Loving on Purpose

Childlike Love vs. Adult Love

Children can love. But what children do is take warm, pleasant, affectionate feelings and do actions that align with those feelings. When a child feels good toward you, they act good toward you. That feels like love.

Most adults do it the same way. Early in a relationship, you have all kinds of warm feelings for your partner, so you just line your actions up with your feelings. You don't have to put a lot of effort in. You're being loving, and it's easy.

But as the relationship goes on—or anytime your partner isn't doing what you want—you have to deal with a harder question: How can I love in the absence of that pleasant feeling?

That's the part children are way less capable of doing than adults. Acting loving when you're not feeling love is a developed capacity. It doesn't come automatically.

Biology Does the Work at First

When we're falling in love, our biology is doing so much work for us. It's pushing us toward kindness and caring and being concerned about our partner. But those feelings fade after a while.

I got married right at the two-year point of my relationship. That's right when things started to fall apart. Right after we got married, we faced these intense challenges of not knowing how to love each other as adults. We had known how to respond to the amazing feelings we'd had, but those feelings went away pretty quickly after we got married.

Then we were stuck in this swamp: I want to love you. I want to create a good relationship. It just seems impossible.

The way my mind put it together was that there was something she was doing that made this impossible. I instinctively blamed her. Realistically, neither one of us knew how to generate love from a place that wasn't driven by feelings.

The Shift That Has to Happen

At some point, when the hormones wear off and you can't rely on biology, you have to shift from your actions being driven by feelings to your actions being value-driven.

You can feel angry at your partner and still figure out how to treat them well.

This catches most people by surprise. Even if you've had multi-year relationships before, if this is the first time you've really committed—married, moved in together, decided "you're my person"—it's going to play out differently than it ever has before. Ironically, it's the security of the commitment that makes the biological help fall off.

For some people, you might get two or three years of hormonally-driven honeymoon. But it won't last longer than that no matter what. If you're going to have a long-term happy relationship, you have to figure out how to love on purpose when you're not feeling warm or kind.

Creating a Secure Base

As a child, I didn't have the kind of secure base from which you can love in an adult way. Children can't guarantee their own safety and security and okayness.

As an adult, if I want to really love my wife, I have to create a secure base to start from. I have to feel like I'm going to be okay. In the absence of that feeling, there's very little chance of me reaching out to her with kindness and generosity.

When I feel like I'm not going to be okay, I'm living with an idea of scarcity. There's not enough love to go around. There's not enough safety. So I'm not going to reach out generously and offer love—I feel like it's a scarce resource.

If I'm fighting a bear, I'm not worried about how the bear is feeling. If I'm fighting with my wife, I'm also not worried about how she's feeling. I'm just thinking about protecting myself.

The Biggest Difference Between Childhood and Adulthood

In childhood, there's a real limitation: you can't take care of yourself. Your happiness, safety, and wellbeing genuinely depend, in a life-or-death way, on maintaining a relationship with your caregiver.

For almost all adults, that's not the case. Most adults really are able to take care of themselves. They might not feel that way. They might not know it yet. But adults are pretty able to care for themselves.

There's real opportunity there. You can invest more in another person, unilaterally, because you can be unilaterally okay.

When I believe I'm going to be okay, that sets me free to be kind and loving and generous toward my wife—to be more concerned about my impact on her than about her impact on me.

Getting Through the Fog

I think about this as being like the fog that covers the ground in winter where I live. The ground's still there, but you can't see it. All you see is this white blanket. You don't know where the trees are, where the ditches are, where the rocks are.

But if I can get below the fog or come into contact with the ground, now I know what's actually there.

The process of coming into contact with reality is difficult for most of us. We're used to responding to our emotions. When we respond to anxious emotions, we end up treating our partners poorly because we're responding to a sense of not being okay—even though that sense isn't accurate.

One thing that helps me is to ask the question: Am I going to be okay? And force myself to face it.

I feel pretty intense panic quite often. For most of my life, that panic was the primary driver of my behavior. I have to get my brain to decide based on data, not emotions.

I look at my life. I have a job, a house, a wife and kids. I live in a safe neighborhood. There's very little data to support the idea that I'm not going to be okay.

Someone showed up at my doorstep a few weeks ago and served me with a lawsuit I wasn't anticipating. It threw me into an emotional tailspin. That was an opportunity for me to ask myself: Am I going to be okay?

I don't know for certain, but I like to think in probabilities. Even after being served with this lawsuit, there's a 99% chance I'm going to be okay. The things I actually worry about—the way my wife treats me, the way my kids treat me—aren't big enough concerns for me to allow myself to spiral over.

Feeling the Panic Without Letting It Drive

I still feel intense panic. But I'm so much more able to make room for it now.

I feel the panic and I feel like I'm not going to be okay, but I still think in my mind: I'm probably going to be okay. I'm probably going to find a way through this.

That is such a gift. I didn't used to have that. I used to get enveloped in the panic and my connection with reality would disappear. I'd get lost in the fog.

When the fog's in the valley, I can't see where the hazards are, so I can't avoid them. But if I can stay in contact with reality, I can see there's a path I can walk that's going to be okay.

The Fire Alarm and the Fire Extinguisher

Anger is like a fire alarm. It's good to have a fire alarm. It's helpful that it's intense and hard to tolerate, because it's telling you there's something here that has to be handled.

But no matter how loud the fire alarm is or how much you yell back at it, that's not putting out the fire. If you want to handle the fire, stop yelling. Settle yourself down. Gather data. Figure out where it is. Figure out what you need to do to address it.

The alarm just tells you: there's a problem here. This isn't sustainable. You're going to have to do something different, or this is really going to hurt you.

The anger is the alarm. The anger is definitely not the extinguisher. Confusing the two is like using a flamethrower to put out a fire.

Anger Is Valuable—Just Don't Put It in Charge

When we talk about anger, we're imprecise. Anger is fundamentally an emotion—a feeling with no actions associated with it. But when we talk about anger, we usually mean angry behavior or aggressive behavior, which is completely different.

The key is feeling the anger and not letting the anger direct your actions.

People ask, "Should I just not feel my feelings?" No—please, absolutely feel your feelings. Work on feeling them. And don't let them drive your behavior.

That's the capacity you have to develop: choosing your behavior based on who you want to be and what impact you want to have, while still being authentic.

When I just let my anger drive my behavior and say "I'm just being authentic"—I'm only going to be angry for a few minutes, maybe a couple of hours. Two hours later, I don't feel that way. Am I just going to treat my partner however I feel all the time?

That's not a recipe for a healthy relationship.

Love and Relationship Are Different Things

People mix up love and relationship. One of the challenges of mature love is figuring out how you can be in relationship with somebody in a way that gives you the best chance of actually being loving to them.

It's not that no matter how they treat you, no matter how mad or hurt you are, you just keep saying "I love you" and being affectionate. Sometimes you have to handle what's happening. Sometimes you have to draw a boundary. Sometimes there's a pattern in how this person's treating you, you've talked to them about it, they're not interested in changing, and it doesn't work for you. You have to handle that.

You can do all of that in a loving way.

The anger might be its own thing you have to deal with. But that's a separate process from dealing with the problem in the relationship. You don't need the anger to handle the problem. In fact, you'll probably get a better resolution without it.

Recommended Reading

Already Free by Bruce Tift

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi

Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch