.  Love is not a feeling but it gives us feelings of many types including loving, loved and lovable, along with a great many others.  It shows how the love within you might be usefully available and purposefully accessed.

Let's take a quick glance at thinking about love.  Try focusing on the thought that love can be done by you as a wonderful performance art that you are going to greatly enjoy learning about and participating in.  Think how developing that mindset might lead you into some greatly enriching experiences.

Now, for the performance part – the most important part for our purposes here and the part I suggest you focus  most on.  It is the actions or behaviors of love that accomplish the most.  It is what you do or perform that fulfills the five major functions of love (see “A Functional Definition of Love” ). Like any performance art, it is the actual performing of the behaviors of the art that are the art.
To help you with that, here is my favorite simplified outline of the major behaviors of love to learn about, and start practicing and working to improve.

THE MAJOR BEHAVIORS OF LOVE

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Love can be understood to be accomplished at three levels, each of which have four major components.  They are as follows:

I.   Basic Core Love Actions

1. Tactile Love
Touch love is the first and most basic way of giving and receiving love.  One can endlessly learn new and better ways to touch with love.

2. Expressional Love 
Facial expressions, gestures, posture changes, voice modulations, proximity shifts, etc. can, and do, send love messages often far better and more powerfully than words.  They also have infinite variations.

3. Verbal Love
Artfully delivered words of love sometimes can be the most meaningful and most magnificent way to deliver love’s most impactful communications.  Work with words of love for depth, height and breadth of love expression and more lasting effect.

4. Gifting Love
One can give objects, experiences and favors significantly showing love.  All three can be of enormous importance and made special by personal variation and design.

II. Higher Functioning Love Actions

5. Affirmational Love

Love behaviors and words that affirm the high value and importance of the loved.  These often are essential for building up, strengthening and actively appreciating the loved.  Thus, they often bringing out the best in a loved one.

6. Self-disclosure Love
Often essential for deep core connecting, growing closeness and creating intimacy.  This involves the self revealing of personal thoughts, feelings (both physical and emotional), behaviors history, hopes, fears, failures and successes and everything personal and private.

7. Tolerational Love
Tolerating the less pleasant and sometimes harder to accept aspects of the loved but not to the point of harm, or self-destruction, or enabling a loved one's self harm or self-destruction.

8. Receptional Love
Acting to lovingly, appreciatively and positively receive acts and words showing love and positiveness toward you.  This is essential for love cycling in ongoing relationships, growing love mutually and a sense of bonded connectedness.

III. Cardinal Love Actions

9. Connecting Love
Actions that cause and promote heartfelt connection feelings with the loved, including bonding behaviors and experiences, feelings of having ongoing unity, deep attachment, strong allegiance and loyalty with one or more networked loved ones.

10. Nurturing Love
An interacting group of behaviors that act to promote, aid, assist, motivate and reward (A) the healthful growth, positive development and constructive advancement, (B) the maintenance and sustaining of ongoing well-being, and when needed the repair, restoration and healing of the loved.

11. Protective Love
Any and all behaviors that aim to safeguard, defendant or, if needed, rescue the loved from harm, reduced well-being, useless hurt and destructive occurrences while also aiming to not be overprotective and, thus, block growth for improvement and strengthening.

12. Metaphysical Love
All healthful actions that are done to spiritually, meditatively and/or metaphysically promote and support the well-being of the loved.

One More Thing:  There's a lot here you might want to enjoy talking over with others to help your own thoughts and understandings go further.  If you do that, please be so kind as to mention this site and our many mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love.

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If you are not happily hungry to learn about love a lot, are you maybe condemned to only learn from your love mistakes – or not at all?