Love Life 101: Resource Book of Love Life Problems and Solutions

By Thomas Jordan, PhD

Dr. Thomas Jordan, New York City psychologist and psychoanalyst, created the LoveLifeLearningCenter.com in 2012 as an online “love life library” for serious-minded lovers to find the information they need to identify and solve love life problems. In an effort to expand the reach of this directory of love life problems and solutions, Dr. Jordan compiled the various blog posts written since the blog’s inception into this easy to reference e-book. This love life directory is organized into chapters that allow a reader to find specific love life problems and practical solutions and discussions, ranging from commitment issues, to managing love when it feels good and when it hurts, to how kids can complicate a love life, the various love life hang-ups, to being alone, making love life improvements, to dealing with the pains of loss, and much more in between. Dr. Jordan knows, confirmed by years of clinical research and treatment, that the health and success of your love life is determined by what you’ve learned about love relationships in your life. This e-book and the blog that inspired it are a way of revising, updating, and expanding what you’ve learned about love relationships to maximize your chances of having a healthy and successful love life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Jordan, PhD
• Release date: May 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370949229

Thomas Jordan, PhD

Dr. Thomas Jordan is a clinical psychologist and interpersonal psychoanalyst. He is a graduate and faculty member of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, cofounder of the LoveLifeLearningCenter.com, and author of the “Healthy Love Relationship,” “Love Life 101: Resource Book of Love Life Problems & Solutions,” and “Individuation in Contemporary Psychoanalysis.” Tom specializes in the treatment of emotional illness caused by unhealthy relationships, depression, anxiety disorders, and adult love life problems. He maintains a private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York City. Dr. Jordan has been researching and treating unhealthy love lives for 30 years.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The LoveLifeLearningCenter.com was officially online in 2012. Since then I have written approximately two hundred and thirty articles on that blog in the hopes that the information in them would be useful to people struggling with love life problems. This book Love Life 101 is a compilation of my blog articles organized under various love life related categories for easy reference. Readers who are experiencing a particular love life problem can reference their concern in the Table of Contents and find the information they need to help them understand the problem along with the information that will strengthen their ability to solve their particular love life problem.

The LoveLifeLearningCenter.com was conceived as an online library of sorts where practical, realistic, and accurate love life information could be easily stored and found. There is so much inaccurate, distorted, and not very useful information available in print and online on the topic of love relationships that it is imperative that a more reliably useful reference of information be made available to the public. Part of the difficulty involves the attitudes and biases writers often display in the love life related literature. Most people view the wisdom they have collected about love life issues in general as intuitive informed only by their love life experiences and the reported love life experiences of others. The problem here is that love life problems too often repeat themselves in a person’s interpersonal relationships without resolution over time. Limited and in some instances psychologically troubled love life experiences are taken as the norm when describing and/or recommending love life development or solutions to others.

My perspective, illustrated in the writings within these pages, is derived from years of clinical research as a clinical psychologist and interpersonal psychoanalyst in New York City. Since the late 1980’s I have been preoccupied with the visible need for effective information, guidance, education, and in some instances, treatment of recurrent love life problems. Simply put, many or most people, sometimes depending on how you look at it, are struggling with love life related problems. In my consultation room, on a predictably regular basis, love life problems are often presented as the cause of emotional and sometimes physical illness. I know this may sound like a pretty bold claim to many of my readers, nevertheless, my research over the past 30 years has confirmed the fundamental truth in this claim.

The only way I can explain it is to think about the understated value of love in our lives. Yes, we are often told of the importance of love in terms of happiness and contentment in life. Romance novels, movies, and the intrigue involved in following the dramatic love relationships of celebrity figures, is only a small part of our interest in love relations. Taken a step further, is the realization that what happens in our love lives is always involved in what kind of mental and physical health we experience in our lives. Suppose we were to realize that love as an experience in life is a necessary ingredient in the overall health of a person? Would that be so bad to admit?

I suppose the hardship would be in realizing that the world we have set up so far in the 21st century is not very conducive to healthy love relationships. Our interpersonal world often does not support, encourage, and promote love as a healthy experience in life. Quite the contrary, we seem to be enamored with developing and promoting love’s opposites.

I believe that part of the solution to this problem is to make available accurate information about the complications in our love lives and what can be done to correct them. My emphasis in this book is on the psychological complications that plague our love lives. The approach I am offering is that we learn about love relationships over the course of our lives, more specifically love lives, and that what we learn, healthy or unhealthy, determines the success and health of our love lives from then on.

This learning can get locked in and become unconscious and repetitive, unless we become conscious of what we’ve learned, challenge its dominance, and practice something healthier. The articles in this book clarify and further substantiate this understanding for anyone interested and in need of accurate information on love life problems and their solutions.

May all that take the time to look for the solution to their love lives in this book, find what they need, and prosper in their love lives.

Dr. Thomas Jordan

Clinical Psychologist

Founder, LoveLifeLearningCenter.com

Author, Healthy Love Relationship

[e-mail]

212.875.0154

Chapter 1

LOVE LIFE EDUCATION

Love Life Basics

Love Life Tips

Men’s Love Life

Men versus Women

Healthy Love Relationship

Privacy in Love

Love Stories

LOVE LIFE BASICS

LOVE LIFE 101

Why is it that we have to be reminded to love or give by having special days set aside for that purpose? Human emotions like hate, anger, envy or greed don’t seem to need a reminder or special day. They seem to have no problem occurring the rest of the days out of the year. Is there something different about the emotion of love? From what I’ve observed, most people are secretly looking for love in one form or another. It’s the great motivator and behind a lot of what happens to people and the decisions they make. Nevertheless, it looks like most of us tend to keep this fact out of focus.

Let’s assume that much of what you identify as your personality is a product of what you’ve been taught. Media, family values, people we look up to, stuff like that. Let’s suppose that whatever benefits come to you, let’s say in the form of health and happiness come as a result of whether or not you’ve learned something positive about love in your life, more specifically, about self-love and love for other people. Suppose what’s missing is you were never taught how to prepare for and sustain love in your life?

I think we come into this world ready to experience the feeling of love without knowing how to prepare for love or sustain love after it arrives? What if, by not getting the learning part of this in, people were getting hurt, disappointed, and angry as a consequence. Now you have a bunch of hurt, disappointed, or angry people running around passing the hurt, disappointment, or anger along to others because they weren’t taught anything better. They’re just following what’s familiar to them, what they have already learned from other disappointed people.

After awhile you have a bigger and bigger bunch of hurt, disappointed or angry people running around without any faith in ever having love in their lives. Instead they’re focused on other seemingly more attainable things like power and money. So there is always a large number of people living day to day feeling hate, anger, envy, instead of love. No one points out that it’s their disappointments in love coupled with the absence of learning about love that started the mess to begin with. Perhaps the memory fades. Is it possible to learn something new about love after so many years? Why would anyone want to be reminded of those old disappointments anyway?

Dr. Leo Buscaglia a professor of education at the University of Southern California back in the early 1970’s decided to offer what he called a ‘Love Class’ at the university because he thought his students had a lot to learn about love. He offered the course for no credit and no pay and had to cope with the ridicule of his colleagues for teaching a course on ‘love.’ So many students enrolled that he had to close enrollment at 100 students per year for four consecutive years. I think Buscaglia understood the need people have to learn the truths about love. The large number of students who enrolled in his course experienced their own need to learn the truths about love. Truths like, love comes and goes on its own beyond our prediction or control. What we can control are the ways in which we psychologically prepare for the arrival of love, and sustain love in the love relationship we create after love arrives. We’re supposed to learn how to practice getting ready for love and taking care of love in our lives. Who is teaching this stuff?

FORMS OF LOVE

As a general definition of what we mean by the phrase ‘love life,’ I’ll offer you the following: A love life is what you think, feel, and do in your life involving the emotion of love including romance, family, how you feel about yourself, and beyond. This definition of love life is probably a bit broader than you had in mind, and what did I mean by beyond?

Romance is usually how people think of the meaning of love life. Although our broader definition has its advantages, one important one is that many of the problems in a person’s romantic love life can be more easily understood, worked on, and solved when this broader definition of love is adopted. A good example of this would be the way in which romantic love benefits from an understanding of and integration with friendship love. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We first need to determine and understand the different forms of love that exist.

The different forms of love are: romantic love, family love (includes parent-child, sibling-sibling and any other combination in a family of origin and immediate family), friendship love, how you feel about yourself, love of humanity, and spiritual love. My list has grown over time. At this point, I think that just about covers it. Romantic love usually involves some kind of sexual activity or desire. The point is it’s a love that is charged with sexual energy. As I said earlier, it’s the most common way of defining the phrase ‘love life.’

Family love is also included in our definition but not in the same way as romantic love. Love in family relationships is steeped in emotional needs for nurture and procreation. In this culture, the family is usually associated with the needs of childhood and adolescence, which may or may not be satisfied by the time an offspring makes it to adulthood. In fact it is very common for early love life disappointments to remain very influence in shaping an adult’s later love life experiences.

Then there is friendship love. This form of love doesn’t usually make it into the definition of a person’s love life. Friendship love can be quite deep and enduring when the friendship values of trust, honesty, freedom, and equality are practiced. Our view is that friendship love can be a stabilizing force in other love relationships. The most common example of this is the way in which friendship when blended with romance adds stability and endurance to a love relationship. If you’ve made your lover or spouse into a true friend you’ve accomplished quite a bit toward ensuring the health of your love relationship.

Now consider the feelings you have for your self. A lot of people get around the uncomfortable phrase ‘self-love’ by substituting the phrase ‘self-esteem.’ Regardless of labeling, the idea is that a person’s love for himself or herself can be measured from high to low on an appropriate continuum. By the way, for those of us with low self-esteem or minimal self-love, expect to find a diminished love life. This little formula has a lot of practical value when it comes to figuring out how to improve your love life. Improving how you feel about yourself is a quick way of improving your love life.

The next two forms of love are newly added to my list. They expand the application of love as a human emotion beyond the confines of relationship. The love of humanity is a form of love whose object is all human beings. I happen to believe there’s a lot to love about people. But in the interest of trying to narrow it down to a personal preference I would say that what is most lovable about human beings is their unique individuality. Each and every one is unique, as unique as a thumbprint. That in and of itself is beyond conception. The closely related issue of ‘value’ drives the point home. Each and every human being is unique and therefore priceless if such a value judgment were ever justified. If we could only realize and sustain this truism I suspect a wonderful change in our interpersonal experience would emerge.

The last form of love is spiritual love. This is the love a person has for the fact of personal and universal creation. However this is conceptualized would be determined by belief. The point is, the phrase ‘love life’ has come full circle. It’s now possible to envision another meaning. To have a love life is to be in a state of loving life. To love life is a demonstration of spiritual living both in oneself and in others. My guess is that these different forms of love are connected in some way. First and foremost, they are all love, that force in the world that seeks to join together what is separate and apart. And beyond that, developing your capacity and sensitivity in one form enables you to more fully experience the other forms of love.

IDENTIFYING UNHEALTHY LOVE RELATIONSHIPS

What are the signs and symptoms that tell you your love relationship is unhealthy? The categories I’ve selected obviously overlap. But for the purpose of a simplified illustration, I’ve separated the signs and symptoms of unhealthy love relationships into three basic categories. A love relationship is unhealthy when one or both persons in the relationship are either hurting themselves, hurting each other, or emotionally immature.

When one or both persons in a love relationship are hurting themselves, they are obviously doing something self-destructive. If there is self-destructiveness in a love relationship, the relationship is predictably unhealthy. If you and/or your lover are not taking care of yourselves, your love relationship is negatively affected. There are many different ways to neglect and abuse oneself and many different ways it could affect your relationship. The presence of self-neglect or self-abuse is a pretty reliable sign that a person has negative feelings about him or herself.

The important point is, how you feel and treat yourself will determine the quality of your relationships with others. One of the more common ways of mistreating oneself involves how a person takes care of his or her body. If you are abusing your body with substances or self-destructive eating patterns your ability to love and be loved will no doubt be disrupted. The same applies to your mind. You can abuse your mind by hanging onto beliefs, opinions, and expectations that are fundamentally false and limiting. For example, you could believe something about yourself or other people that distorts and disturbs your ability to love and receive love from others.

A good example of this is, when a person believes he or she is not ‘lovable.’ A patient the other day told me she thought she was ‘cursed.’ Apart from any superstitious evidence for it in her mind, there was the self-destructive impact of believing this about herself. You can’t walk around believing that you’re cursed without paying an emotional ‘price’ for it and unconsciously creating the conditions and experiences that confirm this belief and expectation. Our beliefs about ourselves shape and reshape our experiences in life.

If one or both persons in a love relationship are drawn to hurting each other, the relationship becomes a place where one person gets hurt because the other is unable to deal with his or her own hurt without turning it into aggressiveness. That’s the formula we have to pay attention to. The transfer of hurt from one person to another by the way he or she treats others. I hurt you because I’m hurt and I can’t deal with or refuse to deal with my own hurt in a healthier way. This kind of problem accounts for a lot of the aggressiveness, violence, and abusiveness that can occur in a love relationship. If you are in a relationship with someone who is having difficulty dealing with his or her own hurts directly, your love relationship will be painful and unhealthy. People who have a hard time expressing hurt, and prefer to convert it into violence, are in need of help. Their love relationships will be a struggle to tolerate, without offensiveness or defensiveness, the vulnerability of intimacy.

The last category of signs and symptoms of an unhealthy relationship involves how emotionally immature the lovers are. It’s hard to put an age on this, even though some people like to say that one decade is more ready for love than another. I say it’s best to go individual by individual. Some people grow up faster than others. Some people are ready for true committed love earlier than others. By the way, you can be physically mature and be emotionally immature. Emotional immaturity is usually accompanied by things like dependency, insecurity, and control. These three characteristics of an immature relationship are responsible for a lot of the misery people encounter in an unhealthy love relationship.

Dependency usually shows up in a love relationship when lovers are trying to get old childhood needs for love met in an adult love relationship. The assumption in a dependent love relationship is, you cannot live or function without your lover. Of course the problem with dependent love is the dysfunction it usually creates. You can’t chronically rely on someone else to do something for you can do for yourself without experiencing a loss of functioning.

Insecurity is the internal feeling of instability that occurs when the person you are dependent upon won’t stay in one place and function as your ‘rock.’ Of course the problem here is that most people are not 100% cooperative with an insecure lover’s demands. People like to be free to do as they please, at least to some extent. This fundamental independence tends to create more insecurity in an insecure person.

Insecurity inevitably leads to escalating efforts to ‘control’ the person being loved. The more dependency and insecurity experienced, the more aggressive the control that is attempted. Control in a love relationship can escalate into aggressive attempts to reduce a lover’s freedom in order to reduce the level of insecurity being experienced. As if that’s not bad enough, another tragic consequence of this inadequate solution to the problem of insecurity is the fact that the person doing the controlling continues to suffer painful feelings of insecurity.

The solution to emotional dependency and insecurity in love is not more and better forms of control, but more effective efforts to grow as a person. What the insecure lover fails to understand is, a lover will never cure his or her insecurity. That’s not the way people grow. Taking care of insecurity as an emotional problem, on the psychological inside, makes it easier to function in a love relationship on the outside. Then you’ll understand that your lover or any lover cannot be the reason you are secure and emotionally stable.

NOT FEELING PREPARED FOR LOVE

This post is one of a series that will show you how to start fixing a particular love life problem. The love life problem we’ll focus on is the feeling of being emotionally unprepared for love in your life.

The limiting belief that is usually causing this feeling of not being prepared for love goes something like this: love is too overwhelming and I won’t be able to handle this feeling in my life.

Love is considered too disruptive and you are probably predicting you’ll be hurt and/or disappointed. You’ve had hurtful experiences in your life that have taught you to be wary of love ever since.

When a person holds this limiting belief either consciously or without awareness, he or she usually adopts defensive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting when love comes around. As a consequence, opportunities for love are pushed away whenever they occur. It’s time now to disprove the predictions being made by this limiting belief.

Treatment involves:

1. Identifying the disappointment you’ve had with love in your life that is still unresolved in your mind. You will know it’s unresolved by the fact that you still feel hurt and upset about it inside.

2. Becoming aware of having the limiting belief that love will go bad no matter what, to protect yourself from repeating the intolerable hurt and disappointment you experienced in the past.

3. Reducing your defensiveness by reintroducing yourself to your natural inborn ability to give and receive love. This is accomplished by allowing yourself to have experiences that will prepare you for love.

There are certain experiences in life that can naturally prepare you for the experience of love. These experiences usually involve learning to tolerate a measure of vulnerability, spontaneity, and cultivating some personal experiences with other forms of love beyond romance (i.e. friendship love, family love, love of people, and spiritual forms of love).

Try to give up some of the control you are using to protect yourself. It’s time to take risks for the sake of love. If your heart gets broken, you can heal it and learn something from the experience that will improve your chances the next time around.

These are changes you can try to make on your own for starters. Self-created change begins with making time to focus on your love life in thought and/or writing. You’ll know if you can do this on your own, if you can tolerate the feelings that’ll emerge.

When you allow yourself to think about your old love life disappointments for the purpose of identifying what is causing your upset, you take them out of the memory ‘closet’ and subject them to the light of day. This is the first step toward decreasing their impact on your current love life.

You can also get really good at reminding yourself that you’re more than the sum of what’s happened to you in your love life. When the ‘love is going to drive me crazy thought’ comes over you, instead of running away, try challenging it to see whether or not it’s really true or just a prediction based on your past experience.

In most, if not all cases, the fear is irrational and you are really able to tolerate the feeling of love as long as you stay aware of the fact that old unresolved hurts will try to intrude into your current feelings from time to time.

The problem with fear is losing track of what’s realistic and what’s not. You dismantle the old hurts by reminding yourself when they show up that they come from an old disappointment and don’t belong in the present.

If a sad feeling comes with the memory, take a little time to feel it and identify the sadness as grief. This feeling is natural. It’s all part of feeling a loss and letting it go, you are separating the past from the present, and keeping your feelings as current as possible.

Of course, if you need some help with this don’t hesitate to find a competent psychotherapist or counselor to help you out. A good professional helper for love life issues will be ‘open’ and comfortable with him or herself, experienced in the love life issues you are concerned with, and willing to stay focused on the love life issues and solutions you want to talk about.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions about his or her experience and training. Be sure to tell your therapist that you want to work specifically on your love life problem. Remember, you can always meet with a few professionals before you pick one. To work on love life issues you should find it relatively easy to talk to the professional you’ve chosen.

MEET YOUR NEW LOVER: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT I

You are a single person looking for a lover. You’re in a single situation with other single people who are socializing. There are single people all around. You want to improve your ability to meet a lover. What are the rules of engagement?

There are six (6) rules of engagement you should know about. They apply to any and every single person looking for love. If you heed these rules of engagement the possibility of meeting a potential lover increases.

I’m going to talk about the first three rules in this post (Part I) and the last three in the next post (Part II). Ready? These are the first three rules of engagement:

1. Don’t show your hunger for love. Visible ‘need’ scares people away. When you first meet someone as a ‘potential lover’ don’t look or act needy. People instinctively know when someone is hungry for love. Ordinarily, neediness scares eligible lovers off.

It sends the message that you are not able to sustain yourself comfortably. That’s a matter of self-love. It also tends to attract people who have ‘issues’ with neediness. They either want to take care of a needy person or the hate it and want to fix it.

Either way, it’s a formula for a bad love relationship. Whatever you need to do to feel more comfortable in your own skin ‘before’ you go looking for love, do it.

2. Don’t look or show frustration. Visible ‘frustration’ also scares people away. Need and emotions, like frustration and anger, have something in common. They make other people uncomfortable. Unless that’s your conscious intention, this is not the state of mind to go looking for love.

Love life frustration means you have been trying to find love without success and you’re not happy about that. A self-sustained optimism coming from a receptive and interactive person is the best state of mind to take with you into the hunting fields.

3. Always hunt in a pack. Solo hunters are often avoided because they are perceived as too hungry or frustrated. In the single love search, perception is a big part of what people experience. In other words, the assumptions made about people (you) will create the experiences they will have of you.

I’m not saying their perceptions are accurate. I’m just saying, the assumptions are being made and you need to know it and deal with it. Eligible people in a socializing situation, among strangers, want the reassurances that come with group membership. If you’re in a group (2 +), you are at least acceptable to one other person.

Now if you can’t arrange for this and you have to hunt alone, try to join a group that is already formed. I know it’s difficult because familiars who gather together in public often keep strangers out. For the sake of the hunt, if you can befriend a member of a group (common interests, etc.) and your presence does not forecast hunger or frustration, you may be allowed (limited?) access to the conversations taking place.

You’ll get a tentative pass that will permit you a chance to communicate your ideas and understand the ideas of others in the group. Now you are in a better position to assess the eligibility of each group’s members.

MEET YOUR NEW LOVER: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT II

Like I said in Rules of Engagement I, you are a single person looking for a lover. You’re in a single situation with other single people who are socializing. There are eligible single people all around. You want to improve your ability to meet someone special. What are the rules of engagement?

There are six (6) rules of engagement you should know about. They apply to any and every single person looking for love. If you heed these rules of engagement the possibility of meeting a potential lover increases.

I’m going to talk about the last three rules in this post, I talked about the first three in Rules of Engagement I. Ready? These are the last three rules of engagement:

4. Sex is the last thing on your mind, right? If it’s the first thing, this will be forecast to everyone you meet. Eligible people have radar for this energy. Even if the person you desire hopes sex is part of the experience when meeting someone new, if it shows up too early, or it’s in ‘bold print,’ it will scare most people away.

Masturbate before you go out if you need to. It will lower your sexual frustration and permit you to socialize with a calm and more relaxed presence (hopefully). Remember relaxed is what you need.

It’s the relaxed state of mind and emotion that is most welcoming to others, most especially eligible lovers, that very easily spooked smaller subgroup of the single people you are interested in meeting.

5. Shared interest is the best context within which to meet an eligible person. If you both like something and meet each other doing that which you like, chances are you will be more of the real you while doing it. You’ll be less of the put on you that you put on when you are in a context for meeting eligible people.

The real you is always the one giving and receiving love, or at least it should be. People like to assess eligibility in another person when he or she is engaged in something else other than looking good and pursuing love. It takes the pressure off.

Remember, alcohol will disinhibit and relax you in your search, in the right dosage. Unfortunately, it can also distort and damage your search, in the wrong dosage.

6. Become aware of and make a practice out of noticing and reading ‘nonverbal communications’ from eligible people. This is the language of the heart in a social group. Words are easily distorted, symbolized to an extreme, and often defensive.

People send nonverbal communications to each other they never really ‘think’ about and choose. This is how direct and immediate this kind of communication can be.

No matter what people are talking about, non-verbal communication is primary, if you can read it properly. The following are the most potent forms of nonverbal communication commonly found where singles gather, in order of intensity:

A. Glances: The ‘eyes’ are the primary sense and communicator of interest between people, example, 1st glance, 2nd glance, and of course, there is the I caught you looking me. Glances are the most subtle and understated of the nonverbal communications.

B. Smiles: Let’s differentiate specific smiles from the general or random type. Specific smiles are sent as communications to specific people. They communicate receptivity and interest. They also communicate positivity and an acceptance of what is seen.

C. Touching: The hands are symbolic of the mind and its search for ‘intimacy’ in the world. The hands reach out (and into) other people’s space when there is interest and curiosity. Touching usually communicates a more intensive interest in intimacy.

For example, if I touch you when I talk to you, I am communicating intimate interest in you. My interest is not necessarily romantic, even though it could be. It could also be more an acknowledgment of a personal or friendship connection. Other variations are the ‘hug’ and the ‘holding’ of another when there is love to give or receive. Hey, good luck.

OUR PHILOSOPHY IN A ‘NUT SHELL’

Here at the Love Life Learning Center (LLLC), we believe in the existence of a Love Life Science. What this means is, there are a number of ‘invariant love life principles’ or things that don’t change about love. These principles keep coming up in whatever love life situation exists. We’ve discovered if you understand and use these love life principles to guide your love life you’ll have a healthier and happier outcome.

Learning to Love

The origin of what you feel in your love life is innate. It comes naturally from the inside of you. You can’t control love. What you think and do about and with those feelings is learned. This learning you can change. You can unlearn what’s not working and relearn something better.

Our objective here at LLLC is to understand and teach the enduring lessons of love (love life principles). We exist to support and conduct psychological research and education in Love Life Science. We help our users tell the difference between the limited love life beliefs learned during the course of life and love life principles or truths about love.

Method of Researching & Educating About Love Life Science

The Love Life Review is the method of educating and researching love life science. A Love Life Review is an inquiry into the personal love life stories of people to determine what love life thoughts, feelings, and actions are creating problems in a person’s love life. At the LLLC we educate and research Love Life Science with our blog posts, audio downloads, and Love Life Reviews conducted in commentary exchanges on our blog, and in the seminars, and individual consultations that we offer.

Ten (10) Invariant Principles of Love

1. Love is an emergent emotional experience. Where does love come from? Love emerges from what is uniquely individual in each one of us. The experience of love is innate. The way we give love and receive love, or the relationship we have with the one we love, is learned. Love is an emotional experience that we cannot control. The feeling of love emerges or departs on its own. We can take care of love by learning to prepare for love, welcoming love when it arrives, grieving the loss of love, and letting go.

2. Our families of origin teach us ‘how to give love’ and ‘how to receive love’ both directly (verbal or behavioral lessons given by adults or other children) and by example (in the form of observations). Children tend to repeat what they learn about love in their adult love lives.

3. Your relationship with yourself, commonly called self-esteem, determines and shapes the quality of your love life as an adult. Improvements in how you feel about yourself will naturally improve your love life.

4. Learning how to properly grieve will help you cope with the loss of love as well as renew your emotional availability. When grief over the loss of love is resolved, psychological barriers to loving and receiving love are moved out of the way. The individual becomes available to love and be loved. Grief is really the flip side of love. If you love you’ll naturally have to grieve. Letting oneself grieve clears the heart and prepares it for a new love.

5. Communication is the pathway to emotional intimacy in a relationship. Communicating hurt feelings and the influence of one’s family of origin allows a couple to solve problems and help each other grow. Sympathy is the emotional language of love. Words supplement this language of love. Love is first communicated without language. Developing words in love helps a couple solve problems together.

6. Your ability to be independent, or take proper care of your self, will help you tolerate the experience of being in love. Learn to be by yourself in a healthy way. This growth permits you to be ‘in love,’ meaning, to love and be loved in the present without the interference of past unresolved love life disappointments and dependency.

7. Control is the antithesis of love because it diminishes freedom. Control decreases freedom in a relationship and diminishes love as a consequence. Freedom nurtures love in a couple. Control in any form limits love. Control mixed with insecurity can lead to mistreatment or abuse (verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, or financial).

8. Equality is necessary for love to grow. Give and take is at its most mature balance when two people practice equality in love.

9. Honesty also grows love. The truth of personal experience however scary to reveal to the one you love establishes and nurtures love. Lying by omission or commission to one’s lover decreases love in the relationship by offering a misrepresentation instead of your true self in the relationship.

10. Trust in your love life is the ability to take a risk on love, to be vulnerable in the presence of someone you love. When you trust you drop your psychological defenses. Common types of trust in love are: trust of another (that love is real and committed); trust of self (faith) that you will survive the hurts of love (faith in your ability to heal).

LOVE LIFE SECRET

No matter what kind of couple you want to be in, there are things you can do psychologically to help you get there. One of the most potent is to make yourself into the person, you would like the person you love, or would love, to love. Bet you can’t say that three times fast.

The point is, if you believe in the psychological function of ‘self-creation’ then you understand that we’re all much more than simply the persona we project. The trick is to know enough about who you uniquely are on the inside to create a persona that comes the closest to representing that true inner you. This used to be called having ‘integrity.’

The bonus of course is, when your outside matches your inside the love, peace of mind, and simple happiness that is possible is off the charts. A lot of people are so accustomed to being who they were made to be that they never question whether or not it is possible to be the someone they are supposed to be, strange way to talk, huh?

In many instances, who you present yourself to be has been shaped and dictated to you by other people, institutions, belief systems, etc. That’s the part that can hurt. The tragedy is, you could go through your entire life never being a truer reflection of who you uniquely are inside.

Starting with your family of origin, you’ll meet a lot of people in this life who will want and need you to be exactly what they want and need you to be. The influences on you will be strong. Taking the time to find out who you are on the inside, in other words, the ‘unique you’ that has always been there and will never change, is a really important piece of psychological work to start sooner than later.

In my profession, I see people all the time who make it to middle age and start questioning who they are. They tell me they have been who other people in their lives expected them to be for decades.

Now for some reason or another the persona they created doesn’t satisfy anymore and they start to feel like it is limiting them in many ways. In my mind, this is a great opportunity, even though it may not feel good right now.

They might get depressed, angry, chronically frustrated, anxious, start to drink or drug to get away from the reality that it coming into consciousness, or they might simply start acting in a way that is uncharacteristic. Somebody might define this as a ‘sickness.’

It’s important to get past this limited psychiatric explanation and realize that what such a person is experiencing is the ‘need to change’ themselves into someone with more integrity (remember? outside matches inside).

Once the cause of the unhappiness and symptoms is understood, it is possible to guide and support the individual through this process of change. Getting to know and articulate who you uniquely are on the inside that is trying to emerge and influence the outside is the most important task at hand, perhaps the most important task of your life.

The end result when it works out is, you’ll take charge of changing and re-creating your persona (outside) to match what you are learning about yourself on the inside. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.

When my patients ask me why I always work in a suit, I tell them that my work is like going to church. I dress up for the experience of witnessing human beings change into a true free reflection of who they really are. Getting back to love, once this happens the ability to love and be loved hits the roof.

THE FIVE LOVE LIFE TASKS

There are five (5) tasks in a love life, any love life. Chances are any particular person will encounter all of these tasks to various degrees during the course of his or her love life.

To master any particular task in the set of five requires a tolerance for a certain experience that goes with the particular love life task. I will describe each task in this post and talk about the experience that goes with it.

Task #1 Find love To find love requires a willingness to let go of the control involved in thinking you can make love happen. When this effort to control other people is relinquished, love tends to more easily find you. Most people don’t like this idea much because they were brought up in a world that has taught them to be in control of everything.

Letting go of this control in areas of your life where it is not needed, or serves as an obstruction can feel uncomfortable hence the tolerance I mentioned earlier. When you let go of interpersonal control, you become more vulnerable to outside impressions, one of which might be love. Unfortunately to be vulnerable in this way will increase your susceptibility to other influences as well.

This leads to the understanding that you should choose when to be vulnerable as wisely as you can. Know when to be open and when to be defensive. In situations where love is possible it pays to be vulnerable, letting love find you. In situations that call for self-protection and defensiveness, vulnerability is a certain liability. It’s good to know the difference.

Task #2 Sustain love To sustain love requires a willingness to ‘grow’ the love you are feeling. When you grow something you think about what it needs to thrive and what it needs to avoid as well. You are busy giving it what it needs and keeping it safe from what it doesn’t need. The same is true for love. If you are willing to grow the love you and someone else are feeling you will have to feed it and protect it.

Generally speaking, love thrives on things like honesty, freedom, equality, and trust. Love also tends to respond well to independence and intimate forms of communication. Making a conscious effort to grow the love you are experiencing by making sure you keep ‘love toxic’ things away such as dishonesty, control, dominance, and fear.

Not communicating with the person you love and stifling forms of dependency will also tend to suck the life out of a fledgling feeling of love. All of this by the way is what it takes to ‘work on your relationship.’ Don’t expect to have a love relationship without doing a little care and maintenance more frequently than you expect.

Task #3 Commit to love Making a commitment to love involves being able to make and keep a ‘promise’ of love to another person. Notice I said, ‘make and keep.’ These two are the ingredients of a healthy love commitment. To make a commitment of love you have to work your way around your fears of ‘being controlled.’ This is the fear for most people who actively avoid making a commitment. They think their freedom will be taken from them. Quite the contrary I assure you.

If you are ‘in love’ with someone, making a commitment to that person brings you freedom. Why? For the simple reason that you don’t have to look for love any more. Now ‘keeping’ a love commitment involves the continuous effort to diminish, reject, or ignore temptations to stray.

Put it this way, your eyes will always look at the world and all the wonderful people and places in that world. Get my meaning? But that doesn’t mean you break your promise. True love is not knocking on your door every day, so you appreciate it, and take good care of it.

Task #4 Leave love I can hear you saying, what is this one doing in his list of love life tasks? If you fall in love with someone you don’t get a guarantee that love will last a lifetime. Sorry. There are many different ways the love you feel can leave you. I don’t wish this on anybody. My point is simply, you have to be able to tolerate grief (another emotion with a mind of its own) if you are going to try your hand at love.

What does grief have to do with love? Let me explain. When real love leaves, for whatever reason, for example you’ve been married for 50 years and your husband or wife dies. The fact that you loved deeply will naturally bring grief. Grief is the flip side of love. It’s not sickness or weakness. It’s what happens when love leaves.

The strange part is, the more comfortable you are with emotions like grief, the easier you’ll heal, and the easier it will be to love again. Welcome grief like you’d welcome love, and grief will expire in a shorter period of time. Think about that.

Task#5 Live alone If you thought grief in the last task was strange enough, why am I now talking about living alone on a list of love life tasks? To be able to comfortably be by yourself means you have developed a positive relationship with yourself. First and foremost, I am talking about your self-esteem.

This little mental function (self-esteem) has a lot to do with the quality of your love life. The formula goes like this, if you feel good about you, you let into your life only the people who are going to reinforce that feeling, not people who don’t. But there’s more. When you can comfortably live alone, you are practicing a form of independence that also improves the quality of your love life.

If you are not independent, you haven’t yet resolved whatever dependencies you had from earlier periods in your life. Bringing those dependencies into your love life as an adult will surely put a strain on love. Developing how you feel about you between relationships is a great way of not only working on reducing left over dependencies but also working on your love life.

LEARNING YOUR WAY TO A BETTER LOVE LIFE

We are all taught how to learn from a very early age. Educational achievement is strongly emphasized and valued in this culture and many other cultures around the world. This emphasis on education has created an ability to learn and apply what was learned in our everyday lives.

The one learning topic that is overlooked is how to most effectively relate in love. This is the part of the falling in love experience we can all learn to do better. We all need to learn how to relate in love in the best possible ways to ensure the health and endurance of the love we feel.

The emotion of love itself is an emergent experience that hits you without you being able to predict or control it. In other words, love comes and goes on its own. The only thing you can do is take care of love when it arrives by building the most effective relationship to contain the love you feel.

Sometimes love arrives when people are not prepared for it for whatever reason(s). This is a tragic circumstance in a person’s love life and most of us can recall the experience of falling in love without being able to tolerate the emotion or without adequate understanding to create and sustain the required relationship for the love we were feeling.

In most instances of inadequate preparation or limited learning love ends up diminished or lost. So what you’ve learned about love and the relationship required to sustain love will not bring the experience of love into your life. We just don’t have that kind of control. What you have learned will do is help you keep love alive and healthy if and when it arrives.

The relationship you co-create with another human being you are in love with to contain your love will determine its longevity and overall health. There are certain things that are required to keep love healthy. These requirements can be learned and practiced. Most people learn how to relate in love in their family of origin. What is learned there can be helpful or not.

If what you learned in your family is not helpful, you can unlearn what was not useful or detrimental to love and relearn or learn for the first time something more effective in preserving the experience of being in love. For example a few important requirements needed to sustain a healthy love relationship are: learning how to take good care of yourself while in love; learning how to give and receive in love; learning how to communicate in love; learning how to be independent in love, and; learning how to be yourself in love.

These requirements can all be learned and practiced. The end result is a deeper and more intimate relationship that nurtures the love you are in with another person. Because of that early emphasis on learning I mentioned earlier, we are all prepared to apply our ability to learn to whatever topic we choose. Imagine if we chose to learn how to best relate in love? Imagine if we made learning how to relate in love a priority for every person to learn and practice in his or her lifetime?

Would there be more successful marriages as a consequence of this more organized and official interest in love? Would there be less love life hurts and pain? Or would the family of origin compete for the exclusive ‘rights’ to continue teaching about love in the indirect ways it has always done so? My guess is that families would feel threatened and fight to retain the exclusive privilege to teach about love to their offspring by resisting any other means of teaching this topic.

Whether the family of origin can meet the need for a more organized and deliberate love life education is doubtful. Until we can live in a society that ensures what we’ve learned about love will promote love in our lives, learning how to constructively be in love must be taught on a grassroots level to individuals who see the value of this kind of education for their personal love lives.

SIMPLE TEST FOR ‘TRUE LOVE’

You’ll know you’re in ‘true love’ if hurting the person you love hurts you as well.

If this happens to you, you are sympathetically connected with another person. Now this might be a little scary to some of you, you know the prospect of being connected like this. It will be particularly difficult for those of you who are used to thinking of your love lives as something you are supposed to control.

You see, this mutual hurting happens because your heart has found another heart to unite with. You not only feel ‘for’ that other person but you feel ‘with’ that other person. He or she feels hurt, you feel hurt. He or she feels joy you feel joy.

Funny thing, we all think about being connected this deeply. Many of us avoid it in any way we can. If you ask me, how am I supposed to tolerate this kind of deep vulnerability and live an independent life? You might not be entirely satisfied with my answer but I’ll try.

I think it takes tolerance, courage to be yourself while in love, and a personal faith in your ability to heal whatever hurts occur. I think individuals make conscious decisions about whether or not they are going to try to accept this kind of connection in their lives.

Look at it this way, when it’s all over what are you going to think about?