Loving on Purpose: A Conversation with Catherine Roebuck

James: Loving from the heart and loving unilaterally is fundamentally an adult task, not a childhood task.

Catherine: When you first told me that, my reaction was, "Well, I know kids can love—I felt a lot of love as a kid. I felt love from my kids." But it's the feeling aspect that matters here. What kids are able to do is take warm, pleasant, affectionate feelings and do actions that align with those feelings. That feels like love.

And that's how a lot of adults do it too. Early in a relationship, it's really easy—you have all kinds of warm, affectionate 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. But as the relationship goes on, or anytime someone's not doing what you want, you have to deal with the 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. It's fundamentally a developed capacity—to act loving when you're not feeling love.

James: When we're falling in love, it's the first kind. My biology is doing so much work, pushing me toward kindness and caring and being concerned about my partner. But those feelings fade after a while, and then I'm stuck in adult love—which I probably don't know how to do.

That's why relationships fall apart after a couple of years. I was able to get into the relationship with childlike love, but I'm not able to build a long-lived relationship with childlike love. It has to be adult love, which is a capacity I have to develop.

Catherine: Right, and not every adult has it. If you're lucky, you had parents who modeled this kind of unilateral love and investment. If you're not lucky, you didn't have that. You're trying to offer something you've never been on the receiving end of.

James: I think basically we all have to face this challenge in adulthood. What you're talking about is that it's harder for some of us than others depending on how much of it we saw and received as children. When I was a kid, if I treated my parent poorly, did they respond by treating me well? Or did they just amplify the poor treatment and do the same back to me—or even worse?

Catherine: How many people have had the experience of a parent yelling at them, "No yelling!" or hitting them because they hit a sibling? The parent is doing the very thing they're telling the child not to do. That reactivity—that reactive expression where you're just acting out what you're feeling—works so well in the honeymoon phase.

But at some point, when the hormones wear off and you can't rely on biology so much, 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.

James: It's interesting—I got married right at the two-year point of my relationship. I had known my wife for two years, and we'd been more or less together for almost two years when we got married. That's right at the point where 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 these amazing feelings we'd had, but those feelings really went away pretty quickly after we got married. Then we were just stuck in this swamp of, "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 or experience love from a generative place.

Catherine: That's that more childlike instinct. When you're a little kid, it's easy to be warm if that's how you're being treated. When those warm feelings go away in childhood, it's easy to give up and think, "There's not much I can do about this until my parents start treating me better again. I'm just not going to feel good."

When you start getting upset at your wife, you're playing out the same thing. That makes sense in childhood because you don't have an option to realistically shift this unilaterally from your side. But as an adult, you can. Just because you have the capacity doesn't mean you have any awareness that you have it, or any idea how to use it.

The other thing about the timeline is that there's a lot going on biologically and hormonally to drive you into a committed dynamic where you might be able to raise a baby. As soon as the relationship uncertainty is resolved—which marriage is one of the main ways that happens—all of this biological help tends to fall off.

For some people, you might get two or three years of hormonally-driven honeymoon euphoric bonding. 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.

James: It's crazy that I got married without having any idea those feelings were going to fade.

Catherine: Was that your first long-lasting relationship?

James: Yeah, my first serious one. I'd had relationships before—one that lasted almost a year, a couple of six-month relationships—but they weren't serious. There was no real commitment, no expectation we were going to end up together.

My relationship with my wife was much more serious. It was my first experience of that. I had never considered the idea that the way I felt about her would change soon after getting married. If someone had sat me down and said, "Let me talk to you about what's going to happen over the next five years of your relationship and what you can do about it"—that would have been incredibly useful.

Catherine: I think that catches most people by surprise. Even if you've had some multi-year relationships, if this is the first time you've ever married someone, lived with somebody, really solidified "you're my person and we're committed"—it's going to play out differently than it ever has before.

Ironically, it's the security of the commitment that resolves this biological drive to a great degree. That's not a bad thing, but it is challenging to navigate.

Creating a Secure Base

James: There's another component to this. 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. It's like I'm living with this idea of scarcity—there's not enough love to go around, not enough safety, not enough okayness.

So I'm not going to reach out generously and say, "Let me offer love to you." I feel like it's a scarce resource. I feel like I'm not going to be okay. 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.

Catherine: This is the biggest difference between how your brain works in childhood versus adulthood. In childhood, there's a real limitation—you can't take care of yourself. By definition, you're dependent. Your happiness, safety, and wellbeing genuinely depend, in a life-or-death way, on maintaining a relationship with your caregiver.

But 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. They might have practical things to work out—earning their own money, handling logistics. But adults are pretty able to care for themselves.

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

James: You can make this shift where instead of being primarily concerned about my wife's impact on me, I can be primarily concerned about my impact on her. But that's only going to happen after I believe that I'm going to be okay.

I might feel like I'm not going to be okay—anxious feelings, panic. But I can do some work with that panic and say, "Even though I feel like I'm not going to be okay, I have a belief, a faith, an understanding that I actually will be okay."

That belief is the foundation for loving action. If 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.

Catherine: A lot of this comes down to taking in the reality of your circumstances as an adult. Anytime someone starts talking about fear of abandonment—that's such a different thing for an adult than for a child. The intensity of that panic feels very similar. But the reality of what it means to be abandoned as a child versus having your partner leave you as an adult—they're extremely different circumstances.

One is a crisis. The other is heartbreak. But it's not a survival-level problem to have a specific other adult decide they don't want to take care of you when you're an adult. You can survive that.

Getting Through the Fog

James: It's so easy to say what you're saying and so hard to actually believe it.

I've thought 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. You're talking about this idea that I'm going to be okay, that this isn't as dangerous as it seems. But the process of coming into contact with reality to that extent is pretty difficult for most of us. Most of us are used to responding to our emotions—especially anxious emotions—and 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.

Catherine: So how do you get through the fog? How do you make contact with reality?

James: 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—especially how I handled myself in my marriage, and a lot of how I handled myself at work. I have to get my brain to face the idea that I need to decide based on data, not emotions. Am I going to be okay?

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. I have to force myself to look at that.

Someone showed up at my doorstep a few weeks ago and served me with a lawsuit I wasn't anticipating. It threw me into this emotional tailspin of panic and despair and anxiety. 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. I don't live in a world where my okayness is really threatened that often. The things I worry about—the way my wife treats me, the way my kids treat me—realistically aren't big enough concerns for me to allow myself to spiral over.

Catherine: For some adults, they could look at the data and conclude, "I'm really not going to be okay. I don't know how to support myself financially. I can't handle parenting alone."

In that case, you have to start handling those problems. Shift off of "my partner's not treating me well, they don't love me enough" and onto "I want to have a real choice. For me to have a real choice, I have to know I can take care of myself financially. I need a plan."

It's fine if your plan takes years. Even having a plan—that's already taking much better care of yourself. It's going to help your nervous system settle down when you start to address the problems in your way.

If you look at the data and think, "I've got serious problems—this isn't just in my head, I have logistical issues or safety issues to handle"—that's your reality. That's where you need to focus. Most adults can still solve those problems. They don't have to secure better treatment from a specific other person to solve their own wellbeing.

James: When we were children, most of us created an imaginary world where we were a little more secure and better cared for than we actually were. As adults, we tend to do the opposite—we feel like we're not going to be as okay as we really are.

Almost everyone I talk to about this, especially someone considering being left by their partner, when I get them to face this reality—I say, "Imagine your life a year after your partner leaves. What kind of life are you going to have?"

And they say, "Oh, I'm going to figure it out. I have friends and family and resources. I'm actually a pretty capable person."

That's coming into contact with the reality: I have capacity and resources to make a life for myself. It's probably going to be different than what I have now. There will be things that are much less comfortable. But it's not going to be the end of my story.

Catherine: A lot of the people I work with are higher income. They really have a lot of options. They might not like the idea of losing half their money, but even in that scenario, they're going to be fine, and they know it. Yet they experience the same level of abandonment panic.

Your brain can produce a story to explain why you're so scared. What's useful about looking at the data is peeling back those layers. Each time you peel back a layer, you still have this feeling of being very vulnerable. So there's the practical stuff to handle, and then there's the feeling—learning to tolerate the intensity, giving yourself enough lived experiences of having this feeling and being okay.

You start to settle down and think, "I might continue to feel, on and off throughout my life, that it would be the end of the world if this person didn't love me. But I can give myself real experiences of: that person hurt me, disappointed me, and I got through it."

Do this enough times, and you become tolerant of the intensity. Either the intensity settles down, or you settle down about the intensity.

James: I think it's usually both. When I'm not settling down about the intensity, that feeds back into it. I'm adding fuel to the fire.

This was my life for so long—I would spiral. I'd feel panic, then panic about the panic, spiraling into deeper and deeper intensity.

I still feel that intensity now. But I'm so much more able to make room for it. "Oh, I'm feeling this intensity, this aliveness, this fear, this panic. I've felt this before. I'm somewhat used to feeling it."

I don't let it affect the narrative of my life as much. I don't go from feeling the panic to thinking I'm not going to be okay. I feel the panic and 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.

Even when I got served with that lawsuit, I felt the panic and immediately started thinking, "There's a really good chance this turns out okay."

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.

In this valley where I live, there are trees, rocks, ditches, and cliffs—but they're not everywhere. 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 come into contact with reality, I can see there's a path I can walk that's going to be okay. I just have to stay in touch with what's real to avoid the problems and obstacles.

Catherine: This brings to mind my younger son. He stubbed his toe recently, and his reaction was to start running in circles. He gets hurt, has a panic response, and starts acting panicked. Obviously, this isn't helping his toe.

I used to have the same reaction as a kid. When I'd stub my toe, I'd just start moving. I couldn't handle looking at it.

As an adult, if I stub my toe, it still hurts. I still don't like it. But I can take a deep breath, stay right where I am, handle looking at it to see if the nail's coming off or if it's really serious.

There's still the acute experience of something going wrong—I don't know yet if it's as bad as it feels or worse. But there's more capacity to be with that. I've stubbed my toe probably a hundred times. I know I typically get through it fine. So I can settle myself down, take a look, gather more data, breathe through it, give myself a minute, and then it passes.

I'm less likely to injure myself that way. If I just feel the pain and start moving without a plan, I'm more likely to make it worse.

James: Imagine if you stubbed your toe and spent the next three weeks figuring out how to get revenge on the door. That's what we do in our relationships. The door was just being a door. It's as much my doing that I stubbed my toe as it is the door's. For me to focus on blaming the door for hurting me is not a useful way to focus my energy.

Catherine: Or maybe another person got in your way—they were somehow involved in you getting injured. There's often an impulse to get mad at them or hurt them back. You don't have to do it.

James: Or you could just say, "I'm not going to walk anymore," because you got hurt while walking. That's also not the best solution. You can walk carefully. You can be kind to yourself. You might limp a little. But you can still keep doing the things that make your life good.

Love and Relationship Are Different Things

Catherine: When we're talking about love, I think people mix it up with 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.

This is actually something you challenged me on several years ago. I was justifying what I was doing with how angry I was about how I was being treated. You told me, "I think you can do what you need to do in this relationship without the anger."

I did not want to hear that. But you were completely right. It took me a while to implement it and figure it out, but I ended up being able to handle what was happening in that relationship without needing the anger to do it. I actually had a much better resolution than I'd anticipated.

The anger was its own thing. I couldn't just bypass it—I had to deal with my anger. But that was a separate process from dealing with the problem in the relationship.

James: When we talk about anger, we're so 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 from feeling anger.

What you're describing is feeling the anger and not letting the anger direct your actions. That's the key.

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 what you're talking about developing: the ability to choose 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. It doesn't lead to good things.

Catherine: You can't even do that toward yourself. If you treat yourself however you feel all the time, you're going to be in a bad relationship with yourself. There's an aspect of discipline here—forcing yourself to treat people decently.

It doesn't all have to be affectionate. But have some integrity. If you think something is not a good thing to do—like if your partner just did something that made you really mad—don't let yourself do it back just to show them how it felt or to punish them. If you think there's a problem with them doing this, don't let yourself do it back.

I think of anger as a messenger, 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. That's a different process. It takes something other than loud sounds to put out a 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.

James: So you're talking about the difference between the fire alarm and the fire extinguisher—completely different things. The anger is the alarm. The anger is definitely not the extinguisher.

Catherine: It's a very bad fire extinguisher. It doesn't work. It tends to make things worse.

James: It's like using a flamethrower as an extinguisher. Getting the two mixed up. "Oh, I grabbed the wrong canister—they looked similar."

Catherine: But if you can handle it more like it's an alarm, and take in what it's telling you... I know some people go too far. You just don't like to deal with anger much. I do think anger's valuable. It's not a bad thing. You don't want to extinguish all your anger or ignore it.

You just don't want to put it in charge of your behavior. It's a pretty bad manager. It's a pretty bad soldier. It's a good messenger and not much else.

James: I agree with that.

Well, I need to let you go because it's pouring rain outside and I have one of my windows open.

Catherine: Go!

James: I just realized I should probably go shut the window instead of sitting here being angry at it for a while.

Catherine: Right.

James: It's such a pleasure to talk to you. We'll talk again soon. Thanks, Catherine.

Catherine: Great talking to you too.

James: Okay, bye.