Love is a Doing Word

I’ve been reflecting on the concept of love as I go about my week. It started because I had a phone call with a dear friend over the weekend who helped me grapple with some difficult information.  At the end of the call I said, as always, “I love you”, which then led me down the rabbit hole of what is love and why is it important?

Allan Schore is a well known and respected psychologist and researcher.  He has spent his life looking at the interplay of relationships and brain development.  One of his most well-known quotes is, quite simply, “infants are hardwired for connection”.  Even in utero, babies hear their mother’s voice and when they are born, their innate response is to search for their parents, they hear the voice and look for them.  Research is unequivocal that skin to skin touch is crucially important for a baby’s sense of connection, safety, trust and love.

Brene Brown is one of my favourite researchers in the human condition.  In fact, I have the following quote on the very first page of my website:

“Connection is why we're here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection."

My entire career has seen me sitting squarely in the midst of human relationships.  I have seen the very best and the most challenging of human behaviour and relationships and have been privileged to support people as they make sense of their experience.  I haven’t made sense of it for them, my job is simply to be there with them, ask the curious questions, sometimes provide some insight from research or my clinical experience and help them find their own way and their own answers.  What I have seen time and time again, irrespective of the individual situation, is the importance of love and connection.

When we think of love, generally speaking, in our minds we tend to default to the concepts of romantic love and parental love.  But love is so much more than that.  The Greek philosophers were the masters of clarification and they separated the single word “love” into eight different categories.

Eros: Passionate love

Philia: Deep friendship

Storge: Familial love

Agape: Unconditional love

Pragma: Enduring love

Ludus: Playful love

Mania: Obsessive love

Philautia: Self love

Even flowers describe love.  Floriography is the word used for the communication of messages through specific flowers; something the Victorians were renowned for.  It’s a good job they didn’t have televisions in the Victorian era because the language of flowers is so complicated it could take an entire year to learn everything and a television would just have been a distraction.  From my in-depth (?) research using Dr Google;

Red Roses - Romantic love

Tulips - True love

Lilies - Refined love and commitment

Iris - Deep connection

Sunflowers - Loyalty and joy

Carnations - Deep love

Daisies - Pure and innocent love

Peonies - Romance and prosperity

Chrysanthemums - Enduring loyalty

Lavender - Devotion

Orchids - Passion and strength

Camellias - Adoration and longevity

But these categories are simply nouns that tell us about love, they don’t tell us how we give and receive love.

Some years ago, I was attending a conference with a focus on child protection.  One of the speakers was explaining their research and the insights of the children participating.  He summed it all up by saying, “love is a doing word”.  I was so struck by the simplicity in his statement that I went back to my office and asked our marketing department to create some simple posters of parents/carers/grandparents and children doing things together, with the tagline, “love is a doing word”.  I stuck the posters around our office, the hallways and group room as a reminder to all of us that love isn’t simply a noun, love is a verb and it is the actions associated with the word love that are so essential to our sense of connection with each other.

If love is a verb, not a noun then it stands to reason that love is a choice, a decision.  Very often, those we love have a tendency to infuriate us - and vice versa.  That emotion doesn’t mean we love them any less, in fact it’s just the opposite.  We feel infuriated, or frustrated or angry because we love them.  Love is the action or choice that leads to emotions such as passion, trust, fond, kind, protective, euphoria, respect, frustration, annoyed. 

Many people think that the opposite of love is hate but it isn’t.  Love and hate are two sides of the same coin.  The fundamental opposite of love is apathy.  That we have so few feelings about something or someone that we don’t actually care about it or them and they have no impact on us.  That isn’t to say hate is the same as love but hate, like love, isn’t an emotion.  It’s a decision, a choice.  Hatred is the mechanism by which emotions arise such as rage, vitriol, obsessed, repulsed, terrified.

When we make a decision to love someone, we also need to make a decision to think generously of them.  Not to be suspicious of their motivation or not to trust them.  It is inevitable that when we love someone they will let us down and we will let them down because none of us are perfect.  When we make a mistake, the most important thing to do is to demonstrate our love for them by as quickly as possible making a decision to apologise and repair the break in the relationship.

Just a little aside at this point.  No doubt you will have heard the quote “don’t let the sun set on your anger”.  In my opinion, it’s rubbish and creates far more problems than it solves.  Quite often when arguments happen, tensions and emotions run high.  Trying to resolve an argument when emotions are heightened is a recipe for disaster.  What people actually need is to have a breather in order for their emotions to calm.  For that adrenaline and cortisol, which flood our brains during an argument, to level out so that our higher order thinking, pre-frontal cortex has time to switch back on and give us the opportunity to think through the issues a bit more logically.  Deciding to have a truce for the night and to come back to the issue the next day is far more constructive than trying to find a solution when our limbic systems are firing on all cylinders.

John Gottman is one of the world’s leading relationship researchers.  He, along with his wife Julie, has been studying couple and family relationships for over 40 years.  He can tell with 94% accuracy whether a marriage/relationship is going to succeed or fail, just by observing the couple and the way they relate and speak to each other.  Love isn’t static, it shape-shifts with time.  Sometimes love fades to apathy.  Sometimes Eros love changes to Philia love and that is ok.  What’s not ok is sweeping the changes under the carpet and ignoring them.

Gottman has written a plethora of books on relationships and parenting.  He talks about the four horsemen of the apocalypse of relationships; criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.  Seeing these in a relationship is how he is able to predict the success or failure of a relationship, whatever the nature of the relationship.  If love is a doing word, then being aware of changes in the relationship and whether any of the four horsemen have come cantering across the lounge room is crucial.  Then you need to work out whether you are willing to apologise and repair the relationship.  If you’re not, then that gives you a fairly significant clue that your decision to love has changed, or faded or ended.  And that is ok, as long as respect is front and foremost.

I grew up in a family where two fundamental words were missing; sorry and love.  It took me a long time to learn how to apologise and how to say I love you because it was never modelled to me as a child.  If you’ve read my book, Bugger, Bugger Shit: my quest for resilience, you will know that I have had more than my fair share of people I love prematurely die.  Without being morbid, I know how fundamentally important it is to tell someone you love them because you never know whether you will have an opportunity to say it or hear it ever again.

Hopefully when we become parents, or have the care of children we make an informed decision about how we will create a family culture.  What will we carry on from our parents and what will we decide to lay down.  In my nuclear family, given our over-experience of loss and grief, we say, “I love you” as easily as we might say, “would you like a cup of tea?”.  It might seem to the observer, casual or even meaningless when it’s said so regularly, but when the motivation behind it comes from knowing what it’s like to not be able to say it to someone again, it’s the polar opposite of casual.  It’s also a deliberate decision on my part, given that I grew up in an environment when those words weren’t said.  How many times have we heard someone say, “well you know that I love you”, except if they don’t say it then actually we don’t know.  That’s why I said I love you to my friend at the end of our call.

But telling someone you love them is only half of the story.  If we go back to the concept that “love is a doing word” we need to demonstrate it as well as say it.

You might have heard people talk about “Love Languages”, a concept developed in the early 1990s by Dr Gary Chapman.  Whilst the work has been criticised by some academics due to the lack of empirical evidence, many psychologists, social workers, counsellors and relationship therapists believe strongly in its merit as they have observed the positive impact in their day to day practice.  Chapman has built upon the work in the ensuing decades and whilst the original Love Languages were directed toward intimate partners, the concept has evolved to encompass children, adolescents, single adults, men and the workplace.

Love language is a simple concept; the idea that people receive love in particular ways; words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch.  Whilst we may appreciate all of them, the premise is that individuals will gravitate towards a primary and secondary category and that those categories might change depending on the relationship eg, partner, children, colleagues.  If you’re wondering what yours might be, you can take the quick quiz on the Love Languages Website.  The quizzes are free but you do have to enter your email address, of course you can always unsubscribe later.  There are also more in-depth, paid resources but I leave that up to you to decide.  It’s worth me quickly saying that I have absolutely no connection with the business.  

What makes love languages particularly helpful is in understanding that just because quality time is my primary love language (no surprises there to the people in my world) it may not be my partner’s or best friend’s or child’s primary love language.  So if someone’s primary love language is receiving gifts but mine is quality time, if I never give them a gift but always make time to sit down for a cup of tea and a chat, they’re not going to feel particularly loved by me.  If they shower me with gifts, whilst I would definitely be grateful (especially if it’s my birthday), if they don’t sit down and have a cup of tea with me when they give me the gift, I won’t feel particularly loved.

What we can all do is get to know ourselves better.  You could do your own mini research project.  Take a guess what your own love language is, then take the quiz and see if you were right.  You could always do it as a couple or family or with friends; guess what each other’s love languages are, then take the quiz and see who was right.  Have a conversation about it and maybe set yourselves a challenge to purposefully commit, starting with once a week, to “doing” love in a way that is meaningful to your partner, child or friend.  If you do, make sure you pop a comment below and let me know how it went.

If love is a doing word, the way we express love to someone needs to be done with their primary love language in mind, not our own.  And this is where it leads back to Brene Brown’s quote about the fear of disconnection and Allan Schore’s quote about being hardwired for connection.  If we are going to authentically demonstrate love to someone in our lives, we have to be connected with them in the first place so that we know what their primary love language is.  If we haven’t made the time and the effort to deeply connect with the other person, then love is simply a noun, not a verb.

PS - Next time I talk to my friend maybe I’ll say “I agape or pragma you” instead and, by the way, in the floriography department, peonies will always go down well with me but lysianthas are my favourite lol…

As always, if you found this helpful, please share with others and pop a comment below.

Angharad