I had an experience at Christmas that confirmed my sense that your real family are the people who love you and whom you love, whether they are related to you or not.

My wife and I have been married for 26 years. We have five children who all lived together during most of their childhood and adolescence. None of these now-grown children are the product of our own marriage. When we first met, I was a single-parent raising three kids by myself, and Joyce was a single parent raising two children. Six years separate the youngest from the oldest.

Our five children, their four spouses and one partner, plus the two grandchildren spent the Christmas holidays together at our house — a gathering that happens at Christmas every other year. For three couples and two children being together with the rest of the family meant flying to Maine from the West Coast.

We had a wonderfully warm, chaotic and loving Christmas together. These events confirmed for me that, in addition to being different nuclear families, we are also one loving family. If you are part of a step-family or are otherwise acquainted with step- families, you know that it is no small achievement to come together as one mutually-caring family.

At our family gathering, I was attentive to the powerful bonds that were celebrated by people who, in several cases, had not seen one another for many months, as well as the new bonds between the grandchildren, both two-and-a-half years old and several of the adults present.

The whole experience was an affirmation for me of the fact that often your real family is the people whom you love and who love you, regardless of whether or not you are biologically related. Affirming that fact can be especially helpful for people who are inclined to bemoan the fact that they are not close to their birth family and overlook the fact that they are surrounded by the loving family of supportive friends who have come together over the years.

Here, as in many occasions in life, we have a choice — regret the love that we don’t have or celebrate the love that surrounds us and needs only to be acknowledged and lived for us to be filled by its presence.

This is a time of year when people give gifts to one another. Everybody is supposed to get a gift; nobody should be left out. That’s why we need to get something for Johnny’s daughter, whose name, by the way, is “Anna.” not “What‘s-Her-Name.” It doesn’t matter that she is 17 now and not the 11 year old she was when we last met: She has to have a gift.

It is good thing that everyone will receive something when we gather for the annual Christmas gift distribution. Nevertheless, important things can easily be forgotten in this cultural mania for covering all the bases at Christmas time. Specifically, it is easy to forget the message that should be behind gift giving. That message is “I see you. I care about you. I want you to know that your happiness and your welfare matter to me. I hope that my gift pleases you and that, in giving it to you, you will know that you are important to me.”

Gift giving should be an expression of love. This special holiday season of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the Hindu Festival of Lights is a time for expressing love and caring.

Now to be realistic, we can’t love everyone to the same degree — at least not the sort of love that is an expression of genuine, personal valuing. We can’t love Johnny’s daughter, Anna, whom we scarcely remember, in the same way that we, say, love our partner. But wait a minute. Perhaps we can also love Anna personally if we sit next to her at Christmas dinner, if we go out of our way to talk with her — if we give her the gift of our attention and our warmth.

Here is a way to use the notion of gift giving to deepen love between yourself and your partner. Train yourself to see that anything anyone does to benefit you, at any time of year, is that person’s gift to you, and therefore worthy of your notice and appreciation. I mean that your husband’s preparing supper when it isn’t his turn to cook but he knows that you don’t feel well is a gift to you. Go further — see as a gift even what your partner does that is “his job” or “her job,” and regularly give thanks for that, too.

Similarly, whatever you do that benefits your partner is your gift to him or her — as long as you have your partner‘s welfare in mind and tell yourself at the time, “This is my gift to you.”

Why not keep it simple, you ask? Why not just figure that your partner does his or her job and you do yours, and leave love out of it? No problem, if your relationship is basically a utilitarian one or if you two are both going along to get along with each other. On the other hand, if you want a relationship of love with your partner, then the more you name the helpful actions of either of you as  love, the more love you bring into your relationship.

I am talking here about ordinary actions, as well as extraordinary ones. You are training yourself to recognize the ordinary kindnesses, considerations and friendly gestures of relationship as expressions of love. By doing so, over time you may discover that you two are living together with love. And what a Christmas present, a birthday present, an any-day present that would be — to take love into your relationship in simple ways and then to realize one day that love really lives between you!

If you want to become a more loving person, you need to think of love as a verb. It is a “doing” more than a “feeling.” When you seek to be more loving, the way you behave matters more than what you feel.

Thinking of love as behavior has a number of important advantages. Here are some.

• If love is behavior, then loving becomes a skill. Skills can be learned. With this view, you don’t have to worry about not being a loving person (i.e., a bad person). Everybody is potentially loving. What you need is skill, plus intention, plus follow-through. You can get all that.
• You come to realize that just as there are different expressions of love (e.g., compassion, listening lovingly, dealing with differences loving), there are also different skills that are needed. You can pick one expression of love and learn that particular skill (e.g., the skill of listening lovingly). You can take learning to love one skill at a time. And you can focus on the particular skills that every day life shows you you need.
• When you commit yourself to acting more lovingly toward your partner, you inevitably confront the issue of where you are going to get the love that you want to give. A lot of us are busy, harried and often tired. Figuring out how to get the energy to give love becomes an important question that will take you into an equally important area of growth.
• Treating love as behavior allows for growth, in a way that regarding love as feeling alone doesn’t. You can experiment with different loving behaviors, note their result and then modify your approach. In that manner, you can become more skilled at loving your partner well.

Loving behavior doesn’t have to wait for loving feelings. You can learn to behave lovingly to your partner even when you don’t feel loving. Fortunately, loving behavior often generates loving feelings, which makes behaving lovingly the best way to get the loving feelings that benefit yourself as well as your partner.

Maybe it’s the influence of my years as a couples therapist, maybe it’s that love is simultaneously watered down and hyped so much — I need a simple, basic, show-me approach to love.

The best one I know is this: Love is action, augmented by feelings. “Oh, I am so devoted to my wife.” “Show me. What are you doing that expresses your devotion?” If you aren’t actually doing anything — then, sorry, but I don’t think that your “devotion” amounts to much more than a good opinion about yourself. On the other hand, if you express your devotion by doing your share of the work around the house, by knowing what is important in her every day life and asking her about it, by sitting with her with an open and attentive heart when she needs your company — well then, you are devoted. And hopefully your wife feels your devotion, and both she and you are the better for your devotion.

At the risk of sounding tough and uncompromising, I think it is important that we get clear about what love is and what it isn’t. Why? Because the survival of our marriages, our families, our relationships and, indeed, our nation and our world depends on loving behavior — showing through your actions that you regard the other person’s well-being as equal in importance to your own. Talk is cheap. Feelings come and go. It is loving action that makes a difference. Make room in your heart for the other person’s reality and then translate your open heart’s knowing into action.

Two people living under the same roof have to cooperate, at least somewhat. Similarly, nations on the same planet must cooperate, even though in some cases it’s very hard to find the cooperation for all the belligerence.

Much cooperation is situationally necessary. (I remember a film from way back in which two convicts who were chained to each other managed to escape from jail and had to cooperate while they were on the run, although they started out hating each other.)

At the other end of the cooperation continuum are those special relationships in which the cooperation is so profound that from it develops a deep and rewarding couple-ness (an “us” so rich that it has a reality of its own — you, me and us. (Suggestion: If you and your partner have such a richly-developed “we,” imagine, each of you, that your “we” actually is a third person in the relationship. Describe that person.)

If you start out with a taste for cooperation and your partner doesn’t, for whatever reason — you become the person in charge of the cooperation venture, and here is what you need to do:

• You need to make it unnecessary for your partner to continue being competitive and
• You need to make “we cooperating with each other” a rewarding and attractive prospect for your partner as well as for yourself.

You need to help your partner realize that s/he loses nothing important by building a good “we” with you. Start out by joining your partner in activities that your partner especially likes and won’t mind having you along. Do so in such a way that your joining your partner strengthens his/her sense of well-being.

Your aim here is to demonstrate to your partner that s/he doesn’t have to oppose you in order to feel safe and strong.

An example might be going to hockey games with your husband or joining your wife in a course that she wants to take. In either case, do your best to celebrate the we experience afterward, without faking it, of course.

Then add more we experiences that are pleasurable and adventurous for you both. When you sense that your partner’s attitude toward cooperating with you has increased to the point that s/he likes being “the two of us together,” then introduce activities that are more tilted toward your own interests.

“Why should I take the lead in this?” you may be asking. Answer: You should because you are the one who starts out wanting it, because you enjoy being “us together” and can introduce the pleasures of that condition to your partner — and because if you are reading this blog, you are probably someone who wants to be more loving, and here is an opportunity. Enjoy.

Last summer, during a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod, I took a picture of an old stone wall and had it printed. A friend of mine looked at it and said, “It’s just a stone wall. Why did you take a picture of a stone wall?“

Meaning: This something that you took a picture of belongs to the category “stone wall.” Stone wall is a completely  insignificant category. What’s to notice about a stone wall?

Well, look again. Specifically, look at what is in the picture. Don’t think “category: stone wall.“ Just look at the picture. If you just look at it, you might see something like what I saw —

• Mass (There are big, heavy stones in this wall.)
• Lichen (This is an old wall — and it’s still alive with lichen.)
• Quality (It looks like a farmer’s wall, demarcating a field. This is no fancy suburban wall. This is a utilitarian wall. This is a working wall. And it feels like it is still working, even though the farm is long gone.)
• Is-ness (First forget category; then forget words. Just look at “it.” What do you sense about “it” when you just look at “it?” What does “it” say to you?

There is an “is-ness” about this wall that transcends category. It’s there, even though you can’t find words for “it.” Something that was there for me when I took a picture of it.

Now consider your partner.

My husband, Frank. My wife, Gloria. Category: Spouse.

How could it be different? After all, you’ve been married to Frank for 16 years. He is “my husband, Frank.“ But see if you can look at him (or her) without category wife or husband — in fact without any category at all? Find a time and place where you can just look at this person with whom you’ve shared years. Look without category. Look without name. Just look — the way you would just look at a tree, or the reflections of light in a stream, or what the setting sun does to that column on your porch. What do you see there, on that face?

If you can’t find a time/place to just look without being seen, then take a photograph of your partner, have it printed, find a quiet time alone and look at what “it” contains, as if you were looking at my picture of the wall.

Yes, he is “my husband, Frank,“ “my wife Gloria” or whatever his or her name is. Still there is something special there, something utterly beyond “category spouse or partner,” something new to be seen and experienced, if you take the time occasionally to just look. If you want the relationship to remain alive, you have to see and experience beyond category: my partner.