Many people need to relearn how to love, in order to love more maturely. Your capacity to love others is closely related to your capacity to love yourself. And learning to love yourself is not selfish and conceited. In fact, it is the most mentally healthy thing you can do. There are a number of specific steps you can take to increase your self-love.
Love is like a bouquet of roses: you don’t remember the work to get them; you only remember the love in her eyes when she received them.
Love is like sitting with my back to the fireplace. I can feel the warmth without ever seeing the fire.
Love is the greatest gift you can receive. But you have to give it to yourself.
—Ed
As we make our way up the mountain, we observe graffiti on the rocks, written by poets commenting about love. Most of what we learn about love is from the poets. Who had any homework in school concerning the nature of love? Would you take time right now to do some “homework?” In the space below, write your definition of what love is. (We are talking about love between two people in a romantic relationship, not about parental love, spiritual love, or love for humankind.)
Love is:
We’ve asked thousands of people to complete this exercise, and what we discovered is that although it’s a difficult assignment for anyone, it’s particularly difficult for divorced people. A typical comment is, “I thought I knew what love is, but I guess I don’t.” Many people feel inadequate defining love. But love is like a diamond, with a multitude of facets. You can view it from many different directions, and there is no right or wrong way to define it. There is only the way you feel about love.
In our society, many people have stereotyped love to be something you do for somebody or to somebody. Very few people have learned that love is something that should be centered within you and that the basis for loving others is the love you have for yourself. Most of us recognize the biblical injunction to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But what if you don’t love yourself?
Here is a somewhat cynical definition upon which many relationships are based: “Love is the warm feeling that you get toward somebody who meets your neurotic needs.” This is a definition of neediness rather than love. Because we are not whole and complete people, but have emotional deficiencies, we try to fill those emotional deficiencies by “loving” another person. What we lack in ourselves we hope to find in the other person. In other words, many of us are “half people” trying to love someone in order to become whole. Love coming from a whole person is more mature and more likely to be lasting.
Perhaps you have heard the expression “warm fuzzies with a fishhook in them.” A “warm fuzzy” is a nice gesture that you give somebody, such as saying “I love you.” Unfortunately, many of us are still struggling to fulfill ourselves. If your own life bucket is nearly empty when you say “I love you” to another person, it probably means, “Please love me.” The other person finds the warm fuzzy, swallows it, and is hooked. Saying “I love you” from an empty bucket tends to be manipulative, while love from a full bucket allows others to be themselves and to be free.
Another problem with love in our society is that falling in love is the most acceptable reason for getting married. However, “falling in love” may have more to do with loneliness than with warmth toward the other person. Falling in love to overcome loneliness is not actually love. Rather, it is a feeling of warmth that comes from breaking down the barriers that have kept us from being intimate with other people.
Sometimes one does not love the other person, but instead loves the idealized image of that person. When the difference is realized, one becomes disillusioned, falls out of love, and the relationship is dissolved. If a couple can grow past the stage of loving their idealized images of each other, there is a possibility that they will be able to love in a more mature manner. For some, this growth will occur in the love relationship, and their love for each other will mature. For others, maturity comes only after dissolution of an immature relationship.
We see many people loving with an immature love: love means doing something to somebody or for somebody; love means taking care of someone; love means achieving; love means always being in control; love means “never having to say you’re sorry”; love means always being strong; love means being nice.
Shirley believed that always being nice equated to love, so she was trying to improve an unhealthy love relationship with niceness. Ken asked her why this didn’t seem to be working for her. Shirley replied, “I guess I just wasn’t nice enough.”
Many (most?) of us did not receive enough unconditional love while growing up—love given by parents or others just because we were, not because we earned it by being “good.” We thus adopted immature forms of love toward others because we were not loved unconditionally. That’s a tough history to overcome. Nevertheless, we can come to realize that mature love equals loving yourself for being who you are and, likewise, loving others for who they are. When we can feel such unconditional no-matter-how-you-act love, we have learned mature love. Mature love allows you to be fully yourself with your loved one.
For many people, it is difficult to give up immature forms of love. That is the way they have always received their strokes, attention, and good feelings. Eventually, though, they recognize that they have to keep striving harder and harder to earn the love they are seeking. It is like settling for second best, taking whatever strokes we can, rather than going all the way to get really good strokes by learning to love ourselves.
The need to be loved unconditionally is not met very often. To children, parental love can be seen as unconditional. After all, most parents are able to provide the basics of food, clothing, shelter, care, and physical affection. The child’s limited awareness makes this seem like unconditional love. The child has no question that this love is infinite and omnipotent.
However, with age, maturity, and awareness, one recognizes that any human being may at any point stop loving another for any reason. Or the love may be ended by death. For adults, it is difficult emotionally to accept unconditional love.
Perhaps you can attack the problem from another direction: by learning to love yourself unconditionally. Sound like “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”? Actually, it is simply an acceptance of yourself for who you are: a unique individual, with no one else like you. You can begin to feel that you are an okay person and begin to feel love for yourself.
It is difficult to love yourself if you were not loved as a child. For many people, belief in a supreme being or higher power who offers the unconditional love they have difficulty giving themselves can bring great benefits. Feeling loved for what you are—not for what you do to or for somebody—can give you the potential to love others in the same way.
The widespread problem of mental illness in our society gives us yet another perspective on love. One way of looking at mental disorders is that they are all ways of compensating for lack of unconditional love. If we could peel all of the psychological diagnoses down to the heart and core, we would find that many emotional problems stem from lack of loving and being loved.
We tend to teach our children the same concept of love that we learned ourselves. Thus, if you have developed an immature form of love, your children may tend to develop an immature form of love also. If you want to teach your children to love in a mature way and to make them feel loved unconditionally, you will have to learn to love yourself! Then you can develop the capacity to love your children so that they feel loved unconditionally.
We are emphasizing unconditional love so strongly because it is such a vital quality for human growth. To know that you are valuable enough—just because you are you—to be loved regardless of how you act, that’s the greatest gift you can give yourself and your children.
(Please understand that we are not advocating irresponsible or antisocial behavior; rather, we are acknowledging our universal humanness and imperfection, and urging you to learn to accept yourself fully, “warts and all.”)
Look at the definition of “love” that you wrote at the beginning of this chapter. Most people include in their definition something that makes the love other-centered—centered in the other person rather than within themselves. Many people write that love consists of caring and giving and making that other person happy. Very few people include in their definition of love a mature idea of self-love.
Let’s examine that. If the center of your love lies in your partner and the relationship dissolves, the center is suddenly removed; as we considered earlier, this makes divorce even more painful. What might it be like if you had become a whole person and learned to love yourself? If divorce came, there would still be pain and trauma. But it would not be so devastating; you would still be a whole person.
Divorce is especially traumatic for those who have not centered their love within themselves and learned to love themselves. They end up feeling unlovable or that they are incapable of loving another person. Many spend a great deal of time and energy trying to prove to themselves that they are lovable. They may search for another love relationship immediately, because that helps to heal the wound. They may become sexually promiscuous, developing all kinds of relationships with anybody who comes along. Many of these people have confused sex and love, feeling that if they go out and find sex, with it will come the love they have been missing and needing. It sometimes seems it would be more appropriate for them to say “I sex you” rather than “I love you”!
As we discussed in previous chapters (particularly in chapters 2 and 6), it is wiser to go easy on love relationships during this difficult time. Invest in friendships instead until you have made good progress learning to love yourself. (More on this in chapter 16 also.)
So many people have never really learned to love and to be loved. Sometimes it seems easier to love others and not allow yourself to be loved. By “wanting to love another person,” you may really be hiding your own need to be loved.
Bruce recalled something that happened when he was working through his own divorce process:
I was taking part in a meditation exercise. We sat with our eyes closed and meditated to bring a flow of energy through the different levels of our bodies until it reached the tops of our heads. I was able to follow this meditation and feel a warm flow of energy within me, gradually rising higher in my body. When the guided fantasy had reached the level of our chests, the leader said, ‘Many of you at this point will be feeling that the flow of energy is leaking out the front of your chests. If you are feeling such a leak, then imagine a cover over the front of your chest so that the warm flow of energy will not leak out.’ She was describing exactly the way I felt! I was amazed!
After the guided fantasy was over, I asked, ‘How did you know how I was feeling when I was sitting there with my eyes closed, not talking?’ She replied that many people have the feeling that the flow of energy is leaking out the front of their chests. She related it to the belief that love is doing something to somebody or for somebody, that it is other centered rather than centered within ourselves. Thus the flow of energy leaks out toward others. We emotionally drain ourselves by putting the love into others, rather than filling our own bucket of life.
I thought about this a great deal and decided that my goal was to learn to love myself in a more adequate manner. I decided that I would like to have my love be a warm glow, burning within me, warming me and the people with whom I came in contact. My friends would be warm without having to prove that they were lovable. They simply would feel warm by being close to my fire.
Since a special, committed love relationship involves being very close, that special person gets an extra flow of warmth from my fire.
How about you? Do you have a fire going within you? Or has your fire gone out? It is important for us to care for the fire within us and make sure that we have a glow that warms us and also allows the people around us to be warm.
Our lives express our definition of love. If we believe that love is translated as making money, then that is how we spend our time. We act out our definition of love in our behavior. How have you been acting out your definition of love? What has been the important priority in your life? Are you satisfied with the definition of love you show by your behavior, or do you want to change? Think about it.
An interesting paradox exists about the way we love others. While each of us has a unique style of loving, each person tends to believe that his or her style is the only way there is of loving! It is difficult for us to see that there are styles other than our own.
When you enter into a love relationship, it’s important to be aware of your own style and that of the other person. Perhaps by examining some of these styles, we can better understand ourselves and others. We’re impressed with the work of University of Toronto sociologist John Alan Lee, who has researched the subject rather thoroughly and identified nine “types of love.” We’ve simplified his list a bit to offer the following six types for your thoughtful consideration:
One couple in marriage counseling had a great deal of difficulty because he was a friendship lover and she was a romantic lover. She felt that his cool love was not love, and he felt that her romantic love was unstable. His style of loving was to take care of her, provide for her needs, and stay with her in the marriage, and he felt that this was proof of his love for her. Her request was for him to say, “I love you” and to express different forms of romantic thoughts that would make her feel loved and romantic. His friendship love was not a good mix with her romantic love. They had difficulty in communicating and understanding each other’s viewpoints because their basic beliefs about what love was were not compatible.
Each person obviously is a mixture of these styles, and there is no one style that fits anyone at all times. Understanding your own mix of styles is very important when you get into a love relationship with another person.
As people move up the trail of the divorce process, the question often arises, “How do we learn to love ourselves?” As we have seen, the answer is not easy. Here is a specific exercise that will help you learn to love yourself.
Think of a time in your life when you started to make changes. It may have been when you first had difficulties in your marriage, when you first separated from your beloved, or perhaps when you started reading this book. Make a list of the changes that you have made, the personal growth you have experienced since that time, and the things you have learned about yourself, others, and life. Consider the feeling of confidence you have gained by learning these things and getting more in control of your own life. That confidence is what gives you the good feelings. The length of your list may surprise you.
The late esteemed psychotherapist Virginia Satir devised another method of helping people learn to gain more self-love, which we recommend you do at this point in your journey. Make a list of five adjectives that describe you. After you have listed these adjectives, go through and put a plus or minus sign after each word to indicate whether you think it is a positive or negative trait. Then analyze those you marked with a minus sign to see if you can find anything positive about each of these qualities or aspects of your personality.
One woman listed the adjective “bitchy,” noting that was what her husband often called her. As she began to talk about it, she realized that what he called “bitchiness,” she recognized as assertiveness—a positive way to stick up for herself. Once she understood that difference in labels, she was able to accept that as a part of herself and feel good about it.
That’s what self-love is: learning to accept ourselves for what we are. As renowned psychologist Carl Rogers observed, when you learn to accept yourself as you are, that gives you permission to grow, change, and become more the person you want to be. But as long as you don’t accept a part of who you are, you will have trouble changing that part. Does that sound like a strange paradox?
We all need to discover that “it’s okay not to be okay” in certain areas. We have all had traumatic experiences that have left us wounded someplace, incidents when we did not feel loved, experiences that have left us less than whole. But those experiences are part of life and part of living. We are not perfect; we are human beings. And when we can learn to accept some of the not-okay things about ourselves, then we can begin to feel more okay. And that’s a step toward self-love.
Have you thought about how we learn to love another person? What causes the feelings of love for that other person to begin suddenly—or slowly? Perhaps it was a kind and thoughtful deed he or she did; maybe by doing something that met your needs, she or he helped you feel good. What would happen if you did kind and thoughtful deeds for yourself? If you set aside a period of time tomorrow to do something that feels really good and makes you feel okay about yourself? That could be a way of learning to love yourself more fully and more completely. After all, it would be you who was capable of doing something kind and lovable for you!
Perhaps the most important method of learning to love yourself is to give yourself permission to love yourself. If you can decide that it is okay, and not selfish or self-centered, to love yourself, maybe you can allow yourself to go ahead and have feelings of self-love.
The growth you have achieved is something that no one else has done for you, so no one can take it away from you. Your life is in your control, through knowledge of yourself and others. To that extent, you are not at the mercy of others anymore. Let the good feelings of your growth soak into your body, and let yourself feel the warmth of what you have achieved. Let yourself feel love for yourself for a while. It is okay to love yourself. No, it’s more than okay—it is the way life is meant to be!
While everyone is concerned about what love is, children may feel somewhat unlovable because one parent has left. Many suffer from the fear of losing the other parent as well. At the very time children need a great deal of parental love, parents are undergoing their own trauma and often are incapable of giving as much love to the children as they would like. Awareness of this problem and special efforts to overcome it—especially through much honest conversation with youngsters about what is going on and reassurance that they are much loved by both parents—are what is needed at this crucial time.
A mother told a delightful story, one of those little vignettes in life that seem to make everything worthwhile. Her three-year-old son came downstairs one morning and sat on the sofa. He was just sitting there, presumably thinking, and suddenly came out with, “What do you know? It seems like everybody loves me. Isn’t that nice!” Moments like that are special in life. As parents, a major goal for us should be to try to help all children of divorce feel that same way, even though we are going through a period of feeling unlovable ourselves.
Check out your own level of self-love before you proceed to the next chapter: