TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….

PART I   Identifying What You’ve Already Learned About Love

Chapter 1: Review Your Love Life………………………………………………………………

Chapter 2: Falling in Love and Being in Love………………………………………………..

Chapter 3: What Did Your Family Teach You about Love?……………………………

PART II   Recovering From Disappointments In Love

Chapter 4: Relearning How to Grieve for Lost Love……………………………………..

Chapter 5: Learning to Take Care of Yourself……………………………………………….

Chapter 6: Relearning How to Receive in Love……………………………………………..

Chapter 7: Relearning How to Give in Love…………………………………………………

Chapter 8: Learning How to Cope with Hurt in Love……………………………………

Chapter 9: Learning to Forgive and Forget in Love………………………………………..

PART III   Freeing Yourself To Love

Chapter 10: Learning to Communicate in Love……………………………………………..

Chapter 11: Learning to Be Independent in Love…………………………………………..

Chapter 12: Relearning to be Spontaneous in Love………………………………………..

Chapter 13: Learning Not to Control the Person You Love…………………………..

Chapter 14: Relearning to Be Honest in Love……………………………………………..

PART IV   Learning To Be Intimate In Love

Chapter 15: Learning to Share in Love……………………………………………………….

Chapter 16: Relearning to Trust in Love…………………………………………………….

Chapter 17: Learning to Keep Your Promise of Commitment……………………….

Chapter 18: Learning How to Relate in Romance and Sex…………………………….

Chapter 19: Relearning How to Be Yourself in Love……………………………………

PART V   Keeping Your Love Life Healthy

Chapter 20: Learning to Work On Your Love Relationship…………………………..

Chapter 21: Some Love Life Problems: What They Don’t Tell You…………………

Postscript………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Appendix: Unhealthy Love Life Lessons………………………………..……………………

Author’s Bio…………………………………………………………………………………………..…

                             Acknowledgements

I have been privately and therapeutically thinking about the importance of love for many years. I now want to share what I have learned with more people than just my patients. The Internet is a wonderful place to do just that. As a consequence of these efforts the Healthy Love Relationship: Learn How and the Love Life Learning Center blog were born.

I am indebted to my wife and colleague, Victoria Jordan. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to practice having a healthy love relationship with her. Most of the ideas described in this book have been tested in our daily love life. Victoria’s ability to forgive and forget my limitations in love is a reminder to me of how lucky I am to be her husband.

Another more recent key player in the evolution of my thinking about love is our son Bradley. Besides my love for him as our son and a person, witnessing his growing ability to express and receive love in our family is a wonderful experience in our lives.

I would also like to thank my editor, Sarah Cypher, for the great editing work. She understood the deeper meanings in this book, and I was inspired each time she brought them out and clarified them for me.

My final acknowledgement goes to my analyst and friend, the late Dr. Ben Wolstein. He taught me a lot about love at a time in my life when the lessons were painful. Unfortunately his knowledge about love was never published. I’d like to believe if he were around he’d be gratefully amused that I have remembered everything he taught me and included it all in this book.

                                    Introduction

Nowhere in our contemporary society do we take the time to teach about love with the same enthusiasm we lavish upon other topics of human interest. Perhaps we do not yet believe that how we relate in love can be learned, the basic tenet of this book. As of yet, our society has not taken upon itself the responsibility of ensuring that its people learn about the healthy love relationship during their early lives. Most of us remain loyal to the uncontested learning about love that occurs in the random experiences of the family of origin, however healthy or unhealthy that may be. Leaving the teaching about love to the family of origin certainly plays its part in shaping both the joys and the unhappiness in human experience.

For now, the corrective learning about love that is needed falls to the individual. Since love is by nature individualistic, for and by particular human beings, it is among individuals that we have the best opportunity to learn how to relate in love. Not only will there always be individuals who have an intuitive understanding of love, there will always be a capacity for love in each of us born to this world. In many instances, the love will be experienced and given. In many instances, it will not. Knowing that a capacity for love is inherent in our natures, however, provides the assurance required to remain optimistic in these troubled times.

Even more optimism is possible when we realize that the right kind of learning has the power to create a healthy love relationship. In this regard, our ability to learn how to relate in love is truly a wonderful gift. So much of what ails us can be traced back to the disappointments and absence of love. Learning that this misfortune can never extinguish the capacity to love we possess provides each of us with an opportunity to outgrow the effects of limited learning. I hope this book encourages you to identify what you’ve learned about love, to challenge what is unhealthy about what you’ve learned, and to learn what is required to create and enjoy a healthy love relationship. I’ve tried making this book as practical as possible to help you accomplish this goal. In fact, I think that is precisely what makes this book different from most other treatments of this topic.

As for myself, I confess it took me six whole years to learn what I needed to learn about love to get my love life right. The biggest and most challenging lesson for me as a single man was to find a woman I could love and live with, as-is, without having to “fix” her or change her into some other person I wanted her to be. It is much less work to love people for who they already are, with a greater probability of success to boot. For me the love-life-changing lesson was that people change because they want to, not because someone else wants them to.

This is not to say those six years were a breeze. I met Victoria at a job interview, fell head over heels in love, scared the hell out of myself, and at the time had no idea what to do with what I had fallen into. Disappointing dates, frustrating conversations, a few hurtful relationships with other people, and the low-grade anxiety that comes with not feeling ready for someone I needed in my life. All these growing pains had to come and go before I could admit to myself that Victoria was the one. Boy, am I lucky she was available after I learned my love life lessons and came to my senses.

What stayed with me after all of this was the understanding that it was possible to learn how to have a better love life. We’re all taught how to learn from a very early age and when learning we are at our best and most resourceful. So why not apply this skill to love? From what I’ve observed and lived through over the years, I believe we can all learn a few things about our love lives to help us get it right. Being of a helping nature, I wanted to help people improve their love lives by sharing some things about love that will help people learn some things about love, sooner rather than later. In fact, this was the main inspiration and motivator for writing this book. If I could present in a straightforward way some valuable love life lessons that are easy to apply, you might avoid some of the pitfalls and problems. Why not?

This book is about defining the ingredients of a healthy love relationship. I have spent more than twenty years thinking about this problem both in my personal life and as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Besides my own journey, I am delighted to share what my patients taught me over the years, as well as what I learned from the various mentors who understood a lot about love but never wrote about it. I put all of this together, speaking in a practical way about healthy love relationships. I offer a few ideas in this book that will challenge you to reflect on your own love life beliefs and whether they’re working for you these days. I hope to get under your skin far enough that you might consider love in new ways you hadn’t thought about before. So, read the book, take what is useful, apply it to your love life, and, I hope, do all of that in much less time than it took me.

Each chapter of this book is devoted to one particular ingredient of a healthy love life. I suppose that if you were writing this book, you’d have something to say about what ingredients you personally would include or leave out. No doubt the list of ingredients I have included in the healthy love relationship reflect my own experience and beliefs about which ones are important and which ones aren’t. I’m hoping you can relate to my experiences and get what you need out of reading this book.

Nevertheless, I’ve spent a lot of my time watching and listening to other people. Most of the ingredients on my list seem to be pretty important in the love lives of the people I know and worked with. So I’ll stand behind this list, certainly not as the final word as to what goes into a healthy love relationship, but pretty close. Now, if you decide to leave out a few of the proposed ingredients in this book, who’s to say you wouldn’t still have a healthy love relationship? It just might be that some of these ingredients are more important than others, but I’ll leave that for you to decide.

I think we can assume that a healthy love relationship is a relationship that’s growing. In order for growth to happen, the two individuals in the relationship must be growing, as well. A healthy love relationship requires feeding and proper care. In fact, you can think of the ingredients I will describe in this book as, the food love needs to grow. Each and every one of the ingredients discussed in this book, in combination with all the others, keeps love healthy and growing.

Think of a multivitamin. You need certain vitamins and minerals on a daily basis to thrive. If certain ones are missing over time, you will develop some kind of physical symptoms related to the particular deficiency. The same is true for love. Like a growing and changing physical body, love needs certain nutrients to grow and thrive. When these vital nutrients are missing, a love relationship starts to get sick. The relationship stops growing, and the love will die if you starve it long enough.

Part I of this book, which includes the first three chapters, focuses mostly on what you’ve already learned about love and what you might do about it. In the first two chapters I’m going to prepare you for that list of ingredients I promised you. First, before you even start nurturing and taking better care of your love relationship, I’ll introduce you to a way of thinking about and analyzing its health right now. In Chapter One I’ll describe the Love Life Review, a simple way of figuring out what you need to change in your love life to make it healthier. The emphasis will be on identifying what you’ve learned that isn’t working, and then challenging it. Once you’ve isolated what isn’t working in your love life, you can use the rest of this book to pick and choose new elements to learn (or relearn, as it were) and add them to your love life. The Love Life Review is a simple method of guiding you through this exercise.

In Chapter Two we’ll talk about love, the emotion. I devote a whole chapter to love to weed out all the misconceptions that are out there. We can’t really talk about love unless we know what we are talking about, can we? I don’t expect consensus. What I do expect is to show you some of the important and invariant elements in this experience we call love, and invite you to become familiar with them. I say invariant because they never change and are fundamental human experiences.

Chapter Three should get you thinking. The Love Life Review, as a method of identifying what is complicating or interfering with a healthy love relationship, is based on a belief that our family of origin is the first and most important classroom for love. It behooves you to know exactly what it is you learned while you were hanging around your family, the first ingredient on our list of essentials for a healthy love relationship. This will require some heavy-duty thought, reflection, and some tolerance for the feelings you might have. The payoff will be well worth your time and trouble. In this chapter I’ll give you a few ideas that’ll help you work with your memories. For a practical list of some of the unhealthiest love life ‘lessons,’ and the kinds of questions you can ask yourself to figure out what applies to you, take a look at the Appendix entitled “Some Unhealthy Love Life Lessons.”

Part II emphasizes the need to recover from past love life disappointments on your way to a healthier love life, and includes chapters four through nine. Chapter Four will introduce you to the second ingredient of a healthy love relationship: Being able to grieve the loss of love if and when it occurs. Why is this so important? Because you are not going to risk love, at least not the deep kind of love, if you don’t trust your ability to work your way through the loss of that love if it happens. A lot of people have had a few early love life disappointments, broadly defined as not getting the love needed in a relationship, by the time they make it to adulthood. If these disappointments have not been properly grieved, they can interfere with forming a healthy love relationship as an adult. It’s enlightening to realize love and grief are two sides of the same feeling.

Chapter Five focuses on your self-esteem in the form of how well you are taking care of yourself. The formula we’ll be working with is simple: When you take better care of yourself, your love life gets better. This relationship is essential. Improving your self-esteem is the easiest and one of the most effective ways to make short-term improvements in your love life. Plus, working with yourself is never a waste of time. At some point you might have to take a break between love relationships and be on your own for a while. Learning how to be by yourself cultivates an interesting and ultimately useful relationship between you and you. The quality of this private relationship with yourself will have everything to do with the quality of love that comes into your life.

Chapters Six and Seven address a couple of the essential psychological functions in love: giving and receiving. It is important to find a balance between both in your love life. I’ll talk about what happens when the scale is tipped to far in one direction or the other. I often see people who give everything they’ve got and accept very little or nothing in return, as though receiving love is not okay. It’s predictable that they will eventually burn out. I’ll talk about the caregivers among us who fit this profile. On the other end of this love-function spectrum are the people who expect love without giving enough of it back. This narcissistic approach to a love relationship is bound to create problems. Letting go of the need to fix past disappointments in a current love relationship is always a part of healing these excesses.

Chapter Eight explores the importance of coping with hurt feelings in a love relationship. One of the bits of advice I got in my life was to never expect a hurt-free journey if I was going to fall in love. Boy was that a surprise! I was all suited up in my armor and ready to be in love without getting hurt. What I didn’t figure on was how my self-protective armor was going to trap my emotions and undercut my ability to be emotionally intimate with the person I love. The better approach is to figure out how to build up your tolerance for the bumps and bruises that occur in a relationship over time. For me, it came down to fortifying my personal faith in my ability to heal the hurts of love in or out of a relationship without having to protect myself so much.

In Chapter Nine I talk about forgiveness, but I marry the concept to the most unlikely companion you could ever pick: forgetting. Forgiveness for whatever transgressions take place in a love relationship is a very popular topic; you really can’t find a book on love that doesn’t touch on this issue. But these two, forgiveness and forgetting, come as a pair. I can see you throwing up your hands and saying, the doctor has finally lost it, forgetting what happened? In this chapter I make the point that forgiveness without forgetting offers little in the way of healing love after hurt.

Part III includes chapters ten through fourteen, and concentrates on the importance of freeing yourself, letting go, in preparation for love, or deeper love if you are already in a relationship. Chapter Ten turns to one of the most vital ingredients in a love relationship: communication. Put it this way—you can’t be in a healthy love relationship without “communing” with the person you love. Communication is a two way street that connects you to your partner. It is an intimacy-builder, the relay that makes a relationship happen. Granted, there are different forms of communication in love, and we’ll get to all of them. The hardest one, of course, is the one where we have to rely on language. Putting our thoughts and feelings into words can sometimes feel like trying to wear that old suit you used to wear before you put on weight. There is sometimes more to the ideas and feelings than the words can accommodate. We will discuss the benefit and necessity of practice, so that you can get good at tailoring your words to fit your feelings.

In Chapter Eleven we consider the state of being independent in love. Some people in my profession think of a love relationship as a mutual dependency. I reserve the word dependency for children, the elderly, and people with emotional problems. For me, dependency is a red flag that your childhood disappointments in love are unresolved and still pretty active in your life. Independence is a maturational experience, strengthening you to stand on your own and be your own person. When you reach that state of mind as an adult, the benefits for your love life are obvious. I think of a healthy love relationship as a mutual independency: in which two people are independently in love with each other because they’ve moved the childhood disappointments out of their love relationship.

In Chapters Twelve and Thirteen I talk about the two forms of control that are possible in a love relationship: self-control and control over the person you love. Whether and to what extent control is helpful in a love relationship is an important question. In many cases, control is destructive in love, and we’ll try to understand the conditions under which control takes a turn for the worst. Unfortunately, there are too many people trying to love and be loved in abusive relationships. In Chapter Thirteen I talk about the psychology of abusive relationships and the changes required to get out of one. Abusive love relationships are a prime example of the need to understand the influences of the past on your current love life.

In Chapter Fourteen I’ll talk about honesty as a friendship value, which when mixed with the state of being in love naturally creates depth in a relationship. Billy Joel might have been wrong when he said, “Honesty is such a lonely word.” Yes, honesty can be a lonely word—or a loving word, if it is made an essential ingredient in a healthy love relationship. The problem is that we are often taught how to lie and deceive in order to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We learn this defensive maneuver so thoroughly that when we are called upon to be honest and open in love, we don’t trust ourselves to tell the truth about what we think and feel anymore. This appears to be the state of our world. Telling lies has become easier than telling the truth. In the hands of a person who recognizes the relationship between love and truth, however, the world can change for the better one relationship at a time. You can relearn and practice telling the truth of your personal experience to the person you love.

In Part IV of this book, which includes chapters fifteen through nineteen, the focus is on what needs to be learned to be really intimate in love. In Chapter Fifteen I will talk about sharing as one of the ingredients of a healthy love relationship that helps develop the intimacy that best “contains” love. Intimate sharing is the reciprocity that goes on between two people in love. Work on intimacy by learning together how to value and inquire into the personal experiences of your partner, and vice versa. This intimate reciprocity is to be differentiated from the narcissism that has gripped the interpersonal lives of so many people. Love life narcissism is a byproduct of the search for a lost or imperfect childhood love; for such a person, adult love relationships are misguided opportunities to correct the past. To overcome an uneven reciprocity, we must grieve the loss of love, repair our broken hearts, and learn how to live with the joys and limitations of a matured love relationship.

In Chapter Sixteen I’ll talk about the various defensive maneuvers used to try coping with the absence of trust in love. Without trust, a love relationship degenerates into an experience of mutual suspiciousness and defense. Defenses are a dime a dozen, and there are certainly more than a dozen to pick from; it’s humbling to think that anything and everything can be used as a defense against the discomforts of falling in love—from excessive work, to keeping busy, to otherwise healthy self-absorbing activities. Thank God every once in a while a person will pop his or her head out of the defensive fortress and perceive the possibility for something even more emotionally fulfilling. This is when the fun starts. In this state of mind you can start learning to tolerate the vulnerability involved in falling in love in order to get the ultimate reward: a healthy love relationship.

In Chapter Seventeen I’ll talk about the experience of making a promise in a love commitment. If you think of a love commitment as a promise kept to someone you love, the idea starts to tug on a few more heart strings than just using the scary word commitment alone. Promises are what you give to a person you love. Promises of love require “com-promises” to work. We’ll focus on the fears that occur when some people think of the word commitment. My old friend Dr. Ben Wolstein used to say that a commitment of love sets a person free. At the time I was under his care I used to feel that commitment meant control and a loss of freedom. One day I asked him what he meant when he said that a love commitment sets a person free. It seemed so counterintuitive to me at the time. He said it’s when you’ve fallen in true love and given a commitment of love that you’ve set yourself free from the need to search for love.

In Chapter Eighteen I’ll talk about the need to relate with the person you love in romance and sex. Relate is a code word for reciprocal emotional intimacy. Sex freed from societal, moral, and familial restrictions is in need of relationship. It seems to me that romance and sex still need to evolve a little because they’ve spent so much time in the closet. Without intimacy, sex is empty. Without intimacy, sex may attract other more negative emotions and experiences. As evidenced by a sex industry which draws the attention of young people away from the lessons of love that would teach about sex as a mode of intimate relatedness. We can do better.

In Chapter Nineteen we will explore the coveted state of being yourself in love. One of the great joys of being in a healthy love relationship is the opportunity to be your true self fully with at least one person in the world. This is how it should be. Your love relationship can become a sanctuary of interpersonal acceptance and relaxation. This kind of experience is fundamentally healing. The stresses and strains of life are relinquished, at least temporarily, because you’ve got a place you can go and take those social and work roles off at the end of the day like a tight pair of shoes. In short, the more you can be yourself in your love relationship, the greater the health of your love relationship.

In Part V, chapters twenty and twenty-one, we’ll conclude with a focus on keeping your love life healthy. In Chapter Twenty, I’ll present to you one way to use this book to develop your love relationship. Sorry, being in love does require a bit of work. Here, I invite you to pick and choose those love life ingredients you’ll need to work on. The ones you need to strengthen or start creating in your love relationship will guide the work that you and the person you love will put into deepening and broadening your love for each other.

Chapter twenty-one is the final chapter in this book and a number that is usually associated with adulthood. I thought about that coincidence. Maybe it’s not a coincidence at all. Maybe when you’ve understood and begun applying the ideas in this book, your love life will develop in all the ways you need it to, wouldn’t that be great. In this chapter I’ll discuss a few of the more common love life concerns from a few perspectives you might not expect. The idea is to get beyond the obvious whenever necessary. Sometimes the issue in charge of what happens in your love life is not so obvious. It has to be dug out from under all the misconceptions and misunderstandings we all have about love. The love life problems I’ve chosen to put through this treatment are divorce, cheating, men’s troubles with love, women’s troubles with love, and falling in love with married people.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the ingredients of the healthy love relationship I’ve chosen to present in this book, start with what you were taught about love in your family of origin, and conclude with a chapter on being yourself in love. That’s no coincidence. We go from the influence of others, to being your real, true, unique self in your love relationship as the best and more satisfying, and healthiest, way to be in love. And the fascinating part is, being yourself, really letting yourself be you, is a form of ‘love’ that has a lot of similarities to the experience of being in love with someone else. I’m figuring the connection between these two states of mind, or more precisely heart, has something to do with the ‘love’ that you are giving yourself when you get out of your own way and let yourself be yourself, your feelings, your thoughts, your needs, the true you. It doesn’t really matter who gets the love you’re giving, you or somebody else. What matters is your love is given and received.

Now that you have a sense of the ingredients required to have and sustain a healthy love relationship, you’ll no doubt appreciate the important positive influence of being yourself in your love life. This in combination with your native ability to learn, or relearn as the case may be, what you will need to know and practice to keep love healthy, makes a healthy love relationship attainable by everybody regardless of who you are. Starting with the next chapter of this book we’ll get into each one of our ingredients in depth so you can start applying them right away to your love life.

                                         PART I

        IDENTIFYING WHAT YOU’VE ALREADY

                       LEARNED ABOUT LOVE

               Chapter 1: Review Your Love Life

The backbone of this book is what I call the Love Life Review. It’s an exercise in figuring out what belongs in a healthy love relationship—and what does not. If you are reading this to educate yourself about love for the purpose of enjoying a healthier love life, begin here. A Love Life Review has three parts: identifying what you have already learned about love, unlearning the lessons that are not working for you, and practicing something different that will improve your love life.

I don’t suspect you’ll have much motivation to review your love life, or anybody else’s for that matter, unless you’re hurting and unhappy. You’ve probably already tried a few things to disburden your love life. You’re probably hoping that you can find a quick fix that makes transformative changes. I don’t blame you. It’s just hard to do all of this fast.

No, I’m not offering a quick cure for what ails you. My approach involves a bit of work on your part. Chances are, you’ll have to think in terms of learning and practicing the things I talk about in this book over time. But I can promise you, if you do take the time and do make the effort, the end result will be a more satisfying love life. You will identify the limiting lessons you’ve learned about love, figure out how to let them go, and deeply consider ways to produce a healthier outcome. This book will help you review your love life for the purpose of making changes for the better.

Each and every chapter in this book will unlock its secrets when you apply the following keys: What did I already learn about this particular love life issue, what do I have to unlearn about this particular love life issue, and what new things do I have to learn or relearn to make my love life better? Once you’ve applied this key to a chapter or two, the rest will come easy. Before long, I expect you’ll get pretty good at learning how to have a healthier love life. No matter what, I’ll help you along the way.

You know, most of us resist the idea that a person can learn or relearn how to have a better love life. I think the reason for this resistance comes from the idea that no self-respecting adult should have to be taught how to be in love. No sir, you should have that straight in your mind the moment you step out into the world. The assumption is that you already learned whatever you are supposed to learn about love from your family of origin, no final exam required.

We’ll dive fully into this topic later, in a whole chapter devoted to it. For now I’d like to tell you how troublesome this idea has been to me as a clinical psychologist. It has stopped people from questioning whether their current ideas about love actually help them in their love lives. Unless you are willing to question the inevitability of your love life experiences, you’ll never get around to learning new and better ways of being in love. Chances are, you’ll think what you’ve learned about love as a youngster is off limits to investigation or just beyond understanding. In fact, I’ve heard people describe what their family of origin taught them about love in such sacred terms that I am baffled how such a person could make the same love life mistakes over and over without the slightest inkling that trying something new might help.

Once we’re able to figure out your earliest lessons about love, you can decide what you want to keep and what you’re willing to discard. (If those early lessons were perfect and loving, believe me, you are in the minority.) You could have gotten your instruction about love simply from watching the elders in your family relate to each other. How did they treat each other? If you saw your parents giving affection and being loving toward each other, you will have absorbed these experiences through observation.

If you’re a boy, you learned things about how a man should and does treat a woman. You learned about the expression of emotion by watching your father and other male family members. You even learned things about how you should feel about yourself by watching other people’s expression of self-esteem or lack thereof. If you are a girl you learned a lot by watching your mother and how she relates to your father. You learned things about what you should and shouldn’t tolerate in a love relationship. Beyond the superficial constraints offered by the gender roles in a family, we all learned quite a bit from both parents and other adults in our extended families. The question now is, what are we doing with all this learning?

You can expect that what you’ve learned about love is operating at some semi-conscious level in your mind. When you learn things associated with the important people in your life, those lessons often get stored in the back of the closet somewhere with the old shoes, but they remain very much an active process in your life. It’s like a recording that plays over and over again. The repetition is due to the fact that it’s famil-y-iar to you. In fact the only real reason you would have to open that closet and see what’s inside is deep unhappiness or hurt—usually the kind that arises because you are semi-consciously doing something painful over and over again. You might discover that those lessons are steering your adult love life as if it’s on automatic pilot. Generally speaking, when your love life is operating on its own, without your conscious approval and guidance, there is a pretty good possibility you won’t be very happy with the outcome.

For one thing, it’s not that hard to assume that your love life is operating off of a set of beliefs that have long since gone out of date. Their usefulness has expired. Think of it this way: What you’ve learned about love took place probably indirectly when you were very young. You didn’t get to choose what you wanted to learn. You just learned it because that particular love life lesson was being taught in your family at that time. You’ve grown up now, left the house, and the situation has changed. Common sense would dictate that it’s now time to examine what you’ve learned and to update it.

So when you decide to allow yourself to perform this examination, you’ve made a conscious effort to own your love life. The first step toward realizing this ownership is to understand what you’ve learned about love growing up. Dedicate a period of time to reviewing the love relationships of the key people in your family of origin and ranking them according to how close you were to each couple in question. If you were really close, expect to have learned quite a bit from them. In more distant relationships, chances are you’ve learned considerably less. Look for similarities between your love life and theirs. Keep a running journal during this period for thoughts, feelings, images, dreams, and memories that give you the clues you’ll need to figure out your key “teachers.” Once you’ve discovered who they are, you can see the extent to which you’ve imitated some aspects of their love lives.

From there you can include other important people in your life—friends, mentors, neighbors, etc.—and how they may have influenced your love life. Remember, your objective is to get what you learned about love out of the back closet and into the daylight. Once your repetitive learned love life patterns are identifiable, you can begin the business of challenging their dominance in your love life.

Your Love Life Review now moves into stage two. You’ve identified what you’ve learned about love; now you have to decide what you plan to keep and what you plan to throw away. This is the unlearning stage. You can’t keep everything you’ve learned about love growing up. So much of it is out of date, and clearly doesn’t work very well in your love life. In fact a lot of what you’ve learned about love was never intended for your love life. The beauty of this method is its simplicity. In this culture, we are all trained very early and many times over in the fine art of learning—first from our parents, and then in preschool, grade school, high school, and beyond. “How to be in love” will be just one more lesson in life.

Your task now is to decide what to drop, and then unlearn it. Here, I’m going to assume that you may be unfamiliar—and even a little uncomfortable—with the term unlearn. What does this mean? To unlearn something you have learned assumes that the process of learning can be reversed. It’s like going out the same way you came in. Think of driver’s ed. Initially you’re very conscious of the steps involved in driving a car. Then what you’ve learned goes into semi-automatic and then automatic pilot. You can now think of other things as you drive to work.

The unlearning process involves carefully going back over the steps again and deleting whatever you’re not interested in keeping in your love life. You’re basically identifying the thoughts, feelings, and actions that support what you originally learned about love. The mere fact of bringing these details back to consciousness from mental oblivion puts you in the driver’s seat again. Simply put, you create a consciousness for what you are trying to get rid of in your love life. Consciousness allows you to do the cutting.

Now, you will challenge the various old beliefs, opinions, habits, and feelings that have rigidly positioned themselves in your love life. If you are keeping a journal, it will come in pretty handy now. You want to be very clear in your mind about what you’ve learned about love that has caused you to make mistakes and be unhappy in your love life. The clearer the better, so write stuff down. Fill those pages.

I’ll be spending a good portion of my time in each one of the subsequent chapters helping you challenge the beliefs, feelings, and actions you wish to unlearn. Remember: Change only comes when there is enough room for change to take place. Making room means you’ve tossed out some no longer useful love life habits that were taking up space in your mind and heart. Expect that some of the beliefs, feelings, and actions you’ve identified for demolition will leave you with a bittersweet feeling. Have some empathy for yourself. You can’t learn things in childhood, hang onto them in adulthood, and let them go without feeling some grief about it. Whether or not something was good or bad for you, if it is familiar, letting go of it invites sadness.

What kinds of things have to be unlearned, exactly? Let’s consider a few common love life beliefs that get most people into trouble. How about, I can make someone who doesn’t love me, love me. In my experience as a psychologist this particular belief creates a significant amount of misery in love. The truth is, you can’t change another human being. You can’t create, control, rehabilitate, or predict love in another person. Nobody has that kind of power. This is the kind of love life belief that is usually protecting the believer from realizing and probably feeling a disappointment or loss of some kind.

Let’s do another one. How about, I’m not a complete or valued person until somebody loves me. Remember the song, “You’re Nobody until Somebody Loves You?” This is almost the same thing. The mistaken belief here is that you make a whole person by combining two people. Seem crazy to you? Think about it. Why shouldn’t you be whole and valued just as you are? Indeed you are, except you might not believe it. The hard part is, beliefs have a lot to do with what we end up experiencing. If you are going around in your love life looking for another person to fill out the gaps in your own personality, think of the burden this places on the other person, and the dysfunction it could create in you.

One last example. How about, Jumping into another relationship as soon as possible is the best way to fix a broken heart. There are a lot of people who believe this. They might not consciously know they believe it because the belief is tucked away somewhere deep inside their heads. Rebounding is the term used to describe this particular love life trick, and involves an attempt to escape grief by distraction. The logic goes like this: If my heart is broken because I’ve lost someone I love, I can get away from the pain by jumping into another relationship. Sorry, but the heart doesn’t work like that. Rebounding only delays the inevitable grief, and unfortunately, that grief comes roaring back, intense and distorted. It’s healthier to take a while and grieve a loss right after it happens, and only then move on.

Last, the third step in your Love Life Review will help you learn something new about love—or relearn something you used to know about love but forgot. So much about growing up involves forgetting things we once knew, so let’s not rule out the possibility of relearning useful love life lessons. Let me give you an example. In a later chapter of this book I’m going to talk about learning to take care of yourself as an important part of your overall love life education. You’ll notice I’m using the word learning for this particular task because taking care of yourself is not really something humans know how to do when we come into this world. It’s an acquired skill with a lot of influence on your love life. Something you were born knowing, however, was to be spontaneous in love. You didn’t have to think about whether to express delight or to smile when you felt happy. Spontaneity is basically another word for freedom. We’ll talk a lot about this particular love life relearning in a later chapter devoted exclusively to it.

So once you’ve started successfully challenging some of your outdated beliefs about love, you’ll need to replace them with beliefs that work better. Does it seem weird to think of your beliefs as something you can change, revise, update or modify? Good. This is exactly what I want you to feel. Too often we don’t pay enough attention to what we learn to believe in. We usually don’t make the connection between what we believe and what we’ve experienced, bad or good. When you realize that you can shape your beliefs, you can expect radical changes in your experience of life. This is a personal responsibility none of us can afford to live without.

What you’ll be learning to replace are your old, worn-out, probably-never-worked-well beliefs with the truths about love that have survived the passage of time and are known intuitively by pretty much everybody who is happy in love. What usually happens when you hear or read one is a simple recognition of its validity. For example, if I tell you that when two people in love are honest with each other, their love grows, chances are you will see the simple truth of this statement even if you are convinced it’s better to manipulate and misrepresent what you believe to the people you love. How about this one: You can’t avoid getting hurt when you are in a love relationship. Do you think I am crazy? Doesn’t it make better sense to protect yourself from getting hurt?

No. Most people in love—we’ll just call them lovers for simplicity’s sake—who are brave enough to be vulnerable and open to love will tell you that you can’t protect yourself and be open and vulnerable at the same time. Defensiveness naturally decreases your ability to directly experience love. This is how the mind is built. If you are going to play in the field of love, you’re going to accept the fact that you might get bruised or scraped from time to time. Of course you’ll expose yourself to this risk for a good cause; that is, trying to work out the problems of being in love. Once you get past your initial defensiveness and self-protectiveness, you’ll see the simple truth in this very real expectation.

So when you start learning or relearning things about love that help you find love, sustain love, commit to love, leave a dead relationship in a healthy way if necessary, and improve your feelings about yourself, the health of your love life increases. My job in this book is to introduce you to the Love Life Review, convince you to review your love life, and help you apply your review as an effective method of making improvements. You can use it to update and revise what you believe about love so that your beliefs no longer interfere with the satisfaction and fulfillment you deserve.

By the way, once you’ve recognized this connection between what you believe and the quality of your experience in life, with a little practice you’ll get good at personally owning and supervising what you believe in all areas of your life. Beliefs were never meant to be items we inherit or create without revision. Beliefs are tools of thought. Their true purpose is to help us make sense out of life. While young, we receive beliefs from others. Growing up requires that we should add or subtract, modify or reject, until what we believe represents who we are as unique individuals. This book is intended to help you do that in your love life.

       Chapter 2: Falling in Love and Being in Love

Now let’s focus on the reason we’re all here, love. What is this thing that we all want but which drives us so crazy? Before you answer that question, let me illustrate how much we humans want this thing we call love. Consider the fact that those of us who didn’t get enough love earlier in life have a hard time giving up on the possibility of finally getting it as adults. Many a patient has spent countless hours in psychotherapy talking about what they didn’t get from the people who were supposed to give it to them. And if they are really unlucky, they will spend a large portion of their adulthood looking for the love they didn’t get. We’ll get back to this.

For now let’s talk about two states of mind: falling in love and being in love. By the way, notice that little word, in. In before love means a lot. It means that you are under the spell of this experience we call love. If you just love someone, you care a lot about that person but aren’t under the spell. For some people, being in love is like losing their minds. Recently I’ve heard it equated with being stupid or in a stupor. I don’t recommend either of these characterizations to you, but we can all understand the reference.

To be in love is a fall. To get there you have to fall in love; you trip into this particular state of mind. This part about losing control is very important to understand. You can’t do love if you are in control of your emotions. Love requires that you lose control of yourself. Now that’s not very appealing to most of us, right? Who wants to lose control, even for a good cause? Essentially, that’s what it comes down to: losing control for a good cause. But let’s back up a minute. Some people are averse to falling down. They don’t like the feeling. I don’t blame them. The problem, though, is that love is going to feel uncomfortable at best and intolerable at worst.

So, to fall in love requires that you lose control of your feelings or emotions. By implication, you have been changed. You are not the same person you were before. Falling, as the operative term in this expression, makes sense now. (I think the person who invented this phrase to describe being in love was probably out to scare the bejesus out of people. He or she could have been one of those newly burned lovers in the mood to convince everybody else that love was a hazard.) The point is, if we continue to look at this feeling as a falling into something, a state of being taken over by the momentum of the emotion, we’ll forfeit a bit of important understanding. A more technically accurate way of describing the initiation of this in love state of mind is to think about it as being subjected to something from the inside out. Right now, I don’t really have a better way to talk about this, because the language available is limited at present. The short of it is, when you fall in love you are really being overtaken by something inside of you that is emerging into your direct experience of yourself. Where does it come from? Now this is the mysterious part.

Is love coming from the person you are falling in love with? I think not. Is it coming from the hole you’ve fallen into? I think not. So where does love come from? My guess is inside of you. Without getting spiritual about this, I think the feeling is in each of us requiring the right conditions to emerge. Technically speaking, it’s psychologically merged with the rest of your mind until it is stimulated in some way to e-merge. When love does emerge and create an in love state of mind, its potency is mind-blowing. In other words, love at this level has the power to overwhelm you. And it is supposed to.

You may not like to be overwhelmed—meaning mentally over the helm and into the drink. In any case, how you react to being overwhelmed is a matter for a later chapter. You could say that love carries such a powerful surge so that it can transform your mind and prepare you for a very deep connection. Think of it as a flood, designed to wash away certain personal mental structures to prepare for you a specifically interpersonal feeling, one oriented toward one specific person. What I mean is falling in love is about loving one unique human being. That’s about as specific as you can get in this life.

I’m in love with my wife. There is only one of her in this world. A byproduct of my love for her is an acute awareness of her uniqueness. Of course there are a few matters to deal with as a consequence of this depth. One is, you realize there is only one of the person you are in love with. Sorry, no clones. I have to admit, there’s a bit of stress that comes from being in love with someone like this. You fear the loss and grief of possibly losing the intimate relationship in love, but we’ll get back to all of that a little later.

So you fall in love from the inside out. If that’s not enough to confuse the hell out of you, I don’t know what will. Regardless, being confused never stopped anyone from being in love. In fact, count on some mental confusion to be part of this experience of being in love, at least at first. Consider your inevitable reaction to this new mental state of falling into love: in a word, conflict! Part of you wants no part of it and longs to simply return to that over-controlled, blissful, solo state of mind where you don’t have to need anybody. It tries to convince the other side of you to walk away from this madness.

Conflict is never easy. To be conflicted about something guarantees a certain amount of emotional paralysis. Think of this as the shock that comes after you’ve been smitten. For most lovers this conflicted state of mind resolves into an acceptance of falling into love and a preoccupation with having their object (person) of desire. If you are fairly secure within yourself and have a reasonably stable self-esteem, being in love will be manageable at first and immediately enjoyable. Your preoccupation with the person you are in love with begins to demonstrate the next emerging headache: need.

Wait a second. So far, you’ve fallen down, suffered confusion and mental conflict, and now you are in need of the person you are in love with? Wow! To someone from another planet this might seem like some kind of self-punishment. Why are human beings coveting a state of mind that upsets them to the core? A sensible answer to this question can be found only when you have connected with the one and only person you are in love with. Then, and only then, is it worth it. This desired connection brings us at last to that important state of mind: being in love.

When you have your “being” in love with another person, the two of you share the experience together, connected as two vulnerable people in need of each other. If you’re a bit squeamish about being this vulnerable and defenseless or you are prone to interpret this whole experience as weakness, you won’t have much fun here. The state of being in love will be difficult, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to cope with it better.

I’ve come to understand, as I’ve grown older, that true strength in this life is genuinely demonstrated by an ability to tolerate experiences like love and grief. It’s your ability to experience yourself without defenses that provides you with the greatest opportunities in life. In comparison, any of the things people do to protect themselves from feeling too much or being too vulnerable are easy. So let’s talk about some of things you might do to protect yourself when faced with the prospect of falling and being in love.

If you are interested in love like the rest of us but you are not particularly interested in exposing yourself to hurt, you’ll no doubt have a few defensive moves up your sleeve. What I mean is, you’ll probably try to find or be in love while “closed.” You’ll be doing all the things that people do when they are looking for love, dating or even being in relationship; but you’ll be doing them defensively. Your heart will be closed in some effort to protect yourself. This never works. In fact, whatever feelings of love do manage to occur will be quickly diluted by these self-protective mental defenses.

If you are looking for love closed, or you are in a love relationship closed, your secret preoccupation is with avoiding hurt at all costs. Technically speaking, everything on the planet can be used to defend yourself against falling and being in love vulnerably. Even things you’d never suspect were being used to avoid love might be secretly commissioned for this purpose. It just depends upon how the activity in question is being used. It’s like wearing a space suit on a date. You want to be there, but you’re not sure the atmosphere sustains life.

Let’s talk about a pretty common example of being defensive in love. Just about everybody would agree that work is an important human activity, right? Suppose you are a person who works long hours to make a good living. Who’d argue with that? Suppose you were doing it in part to avoid the pains of love? Suppose you were in love not long ago, had an unfortunate breakup, and swore off love for the rest of your life. Only you don’t consciously know you made this emotional decision to avoid love; something in you just finally gave up and decided love was too painful. The consequence of this decision is that from now on your dealings in love will be defensive. You might go to parties, meet new people, go out on dates, even start a love relationship, but you do it knowing that you will never again let another person be more important than your work. If that ever happened, you would tell yourself, you might get hurt again.

The difficulty occurs when you get tired of your part-time love life and start feeling like you need more. Now you’ve joined the ranks of the people who are looking for love closed. Your mind tells you that you need to find love, but you heart tells you to protect yourself. Or is it the other way around? Either way, the point is that you are protecting yourself from the very thing you want and need: love.

Being in conflict with yourself is difficult. What can you do about it? Let’s get back to the assumption you’ve made that love is always going to be too painful. Is this true? Granted, you’ve got a lot of evidence for the fact that it was too painful that one time. The experience is seared into your emotional memory. So you’ve dedicated yourself to avoiding this kind of experience going forward, forever. The fact that you were in such bad shape when the breakup happened is undeniable. Even the fact that you don’t want this kind of thing to ever happen again makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense is why you have to assume that every encounter with love will create the same outcome. You see, this part doesn’t make sense. You’re simply afraid, and as a quick solution for your fear, you’ve made a prediction—one powerful enough to change your love life forever; one powerful enough to keep you away from love for the rest of your life. And that’s precisely why I am making a big deal out of this kind of defensiveness.

You’re with me this far, so let’s go a little further. Instead of generalizing based on fear, let’s get specific. Suppose you