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What about Love?
We might think that love would be listed as one of the basic emotions. After all, it’s what we strive for and what we will even die for. It’s what led us to get married, and it’s what’s supposed to make the world go round. But in all the literature related to EQ and business, love is never included in the discussion.
Yet we agree that it is complex. Look at the definition of love given by Wikipedia:
Love is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection (“I love my mother”) to pleasure (“I loved that meal”). It can refer to an emotion of a strong attraction and personal attachment. It can also be a virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection. . . . It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one’s self, or animals.1
That covers a lot of territory.
In the English language, we have only one word for love, and it applies to all the various ways it is used. The ancient Greeks had five words for love. Agape is a New Testament word that describes an unconditional form of love that expects nothing in return: “I will agape you no matter what.” Phileo, also a word used in the New Testament, describes a brotherly type of love, hence the name of the city of brotherly love—Philadelphia. Eros refers to a sexual kind of love, and we get the word erotic from it. Storge describes the kind of love a child has for their parent. Xenia describes love as hospitality.
What Is Love?
Robert Sternberg, a Yale University psychologist, defines what he calls the “mystery of love.” He says, “Love is one of the most intense and desirable of human emotions. People may lie, cheat, steal, and even kill in its name—and wish to die when they lose it. Love can overwhelm anyone at any age.”2
One of our favorite definitions of love is “an emotional, volitional response to an intellectual evaluation of another person.” We used that definition while teaching a college Sunday school class years ago. After the class a young man came up to us and said, “I like that definition. I’ve been dating several girls, and I think it’s time I get married. So I’m going to make an intellectual evaluation of them and then decide who I’m going to marry.”
We weren’t sure we wanted to have that definition taken so seriously and so quickly. But the next week he introduced us to Linda, his future bride. Later we asked him how he had decided. He said he had made a list of all the positive things he liked about each of the girls he was dating. Then he wrote out what he thought might be the problems they would face as a couple. After letting what he had written sit for a while, he went back to it to see what his emotional response was. Linda was the clear winner according to his heart’s response. They married, and he went on to seminary and became a pastor. Last I heard, he was enjoying a good relationship with Linda, who, when we asked her, said she knew how he had decided.
C. S. Lewis described love this way: “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”3 This Christian contribution to the understanding of love is not only recognized by Robert Sternberg but incorporated into his definition of love. His research on love led him to develop a three-part definition consisting of intimacy, passion, and commitment. He called it the triangle of love.
Intimacy can be described as the emotions we have that make us feel close to our spouse—connected and bonded to each other. It includes liking each other and knowing each other deeply. Obviously, to do this, we have to communicate with each other—a behavior.
Passion almost automatically takes us to the physical and sexual aspects of marriage. In King Solomon’s Song of Songs, the woman described passion at its most ardent level in this way: “For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as enduring as the grave. Love flashes like fire, the brightest kind of flame” (Song of Songs 8:6). But passion goes beyond just the physical. It involves the excitement we have at just being together, the sense of well-being we have doing just about anything together.
It is interesting that Sternberg’s first two components of love involve both decision and emotion. Intimacy takes place when we first decide to spend time opening up to our spouse, and then its feelings follow. Passion begins as an emotion, then is kept alive by making ongoing behavioral decisions to continue to enjoy our spouse. Commitment is basically a decision; it doesn’t have the emotion that intimacy and passion have. However, it is an equally important piece in understanding love.
There are basically two decisions involved with commitment. First is the decision to love—to make the initial commitment. This is a clearly defined decision. But it is followed by an equally important ongoing decision we make regularly—to maintain and nurture that first decision to love and to grow our love. Those two decisions get us through the crisis times every couple will experience at some point in time. They also get us through those inevitable times when the feelings of love are weak or even absent. And those decisions are especially important when loving the other isn’t easy.
The Behaviors of Love
Psychologist Erich Fromm, in his book The Art of Loving, made the point that love is more than a feeling or an emotion; it also includes behavior. He says that the feelings of love are secondary when compared to the behaviors of love. This wasn’t something new, for the apostle Paul, when he wrote the “love chapter” (1 Cor. 13), did not make a single reference to an emotion or a feeling. It is all about the behaviors of love. Fromm points out that some people have tried to study love and end up saying it is just a glob of intense emotional experiences that cannot be understood. Others have tried to break it down into so many pieces that they end up explaining nothing.
Paul begins the love chapter by noting the importance of being loving: “If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (v. 1). He adds that without love, we end up being nothing. In verses 4–7, he gives us a list of behaviors of love that make up his definition of it:
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
Not a feeling or an emotion in the list! Love, to Paul, is all about behavior.
I’ve found in working with couples that when the behaviors of love begin to wear thin, the feelings of love also begin to wane. When the behaviors of love are restored, the feelings of love return. That’s why the feelings of love are secondary to the behaviors of love in a marriage. Show each other the behaviors of love, and the feelings of love will be there.
That also explains why Jesus, in talking with his disciples, could command that they love one another. How do you command an emotion? You can’t. It’s not like you can turn on an emotion by decree. But he told them, “This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you” (John 15:12). Then he went on to describe how he loved the disciples: “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (v. 13). That’s love expressed as a behavior. And soon Jesus would demonstrate his love through his behavior by becoming the sacrifice for our sins on the cross.
SMART Love, as many of the Action Plans in this book will show, is based on doing the behaviors of love, particularly as those behaviors relate to the area of our emotions. Our goal has been to increase our emotional knowledge. If we can identify our emotions, manage them, be accountable to each other, and show empathy to each other, these behaviors of love will create the strong feelings of love we so desire.
Here’s a suggested exercise. When one of our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, was twenty years old, he wanted to make certain he cultivated the development of his character. He created a list of thirteen virtues, defined them, and then determined to practice each one for a week. In three months he would work his way through the list and then start over. As a printer, he was able to create a small booklet to track his progress. On the left-hand page he described one of the virtues, and on the right-hand page he made a weekly chart. At the end of each day, he would mark with a black dot on a graph that showed whether he had succeeded or failed in living up to that virtue.
What if we did something similar? Below is the list of the apostle Paul’s fifteen behaviors of love, taken from the New International Version. Begin with “love is patient,” and talk with your spouse about how you define patience and areas of your lives where patience is difficult. Then work on being patient with each other for a week. During that time, mention the positive examples of when you each have been patient with the other. The next week, work on “love is kind,” and so on, working your way through the list of behaviors.
Love:
- Is patient
- Is kind
- Does not envy
- Does not boast
- Is not proud
- Does not dishonor others
- Is not self-seeking
- Is not easily angered
- Keeps no record of wrongs
- Does not delight in evil
- Rejoices with the truth
- Always protects
- Always trusts
- Always hopes
- Always perseveres
Doing this exercise guarantees strengthening your ability to love each other and to recognize the uniqueness of what we call love. Deepening our love for each other is the goal of SMART Love and the primary outcome of our developing its five skills.
There are other ways that the emotion of love is unique. Consider this: each of the basic emotions we’ve discussed has a purpose. There is something we are called to do once we have experienced that emotion in a healthy way. Then, once we do whatever that is, we are supposed to stop experiencing the emotion. It has served its purpose. For example, our amygdala warns us of impending danger so we will experience either anger or fear. We experience one of those to motivate us to take action and protect ourselves. We will do this through fighting, taking flight, or freezing in place. Once we have protected ourselves, the emotion dissipates, for it has served its purpose. Similarly, the healthy expression of sadness has the purpose of enabling us to grieve a loss. In the same way, shame’s purpose is to motivate us to make things right.
This, of course, is only true when the emotion is being expressed in a healthy way—in the here and now. In its unhealthy form, we get stuck in an emotion and it becomes our basic emotional posture (BEP), whether that’s fear, anger, toxic shame, or depression. These four emotions are not meant to linger, only to come when needed and then go. It’s when they linger that they become unhealthy.
On the contrary, love is meant to be a steadfast experience. In its healthy form, it’s meant to come, to stay, and to grow stronger over the years. It doesn’t basically increase or decrease in response to the changing environment or the changing circumstances or needs of the lover. Real love, therefore, is in a category of its own! The truth about love is that it is a constant. We didn’t “fall in love” in order to “fall out of love.” When we love, our intention is to stay in love.
Our hope in writing this book is to launch you on a journey of love that leads you to enjoy visiting the land of emotions safely. But it is a journey of many steps, which means it will take time and energy to work through the Action Plans for each competency. We invite you to come back again and again to the Action Plans in order to become ever more competent in each facet of SMART Love. It’s not an easy journey, for you will be taking risks each step of the way. But if at times you think of giving up the journey, ponder these words from C. S. Lewis:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.4
Love is everywhere. It’s in a hug with your spouse, a special touch on the arm, the concern of a friend, and even the look your pet gives you. You can be mad at the person you love, but you still love them. You can even be disappointed in them, but love remains. Love goes far deeper and lasts far longer than any of the emotions we’ve worked with in this book. So love stands on its own, and that’s why we call it SMART Love!