Love is Action – Something You Do
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009If 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.
