1> What Love Is Not

• Falling in love is involuntary — not a choice
  • We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.
• Dependency is not love
  • “If being loved is your goal, you will fail to achieve it. The only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love.”

• Self-sacrifice disguised as love
  • The minister saw his self-sacrificial behavior as love, although actually it was motivated not by the needs of his family but by his own need to maintain an image of himself.
  • Narcissistic individuals lack the capacity for empathy — they do not perceive others as others but only as extensions of themselves.

2> What Love Requires

• Love is work, not feeling
  • Since love is work, the essence of nonlove is laziness.

• It requires courage
  • Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.
• It requires attention — especially listening
  • The primary way we can exercise our attention is by listening.
  • We spend large amounts of time teaching children to read, very little teaching them to speak, and almost none teaching them to listen
  • True listening can only occur when time is set aside for it and conditions are supportive of it

• It requires timing
  • Not giving at the right time was more compassionate than giving at the wrong time.

3> How Love Is Defined

• Love replenishes — it doesn’t deplete
  • Genuine love is a self-replenishing activity.
  • Sacrifices made for the growth of the other result in equal or greater growth of the self
  • Hobbies are self-nurturing activities (i.e., self-love is part of the equation)

4> Love in Relationship

• The foundation: accepting separateness
  • True acceptance of their own and each other’s individuality and separateness is the only foundation upon which a mature marriage can be based and real love can grow.

• The parenting trap: children are not extensions of you
  • Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.

• The marital neglect pattern
  • A common masculine marital problem: the husband devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage — his base camp — expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he returns, without assuming any responsibility for its maintenance.

• Childhood love shapes adult lovability
  • Children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep-seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable — and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves.