How to know if it’s love
As a relationship coach my clients come to me to help them solve the problems they’re facing in their relationships. They tell me that they love their partner but it feels so terrible because of all the things that the partner has done wrong. I always tell them that what they’re feeling is not love. How do we know when it’s love and when it’s something else, other than love? How can we tell the difference?
Let’s talk about love
Love can be defined as a feeling that we can generate with our thoughts. When we think about how wonderful our partner is one of the emotions we’re going to feel is love. When we think how awful they are, and about all the things they should be doing but aren't, it's likely that we’ll feel something more akin to resentment, loathing or anger.
This is like a basic maths equation, but it’s the key to how we can take responsibility for feeling love in our relationship. I wrote a blog post here about taking responsibility for our own feelings. It might sound simple, but it isn’t always easy!
Let’s begin with thoughts and feelings. We’ve been socialised to believe that if someone is good and kind and behaves well and does what we want then that makes them deserving of our love. We give them love based on this idea. When we deem another person to be bad, unkind or not doing what we want then we withhold love. This way of going about things seems correct and lovely. It seems to fit in with a set of rules that have been handed to us and we’ve never questioned.
This method makes sense until we notice that we don't love the person we’re in relationship with and we are certain that it’s their fault. At this point you might want me to agree with you, to say yes, they did wrong, they don't deserve your love, so don't love them.
But who do we think feels the effect of that withholding of love? The brain wants us to believe that the other person will be hurt and punished, as they hurt and punished us but this is never what happens. The only person who feels the withholding of love is ourselves! And it hurts. The absence of love is pain. And all the while we try to convince ourselves ‘I really love them but it feels so painful.’
This is where we’ve been so confused. What we’ve been feeling is not love. Love never feels painful. Love only ever feels like love. But we’ve been telling ourselves that if we love them we’d be giving them the message that the way they’re behaving is ok with us, and it really isn’t, so we must punish them for not loving them. This makes no sense, because the only person who ends up being punished is yourself! We tell ourselves that ‘when they change then we can love them, but until then, I’m going to withhold the love’
I’m not saying here that we should think everyone is great all the time. A partner can (and frequently does) behave in ways that we don't like, that aren’t in alignment with our values, that we think cause us pain, but really the only thing that causes us pain are the thoughts we have about what our partners do. Maybe they ignore us. Do we make it mean that they don't love us so we shouldn’t love them anymore, or do we make it mean that they’re missing out on our amazingness and we give ourselves some extra love? Perhaps they haven’t cooked for us in ages. Do we make it mean that they’re unkind and thoughtless and therefore undeserving of our love, or that now you have the opportunity to be in charge of cooking what you want, and you get to love yourself some more?
The most love I have ever felt for another human being is for my child. I want to love her because it feels so good. Not loving her is unimaginable to me, impossible.
How can we take that level and depth of love we feel for our child and apply it to our partner? We don't love our child because of what they do, how they behave, their grades in school, the certificates they have. We love them simply and unconditionally. A love for a child is uncomplicated. We love them because it feels good to us as parents. We don't love them out of a sense of duty, because we should, because we have to. We love them because we want to and because it feels so darn good.
A great reason I know to love someone is because it feels so good.
When I love my partner I get to feel it, not my partner!
A client told me that she couldn’t love her partner because of something he’d done. She said that what he’d done was so awful. When I asked her why it was so awful she told me that she just wanted to love him, and now she couldn’t, that he’d denied her the ability to love him. I offered her something from teacher Byron Katie ‘You can love him, and there’s nothing he can do about that!’ Just because he did the thing doesn’t mean you can’t love him. He can’t stop you from feeling love for him.
Your partner is no different from your child in terms of how deserving or not of your love they are. Your partner is another opportunity to love someone. I think the best reason to be in a relationship with someone is because we love them. When we love them it feels so good to us, which is such a great reason to love them, right? And when we don't feel good, that’s how we know we aren’t loving them.
I like to think of it like this. Love is free. It doesn’t cost anything. In fact, it’s an investment in our emotional well being. It’s not like there’s a finite amount of love either. The more you love, the more there is, and it’s free and readily available so why not?
By contrast, not loving costs us a lot. When we don’t love the person we’re with there’s a level of ambivalence that has so much more attached to it; guilt because we tell them we love them but we don't mean it, guilt because we really should love them, after all they’re a lovely human being, shame, because all our friends have partners that they love and their relationships are so easy and simple.
How can we love someone when we don't like what they’ve done?
We’ve got really good at convincing ourselves that what someone else has done has caused us pain. Here are some good questions to be asking yourself;
Would it feel better to love them or to loathe them? (remember, we can love someone and disagree with what they did)
What is stopping me from loving them unconditionally for my own sake?
It’s useful to know that feelings are always a choice, and we can choose to feel whatever we want to in any given situation. We might choose to feel angry with someone, but this does not have to be at the expense of feeling love as well, and we never feel anger because we feel love. It is possible to feel love and anger at the same time. We get in a pickle when we tell ourselves we have no choice in the matter, and that we can’t possibly love them because of all the things they’ve done wrong, and should be doing differently.
The second thing I want to offer is to ask yourself ‘What would love do?’ This is a great question for when you’re deeply mired in the angst, when you’ve totally convinced yourself that there simply is no other way. It takes the onus off you for having to generate the love and gives it firmly to love itself. We can imagine love as a feeling, something that vibrates within our body, and as an entity all of it’s own. This question has turned things around for me when I thought all hope was lost. It puts me back in the hands of love. Which is where I always want to be.
Love feels great. Try it!
Try as we might we can’t argue with the fact that love feels great, and if it doesn't feel great then it isn’t love. Love never feels terrible. Love only ever feels like love.
If you want to talk about your relationship with your partner and to find solutions to your relationship problems then book a consultation with me today. It’s a free 60min call that could change your relationship and change your life for the better. What’s not to love?!