Why the Family is the First School of Love
Since there are not, and in my mind, it is hard to fathom that there ever will be, a multitude of schools that exist primarily for the purpose of cultivating the skills necessary for loving and fostering healthy relationships, one must be resigned to the fact that the family, by default functions as the primary school of love. This being the case, there are as many schools as there are families, most with some overlap in terms of the similarities and differences and very few that can be counted as being the same. It is within the confines of the family that love is defined. The family is where the meaning of love is given a structure and a shape.
This meaning-making is carried out in both verbal and non-verbal ways. The memory of childhood is imperfect and prone to alteration as time passes, but certain moments are indelible and leave lifetime impressions on the mind and the heart, and oftentimes these moments deal with the particular topic of love. What it is and what it isn’t. Looking back, I surely thought love was the feeling I got when my mother took care of me when I was sick, or on days when I wasn’t sick, the feeling I got when my father let me play hooky and stay home from school. Those moments are easy to recollect because of the positive association I have with them. Naturally my world was defined by emotion, and all my value judgments were subject to the approval of my feelings. It takes a long time to realize that love is more like the nights your mother worked overtime at the hospital, the club, the restaurant, the office, wherever, to make sure you had school clothes that fit, and possibly a new pair of shoes to go with them.
Most families are too busy trying to survive and advance, and ironically, trying to love, both individually and collectively, to pay much attention to the actual business of modeling what love is and what it isn’t. When one is accosted on all sides by the trivial and serious, the personal and the political, it is difficult to mind what is happening within the four walls of one’s home, and yet this is the task that is always important, until it becomes urgent.
This difficulty leads to confusion about love and acceptance of some faulty assumptions. The most common of these is the assumption that love is only ever about feeling good. This assumption is understandable on the part of a child who is more than anything else concerned about holding onto whatever good feeling they can find. For some children, the unbearable conditions they are forced to endure, in which they still manage to conjure up some amount of pleasure testifies to that fact.
But at some point, you have to realize that love is not always about feeling good and may in fact have very little to do with happiness, at least not the way we usually think of that word. Love produces a happiness that comes from giving rather than receiving. A fulfillment that comes from nurturing someone or something else rather than satisfying one’s own desires. This kind of love is difficult to understand and difficult to practice, and one comes into it gradually.
It is the responsibility of the family to help its members grow into this understanding. To gently disabuse its members of the faulty belief that love is synonymous with feeling good. What you find is that unhealthy families are ones where the adults themselves are just as preoccupied with feeling good as everyone else. This wish makes them incapable of guiding other family members towards a healthy definition of love. No one is able to receive the kind of nurturance that leads to growth and maturity and instead everyone within the family becomes locked in a battle to preserve their own pleasure. This is in essence a form of neglect that ensures long-term dysfunction due to the fact that everyone is stuck at the level of a child when it comes to understanding love, viewing it only through the prism of reward and punishment.
Why I Like M. Scott Peck's Definition of Love
I like it because he defines love as an action and not a feeling. Then he goes one step further and says that love is an act of service, meant to nurture yours or another’s spiritual growth.
True love, according to Peck, is about helping someone to become the best version of themselves, regardless of whether or not it aligns with your personal desires. This also implies that you yourself are someone who deserves love and occasionally should find yourself making choices that allow you to live your best life, despite what others think about those decisions.
Instead of being effortless, true love is effortful and when one realizes this, they realize what love is really about. Choosing to act with care, respect, concern, and commitment, even if you don’t always feel like it.
Why We Recreate Our Old Relationships
Meaning is always contextual and contingent upon our relationship to our environment. Therefore, our first attempt at making meaning occurs within the family. We do this reflexively, unconsciously, unintentionally, but we still do it.
Every family represents the Garden of Eden for the children that are born into them. It is the place that one must be expelled from necessarily, and the place that one always longs to return to. The meaning of home is deeply embedded in individuals. It is like the spine of a book or a picture frame. People can tell stories and create artwork, but only within the framework that is initially provided by these early experiences.
That is why the dynamics of romantic relationships often resemble the dynamics contained within relationships with early caregivers. The similarity comes out of a desire to keep alive the connection to the past. This connection is more powerful because it is formed at a time when an individual is wholly dependent on others physically and emotionally. Any meaning that is made under those circumstances becomes associated with one’s very survival.
Which is why we want to return to the metaphorical garden, even when there is nothing growing inside. Even when the garden is on fire. It is still the only home we have ever known, and it is more familiar, and still more safe than the uncertainty that awaits outside of it.
Existence precedes essence, but so does meaning. Therefore one’s essence is to a certain degree influenced by these primary relationships.
How to Turn Tension into Opportunities for Growth
It’s a sad fact that most of us are never taught explicitly how to deal with conflict and instead are only educated on the topic in ways that are implicit and wildly confusing. Stereotypically this education is received through observation of those closest to us. There are no exact words used to label or categorize the yelling and screaming, the little obscenities that get hurled across the room which no longer seem even half as funny as they used to. No words used to describe why your mother, father, sibling ran away or barricaded themselves behind a locked door, leaving you to wonder in silence about their forceful absence.
There is rarely an explanation for why these things happen, not during or after. They just do, apparently. At least to the mind of anyone witnessing these conflicts play out.
And bearing witness is typically how a person develops their template for dealing with conflict. Temperament and natural disposition play a role, but observation and learned application probably have a greater effect on an individual. I’ve learned that the differences between unhealthy styles of conflict resolution and their methods of application are artificial. Whether you barricade the door or bust through it is irrelevant. It produces the same result and essentially amounts to the same thing..
What Is Conflict?
Conflict is what occurs between individuals and groups whenever there is a recognized difference and sufficient emotional investment. Sports is an easy way to explain it because sports are one of the few and one of the most public forums where conflict can be acknowledged and accepted.
Conflicts exist between teams that are competing against one another, and it also exists between members of the same team who are often competing against each other for certain accolades. In both instances, what is at the core of these conflicts are perceived differences (my team vs your team, my desire for more playing time vs your desire for more playing time, etc.) tied to emotional investments.
Sports are designed to produce these conflicts but they are also designed to inevitably resolve them. Charles Barkely provided a good example of this. During his playing days he truly believed he was the best basketball player in the world. This belief was both the fuel and the byproduct of his success, as is the case with most professional athletes. In 1993, Charles Barkely found himself in disagreement about this with Michael Jordan, who believed in his own right that he was the best. Because their teams were competed against each other during the regular season and eventually for the NBA championship, they would have the opportunity to resolve the conflict. Not by hiding or over-reacting to it, not even through the use of words. The act of competition ensured their engagement, which is all that was needed to address it.
In his retelling of what happened, Barkley reports that as the competition began he told his daughter “Ain’t nobody in the world better than your dad at basketball.” But as it played out he went back to his daughter and said “Christina, I ain’t never said this before, I think there’s somebody better at basketball than me.” Obviously this was a humbling moment, but it also represented the resolution of that particular conflict that existed between Barkley and Jordan.
Consequences
When a person walks away from conflict and doesn’t see it through to the end, they forfeit the opportunity to influence how that conflict is resolved. They lose the ability to impact the narrative. If I’m at odds with someone and they choose not to engage with me, then to a certain extent, the truth about our issue, about them, and about me, becomes whatever I believe it to be. I might be cautious or careless about the assumptions I make and conclusions I come to. I might rely on the advice of friends to help me, but something is still missing. The inability to engage directly with the person I am in conflict with creates a psychological black box. The stories we use to cover up this void are frequently unhelpful in resolving our conflicts.
If someone is able to stay connected to the conflict and work through it, there is an opportunity to either advance or complete the business of the relationship, which in essence is what all conflicts are about, our relationships with others and with ourselves. Advancing the relationship implies learning something new about the self and the other and incorporating this new information into the framework of the relationship. This enlarges the relationship by increasing the inner capacities of both people involved in it, especially the capacity for understanding. Similarly, completing the relationship implies acknowledging the limits of what it can provide and either accepting the relationship as it is or ending it, with full recognition of its limits, and with less bitterness and frustration overall.
Either outcome is fine. What matters is the willingness to engage in the process that allows you to arrive at any outcome at all. This process can often lead to surprises. Relationships thought to be beyond repair can be mended, and relationships that seem to be working just fine can end abruptly. Conflict is an additive. When engaging in it, an individual is not only learning but also incorporating new things into themselves. This is how people become more patient, empathetic, and curious.
One of my favorite examples of this happening comes from Mad Men. In one particular episode you can feel the frustration bubbling between Don and Peggy which quickly boils over into a full-on shouting match. But, while they were both momentarily shaken, neither of them ran away in response to the other’s anger and aggression, and because of this they were able to continue working through the conflict and move forward in their relationship. Before the conflict they related to each other as boss and subordinate, but afterwards their relationship became more personal. Antagonism was replaced by understanding and even affection, which also led to them producing better work.
Our issues can be resolved, many of them to the point of improvement, if we can tolerate the temporary discomfort that comes with working through them.
*Video clips of the Mad Men episode are included below
How Love Improves Mental Health
Describing Love
In his brief but profound classic, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm said “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence” [1]. This utterance is among the many other poetic phrases in this book, which Fromm wrote in 1956, but is just as relevant today. We are paying more and more attention to the internal psychological dimensions of well-being and beginning to more fully appreciate the aspects of living that are non-material, but equally important. With this comes a growing recognition that love is more than just pretty words and romantic gestures. It is a necessary force for the healing of the psychic wounds of the past.
Even with a growing awareness of the impact of love, there are many who still might wonder how it can really benefit them, or wonder, justifiably, what love really is. Love, and this definition is by no means original, is a state of being characterized by active engagement with oneself or another [2]. Fromm believed that discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern were the qualities most necessary to learning about love, which he considered an art just like any other (cite Fromm). The physical and emotional benefits we experience in this state are the byproducts of these qualities. They are what happens when we decide to love.
Physical & Emotional Benefits
Through love there is an amplification of everything inside of us, the physical and the emotional. The heart becomes healthier, the body’s natural immunity is boosted, as well as its tolerance for pain. And the levels of the stress hormone cortisol are scaled back [3].
The hormones oxytocin and dopamine are released in larger quantities when we experience love and make these changes possible. Underneath the process by which this occurs is the simple fact is love makes us better and it makes us stronger. It is a safety net that provides all manner of protection against the challenges of life, and we can hardly face life without it. This is why the need for love is so great in children, but even as adults we still require it. Intimacy, like food, water, and shelter is a basic human need [4]. (Traupmann & Hatfield). Healing then, especially in the case of psychic and emotional difficulties, is a group endeavor, and is never complete in isolation. These difficulties that arise in the context of relationships and must also be healed in the context of relationships.
The wounds we reference are broadly characterized as various mental illnesses–depression, anxiety, mood disturbances, etc. These states of being are the antithesis of love. They take root in its absence. The solutions to the problems they cause can be found in part, through the cultivation of love. In order to do this, one must be willing to learn and practice love. To become more conscious of it and more capable of applying it to everyday life.
Barriers to Love
At this point it is fair to consider why, if the benefits of love are so obvious and considerable, why aren’t more people interested in learning and practicing it?
First, I do not think the issue is a lack of interest. Love may be a universal experience, but not as we experience it. No animal is or ever was as interested in love as human beings. Our art, our fears and our passions, our beginnings and endings, testify to the fact that we are concerned with love to the point of obsession. Instead, the barrier to love is a lack of awareness of what it truly means and a lack of effort in applying its meaning.
Most people believe in the idea that love just happens. It is something you simply fall into, and the feeling of passionate love supports this notion with its effortless quality, but the effortlessness of love is short-lived. The sense that every moment of your life has converged at the point where you are standing face to face with your loved one occurs alongside a surge of biology and the release of hormones (oxytocin & dopamine) that is otherwise rarely experienced. It is easy to get swept up in the feeling of new love and to wish for its continuation, but eventually the effects of this surge fade, and at that point, this passion can only be maintained if it is renewed through conscious effort.
None of this is particularly appealing for the person who misunderstands the meaning of love. It is difficult to accept even if you do. There is something gratifying about relinquishing responsibility and giving yourself up to an experience that feels bigger than you, but the greater pleasure is had when you embrace love as a serious discipline that requires study [5]. The attainment of love, and good mental health, is not an event, but a process. The more serious you are about practicing daily the skills that make you more capable of giving and receiving love, the more likely you are to reap their benefits.
References
Fromm, E. (2088). The art of loving. Continuum Pub.
Carnahan, J. (2020, February 11). Love heals: The powerful effects of love ( and how to create more of it). Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD. https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2020/02/11/love-heals/
Jenkins, P. (2023, November 20). Why love matters: The power of emotional connections in our lives. Brilliantio. https://brilliantio.com/why-love-matters/
Traupmann, J., & Hatfield, E. (1981). Love and its effect on mental and physical health. Aging: Stability and change in the family, 253-274.
Hooks, B. (2022). All about love: New visions. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Why You Don’t Want Your Ex to Date Anyone Else
Even in a long gone by now golden age of men who were dandies that proudly laid out their affections as well as their fleeces, and women who moved with gilded elegance, the idea that we meet the one and fall in love has been a pervasive myth. It does sometimes happen to be the case, that the first love is an enduring one. But for most people their endurance is tested in terms of how much disappointment, and consequently, how much pain they can bear throughout the course of several romantic relationships. It is not unusual that some romantic relationships end, and there are good reasons that we should want them to. What is unusual is that even when a relationship does end, and even when we no longer love a person, we sometimes refuse to accept the idea that our former beloved will go on to care for and eventually love someone else.
It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t.
We harbor the wish that our exes continue to see us in a certain light. We want them to think of their time with us as a unique and singular experience that irrevocably changed them for the better. It is oddly gratifying to know that they are forlorn without us, but this wish only reveals something about our own state of mind. When a relationship ends, even one whose demise we welcome, both people enter a state of loneliness. In this painful space of separateness, we find ourselves yearning for our former foundation. Yes, there was rot, and it was filled with cracks, but it still provided something. When we diverge from the path of coupledom, we find ourselves not knowing what comes next. The feeling of being lost is what we are trying to avoid when we cling to our exes in one form or another.
We maintain a connection to an ex by trying to transform the romantic relationship into a friendship. An effort that usually fails because we have not given ourselves enough time and space to make sense of what happened and sort ourselves out. But in another sense, it “works” because sorting out and sense-making is the last thing a person wants to do when they are reeling from the pain of a breakup.
And even when we choose to expel a former lover from our life, we still want that person to think well of us. We want to feel special in their eyes even when they long ago lost the ability to spark the same reaction in ours. It feels good to be thought of and remembered by the ones we love, but it feels better to be remembered by the ones we don’t. It makes us feel especially unique and powerful. That I could reject a person and they could still hold me in the highest regard and still want me.
It makes sense that people are dismayed when they find out their ex has a new romantic interest. They’re moving on, and if an ex is moving on then maybe we aren’t so important after all. Maybe we never were. Those kinds of thoughts are felt more than they are formulated, and they produce an aching sensation. Of course, we can’t avoid them forever, neither by turning towards the past we had with our ex or leaping into the arms of someone else without taking time for self-reflection. You can acknowledge the pain of having your ego bruised, by the mere thought of your ex caring for someone else as much as they once cared about you and accept that in all likelihood that is exactly what will happen. Their role in your story is finished for now, or forever, and all that any of us can do about it is get back to the relationship we are always in, which is with ourselves, and slowly start to rebuild.