What Does It Mean to Love Well?

Four dimensions almost nobody teaches you

There’s one relationship I had years ago where I didn’t have some of the uncomfortable conversations I should have had.

I knew in the moment I was avoiding them. But my fears and discomforts were paralyzing for me. I was afraid of hurting someone else’s feelings, of the relationship not being able to withstand the discomfort. So I allowed discomfort and tension and unease and unmet needs to fester.

As a result, the relationship never got to the place it could have gotten to.

It was after the relationship was over that I was able to take an honest look at it as a whole and realize I would go back in time and play that out differently. There were opportunities lost — for that person to get stronger, for me to get stronger, for the relationship to get stronger — by us having the difficult conversations.

Love is at the core of human existence. Yet hardly anybody’s taught how to love well. What a tragedy, and how much suffering there is because of that.

Most of us learned about love growing up as kids by observing what was around us. Whatever we saw and experienced as kids in terms of what love looked like and felt like, that’s what we grew up thinking was normal. Oftentimes it was not, or it was “normal” but not in a healthy sense. We watched how the adults in our lives — particularly parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles — loved or didn’t, and consciously or not we were taking notes. Some of those notes were helpful, some not so much. And then we grew up and went out into the world and loved the way we had been taught, without really questioning whether the way we were loving other people was actually love or healthy, or whether it was just familiarity masquerading as love. Performing what we remembered love looking like.

So it’s important to pause now and ask ourselves, do we love the people in our lives well? And at the heart (sic) of it, maybe the hardest part: do you love yourself well? Without loving ourselves well, how is it possible to really love other people well?

There’s a big paradigm shift that made a huge difference for me. We’re brought up to think of love almost exclusively as a feeling. But it’s really a practice as much as it is a feeling. It’s something we do. And it’s a choice — something we choose to do, consciously or not.

The feeling can come and go — it ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, and it can be affected by stress, anxiety, exhaustion, conflict, and the history you have with someone, as well as your own history. As the feeling fluctuates, what is revealed is the practice. The choice to show up, to care for someone else, to repair the relationship when there’s been a violation of trust or some kind of conflict, discomfort, or disappointment. The choice to stay honest and have integrity in that relationship, to be consistent. That’s what the love really is in any relationship.

Repair — the commitment to and the choice to repair when things have been torn or damaged in a relationship — is one of the most important parts of loving someone else. When things go badly in a relationship, it’s an opportunity to actually build it back stronger.

M. Scott Peck wrote about love being a choice — a commitment — back in the 1970s, and bell hooks talked about it in All About Love, one of my favorite books: love is the decision, the will, the commitment to support someone else’s growth and well-being. bell hooks talks in particular about the commitment to someone else’s spiritual growth. I really love that idea — that loving someone is being deeply committed to their growth, especially their spiritual growth, their growth as a human being, as a human soul. That’s not a feeling. That’s a commitment that gets enacted in daily choices about how we show up.

I didn’t understand that for a lot of my life. I’ve come to see it as a choice and as an energy you choose to embody and radiate out to other people and the universe. Ram Das talked about “being love,” being loving energy. That’s my mantra. That’s my mission. That’s why we’re here, I think. To be love. To be loving energy.

This gets you away from needing to possess or control the relationship. Love instead is a choice about the energy and the commitment you bring to someone else. If you have a history of anxious attachment, maybe due to fears of abandonment or rejection, that reframe can be really liberating. I’m not trying to possess you or this relationship. I’m demonstrating a commitment to you to bring loving energy into this relationship day to day. That’s a lot healthier.

Loving well is also about integrity. It requires you to be honest with yourself and with the other person, to be authentic; to make it safe and possible for them to be authentic; to be honest and transparent even when it’s uncomfortable, by having the difficult conversations; to solve problems together rather than treating them as a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser.

There are four dimensions of loving well worth thinking about.

Loving with presence.

If you’re familiar with the five love languages — quality time, gifts, acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch — the idea is that for most of us, one or two are predominant for how we demonstrate love and how we need to receive it in order to feel loved. For much of my life, mine were words of affirmation and physical touch.

I’ve come to realize over time, however, that even if quality time isn’t your specific love language, in some ways it’s still the most underrated form of love. In this society, it’s more and more rare, because we’re so distracted, particularly by our phones. It’s making it harder and harder to have healthy relationships, to feel loved and valued. To be fully present with somebody — not distracted, not performing a role, not wearing a mask, not people pleasing or trying to manage the relationship — just being fully present and authentic, making eye contact, listening, understanding, empathizing, helping them feel understood by checking in and making sure you understand them correctly, validating how they feel — that’s an incredible gift! It’s rare these days, yet it’s an essential part of loving well. When was the last time you actually gave someone you love your full, undivided attention — not in a rush to go someplace else, not distracted by your phone, not rehearsing in your head what you’re going to say next — just fully present?

Loving with honesty.

Any relationship that is truly authentic and sustainable requires that each person show up as their authentic self. That’s the first part of loving with honesty — being honest and transparent about who you really are. Embodying your core values and beliefs. Not playing a role or wearing a mask.

Beyond that, loving with honesty is also about honoring the first of The Four Agreements: being impeccable with your word. Tell the truth, mean what you say, say what you mean. Use your word for good, not ill. Don’t withhold truth because it’s uncomfortable. That’s not kindness. It’s a form of abandonment in a way. That’s what I did in that relationship.

The people who love us best are usually the ones who will tell us the hard thing, not to hurt us, but to help us grow. They respect us enough to be real. They hold us accountable.

I remember hearing somewhere that honest feedback is an act of love — it shows that I care about you and your growth, that I believe in you, that I believe you can do better. I treat my coaching clients that way. People say, “You will tell me the honest truth and give me honest feedback, but you do it in such a loving and caring and safe way for me to be able to receive it and act on it.” That is the highest praise I could receive as a coach.

Being a teacher and working with teens was really powerful in this regard. My best friend was the director before I was, and he was great at this. He would say to a kid, “We’re going to have an uncomfortable conversation. It’s going to be uncomfortable for both you and me.” The reality was it was usually uncomfortable for him, but often not for them! He taught me how to have these loving, caring conversations, in a program that was a place of trust and high expectations for everybody. I was able to take that more and more into my own personal life. I still struggle with it at times, but I’m much more conscious and aware of it now.

Is there something you’ve been withholding from someone you love, for their sake or yours? What do you want to do about it?

Loving with curiosity.

Curiosity is a superpower, and it’s particularly useful to people who’ve known the person they love for a long time. One of the quiet killers of long-term relationships is the assumption — one of The Four Agreements: don’t make assumptions! — that we already know someone because we’ve known them for years or decades or our whole life. We pigeonhole people. We think they’re static, that they’re the same as they were when we were ten, or when we were twenty-three and fell in love. We stop being curious. Yet people change all the time — every day — and grow and evolve, sometimes surprising even themselves.

Like Ted Lasso says, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Curiosity keeps someone from becoming a fixed object in your mind, which then just becomes kind of boring old news. It becomes easy to just fall into a rut, the same old patterns. We don’t listen to them as carefully, since we think we already know how they feel and think. We lose touch with their inner lives, where a lot of the change happens. It’s easy to wake up one day and suddenly feel like strangers.

It can happen with partners, siblings, childhood or college friends. Sometimes, the people we’ve known the longest know us the best — they’ve witnessed our evolution and seen us with keen eyes in a wide variety of circumstances. Or, sometimes they know us the least, mostly seeing the echo of someone we used to be. The difference: curiosity.

If you’re curious, the other person feels like you care about them, that you’re trying to understand them, that you recognize they’re changing and growing. That feels loving.

If you’re curious, it’s easier to feel interested in the other person, to see them as a living, growing human. You may notice new things that surprise you, excite you, make you adore them or appreciate them more.

When’s the last time you asked someone you love something you genuinely didn’t know the answer to, and you were just genuinely curious?

Loving yourself.

For many people, this is the hardest dimension: self love. But you can’t give what you don’t have. You can pretend, you can perform, but it’s really hard to give what you don’t have. So loving others well starts with loving yourself well.

Self-love is not selfishness. It’s the source of your loving energy. If your relationship with yourself is harsh and neglectful, critical, conditional — which for a lot of us it is — that’s a lot of the energy you’re going to bring into your other relationships, whether you mean to or not.

Probably at the core of self love is harnessing your inner voice. Speaking to yourself with kindness matters. Your brain is listening to what you’re saying to yourself. There is some research that indicates that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day, most of them negative, and most are repetitive! If we can reduce the number and intensity of our negative thoughts, and replace some with more positive and grounded ones, we reduce our suffering and gain confidence. And it’s easier to channel positive, loving energy when we interact with other people.

Self love is about a daily commitment to live with integrity — to act and speak in alignment with your core values and beliefs, the best version of your authentic self. That way, when you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day, you will like and love the person looking back.

Loving yourself is also about forgiving yourself and treating yourself with grace when you make a mistake, using it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Self love is also about giving yourself — and asking for — what you need, rather than waiting for someone else to somehow have ESP and know what you want and need. This also requires keeping promises to yourself. Getting to bed on time. Exercising. Meditating. Eating well. Not abusing your body or your mind.

I still struggle with that. I put things in my calendar every day that are really about self-care and self-love — and often ignore them. It hurts me and it negatively impacts others because, if I do those things for myself, my energy coming out to the world is better and more loving. But it is so difficult sometimes to keep my commitments to myself. I’m so much better at keeping promises to other people! But I am working on it and slowly getting better.

Are you treating yourself the way that you treat, or want to treat, other people that you love? That’s the key question, because it starts within.

Why is this so difficult?

Fear is what gets in the way of loving well more than anything else. Fear of being rejected, abandoned, judged, seen too clearly, and maybe not loved for who you really are. Or fear of loving someone you might lose. Those fears make us withhold our love, perform, become people pleasers, and try to control other people and circumstances. I’ve preemptively withdrawn — focused on little things early in a relationship that aren’t real deal breakers, just yellow flags, as a way to protect myself.

But love and fear are not opposites. Fear is something to be carried with us and learned from — that’s what courage is. If we don’t examine the fear, it can ruin a relationship, including our relationship with ourselves. If we examine it, we can learn from it, and the relationship can get stronger.

Unexamined patterns are another obstacle — the scripts we absorbed early on from watching the people around us. If you grew up around love that was conditional or withholding or volatile or absent, that’s what your nervous system learned to expect and replicate. But it’s not your destiny. You can understand the patterns, seek help from a therapist if you think it might help (maybe EMDR if it’s trauma-related), and choose new ways of loving moving forward. It has to be a conscious effort.

In this modern world, busyness and distraction have also become leading obstacles to loving well. Love doesn’t usually evaporate one day or end in dramatic fashion. It quietly erodes over time — through distraction, neglect, assumptions, taking each other for granted. The antidote isn’t complicated: a daily practice of loving well, of presence, of speaking each other’s love languages, of asking a genuine question and listening intently to the answer, of repairing a relationship quickly rather than letting the wound fester. And paying very close attention to your self-love, because that’s the hub everything else grows from.

Make loving well a daily practice. Find small ways to start:

Put your phone away at meals — that's presence. Ask the question you don't know the answer to — that's curiosity. Have the awkward conversation you've been putting off — that's honesty. Keep one promise to yourself this week — that's self-love.

And go out and be love! Radiate loving energy. You’ll be bathed in it, and other people will be so attracted to that loving energy that they’ll want to be a part of it. We can create more love on this planet by just being loving energy.

I’m a life and leadership coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If this resonated, I’d love to connect — book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 or find me at https://www.integrityandjoy.com. Or just reach out — I’d love to hear what resonated with you. latest Substack:

What Does It Mean to Love Well?

Four dimensions almost nobody teaches you

There’s one relationship I had years ago where I didn’t have some of the uncomfortable conversations I should have had.

I knew in the moment I was avoiding them. But my fears and discomforts were paralyzing for me. I was afraid of hurting someone else’s feelings, of the relationship not being able to withstand the discomfort. So I allowed discomfort and tension and unease and unmet needs to fester.

As a result, the relationship never got to the place it could have gotten to.

It was after the relationship was over that I was able to take an honest look at it as a whole and realize I would go back in time and play that out differently. There were opportunities lost — for that person to get stronger, for me to get stronger, for the relationship to get stronger — by us having the difficult conversations.

Love is at the core of human existence. Yet hardly anybody’s taught how to love well. What a tragedy, and how much suffering there is because of that.

Most of us learned about love growing up as kids by observing what was around us. Whatever we saw and experienced as kids in terms of what love looked like and felt like, that’s what we grew up thinking was normal. Oftentimes it was not, or it was “normal” but not in a healthy sense. We watched how the adults in our lives — particularly parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles — loved or didn’t, and consciously or not we were taking notes. Some of those notes were helpful, some not so much. And then we grew up and went out into the world and loved the way we had been taught, without really questioning whether the way we were loving other people was actually love or healthy, or whether it was just familiarity masquerading as love. Performing what we remembered love looking like.

So it’s important to pause now and ask ourselves, do we love the people in our lives well? And at the heart (sic) of it, maybe the hardest part: do you love yourself well? Without loving ourselves well, how is it possible to really love other people well?

There’s a big paradigm shift that made a huge difference for me. We’re brought up to think of love almost exclusively as a feeling. But it’s really a practice as much as it is a feeling. It’s something we do. And it’s a choice — something we choose to do, consciously or not.

The feeling can come and go — it ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, and it can be affected by stress, anxiety, exhaustion, conflict, and the history you have with someone, as well as your own history. As the feeling fluctuates, what is revealed is the practice. The choice to show up, to care for someone else, to repair the relationship when there’s been a violation of trust or some kind of conflict, discomfort, or disappointment. The choice to stay honest and have integrity in that relationship, to be consistent. That’s what the love really is in any relationship.

Repair — the commitment to and the choice to repair when things have been torn or damaged in a relationship — is one of the most important parts of loving someone else. When things go badly in a relationship, it’s an opportunity to actually build it back stronger.

M. Scott Peck wrote about love being a choice — a commitment — back in the 1970s, and bell hooks talked about it in All About Love, one of my favorite books: love is the decision, the will, the commitment to support someone else’s growth and well-being. bell hooks talks in particular about the commitment to someone else’s spiritual growth. I really love that idea — that loving someone is being deeply committed to their growth, especially their spiritual growth, their growth as a human being, as a human soul. That’s not a feeling. That’s a commitment that gets enacted in daily choices about how we show up.

I didn’t understand that for a lot of my life. I’ve come to see it as a choice and as an energy you choose to embody and radiate out to other people and the universe. Ram Das talked about “being love,” being loving energy. That’s my mantra. That’s my mission. That’s why we’re here, I think. To be love. To be loving energy.

This gets you away from needing to possess or control the relationship. Love instead is a choice about the energy and the commitment you bring to someone else. If you have a history of anxious attachment, maybe due to fears of abandonment or rejection, that reframe can be really liberating. I’m not trying to possess you or this relationship. I’m demonstrating a commitment to you to bring loving energy into this relationship day to day. That’s a lot healthier.

Loving well is also about integrity. It requires you to be honest with yourself and with the other person, to be authentic; to make it safe and possible for them to be authentic; to be honest and transparent even when it’s uncomfortable, by having the difficult conversations; to solve problems together rather than treating them as a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser.

There are four dimensions of loving well worth thinking about.

Loving with presence.

If you’re familiar with the five love languages — quality time, gifts, acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch — the idea is that for most of us, one or two are predominant for how we demonstrate love and how we need to receive it in order to feel loved. For much of my life, mine were words of affirmation and physical touch.

I’ve come to realize over time, however, that even if quality time isn’t your specific love language, in some ways it’s still the most underrated form of love. In this society, it’s more and more rare, because we’re so distracted, particularly by our phones. It’s making it harder and harder to have healthy relationships, to feel loved and valued. To be fully present with somebody — not distracted, not performing a role, not wearing a mask, not people pleasing or trying to manage the relationship — just being fully present and authentic, making eye contact, listening, understanding, empathizing, helping them feel understood by checking in and making sure you understand them correctly, validating how they feel — that’s an incredible gift! It’s rare these days, yet it’s an essential part of loving well. When was the last time you actually gave someone you love your full, undivided attention — not in a rush to go someplace else, not distracted by your phone, not rehearsing in your head what you’re going to say next — just fully present?

Loving with honesty.

Any relationship that is truly authentic and sustainable requires that each person show up as their authentic self. That’s the first part of loving with honesty — being honest and transparent about who you really are. Embodying your core values and beliefs. Not playing a role or wearing a mask.

Beyond that, loving with honesty is also about honoring the first of The Four Agreements: being impeccable with your word. Tell the truth, mean what you say, say what you mean. Use your word for good, not ill. Don’t withhold truth because it’s uncomfortable. That’s not kindness. It’s a form of abandonment in a way. That’s what I did in that relationship.

The people who love us best are usually the ones who will tell us the hard thing, not to hurt us, but to help us grow. They respect us enough to be real. They hold us accountable.

I remember hearing somewhere that honest feedback is an act of love — it shows that I care about you and your growth, that I believe in you, that I believe you can do better. I treat my coaching clients that way. People say, “You will tell me the honest truth and give me honest feedback, but you do it in such a loving and caring and safe way for me to be able to receive it and act on it.” That is the highest praise I could receive as a coach.

Being a teacher and working with teens was really powerful in this regard. My best friend was the director before I was, and he was great at this. He would say to a kid, “We’re going to have an uncomfortable conversation. It’s going to be uncomfortable for both you and me.” The reality was it was usually uncomfortable for him, but often not for them! He taught me how to have these loving, caring conversations, in a program that was a place of trust and high expectations for everybody. I was able to take that more and more into my own personal life. I still struggle with it at times, but I’m much more conscious and aware of it now.

Is there something you’ve been withholding from someone you love, for their sake or yours? What do you want to do about it?

Loving with curiosity.

Curiosity is a superpower, and it’s particularly useful to people who’ve known the person they love for a long time. One of the quiet killers of long-term relationships is the assumption — one of The Four Agreements: don’t make assumptions! — that we already know someone because we’ve known them for years or decades or our whole life. We pigeonhole people. We think they’re static, that they’re the same as they were when we were ten, or when we were twenty-three and fell in love. We stop being curious. Yet people change all the time — every day — and grow and evolve, sometimes surprising even themselves.

Like Ted Lasso says, “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Curiosity keeps someone from becoming a fixed object in your mind, which then just becomes kind of boring old news. It becomes easy to just fall into a rut, the same old patterns. We don’t listen to them as carefully, since we think we already know how they feel and think. We lose touch with their inner lives, where a lot of the change happens. It’s easy to wake up one day and suddenly feel like strangers.

It can happen with partners, siblings, childhood or college friends. Sometimes, the people we’ve known the longest know us the best — they’ve witnessed our evolution and seen us with keen eyes in a wide variety of circumstances. Or, sometimes they know us the least, mostly seeing the echo of someone we used to be. The difference: curiosity.

If you’re curious, the other person feels like you care about them, that you’re trying to understand them, that you recognize they’re changing and growing. That feels loving.

If you’re curious, it’s easier to feel interested in the other person, to see them as a living, growing human. You may notice new things that surprise you, excite you, make you adore them or appreciate them more.

When’s the last time you asked someone you love something you genuinely didn’t know the answer to, and you were just genuinely curious?

Loving yourself.

For many people, this is the hardest dimension: self love. But you can’t give what you don’t have. You can pretend, you can perform, but it’s really hard to give what you don’t have. So loving others well starts with loving yourself well.

Self-love is not selfishness. It’s the source of your loving energy. If your relationship with yourself is harsh and neglectful, critical, conditional — which for a lot of us it is — that’s a lot of the energy you’re going to bring into your other relationships, whether you mean to or not.

Probably at the core of self love is harnessing your inner voice. Speaking to yourself with kindness matters. Your brain is listening to what you’re saying to yourself. There is some research that indicates that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day, most of them negative, and most are repetitive! If we can reduce the number and intensity of our negative thoughts, and replace some with more positive and grounded ones, we reduce our suffering and gain confidence. And it’s easier to channel positive, loving energy when we interact with other people.

Self love is about a daily commitment to live with integrity — to act and speak in alignment with your core values and beliefs, the best version of your authentic self. That way, when you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day, you will like and love the person looking back.

Loving yourself is also about forgiving yourself and treating yourself with grace when you make a mistake, using it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Self love is also about giving yourself — and asking for — what you need, rather than waiting for someone else to somehow have ESP and know what you want and need. This also requires keeping promises to yourself. Getting to bed on time. Exercising. Meditating. Eating well. Not abusing your body or your mind.

I still struggle with that. I put things in my calendar every day that are really about self-care and self-love — and often ignore them. It hurts me and it negatively impacts others because, if I do those things for myself, my energy coming out to the world is better and more loving. But it is so difficult sometimes to keep my commitments to myself. I’m so much better at keeping promises to other people! But I am working on it and slowly getting better.

Are you treating yourself the way that you treat, or want to treat, other people that you love? That’s the key question, because it starts within.

Why is this so difficult?

Fear is what gets in the way of loving well more than anything else. Fear of being rejected, abandoned, judged, seen too clearly, and maybe not loved for who you really are. Or fear of loving someone you might lose. Those fears make us withhold our love, perform, become people pleasers, and try to control other people and circumstances. I’ve preemptively withdrawn — focused on little things early in a relationship that aren’t real deal breakers, just yellow flags, as a way to protect myself.

But love and fear are not opposites. Fear is something to be carried with us and learned from — that’s what courage is. If we don’t examine the fear, it can ruin a relationship, including our relationship with ourselves. If we examine it, we can learn from it, and the relationship can get stronger.

Unexamined patterns are another obstacle — the scripts we absorbed early on from watching the people around us. If you grew up around love that was conditional or withholding or volatile or absent, that’s what your nervous system learned to expect and replicate. But it’s not your destiny. You can understand the patterns, seek help from a therapist if you think it might help (maybe EMDR if it’s trauma-related), and choose new ways of loving moving forward. It has to be a conscious effort.

In this modern world, busyness and distraction have also become leading obstacles to loving well. Love doesn’t usually evaporate one day or end in dramatic fashion. It quietly erodes over time — through distraction, neglect, assumptions, taking each other for granted. The antidote isn’t complicated: a daily practice of loving well, of presence, of speaking each other’s love languages, of asking a genuine question and listening intently to the answer, of repairing a relationship quickly rather than letting the wound fester. And paying very close attention to your self-love, because that’s the hub everything else grows from.

Make loving well a daily practice. Find small ways to start:

Put your phone away at meals — that's presence. Ask the question you don't know the answer to — that's curiosity. Have the awkward conversation you've been putting off — that's honesty. Keep one promise to yourself this week — that's self-love.

And go out and be love! Radiate loving energy. You’ll be bathed in it, and other people will be so attracted to that loving energy that they’ll want to be a part of it. We can create more love on this planet by just being loving energy.

I’m a life and leadership coach and founder of Integrity and Joy. If this resonated, I’d love to connect — book a free consultation at https://calendar.app.google/CsBx5mnpX7g9PFuP9 or find me at https://www.integrityandjoy.com. Or just reach out — I’d love to hear what resonated with you.