The Virgin Book Tour: Thoughts about Love
By Lynn Rasmussen in Book Tour, Love, Relationships & Marriage | Comments (2)
My friend Nancy came up with the title: The Virgin Book Tour. My very first time. Sometimes awkward, a bit scary and uncomfortable. Not quite natural yet.
I haven’t been wildly happy with my delivery. I’m good enough for now but I’m not always spouting out the tightest sound bites.
I woke up this morning with an insight: What I really want to do is blow holes in the “Love is work” mantra.
Everywhere relationship experts are saying that love and relationships take work. I so disagree. Love is a whole lot easier and more fun than we’ve been lead to believe.
Love is free. Love is built in to our natures.
Love is the feeling associated with the flow of information and energy between people. You can’t get more of it with work.
Love is everywhere. All you have to do is open up to what’s already here.
I can relax now. The book tour’s going to get a lot easier.
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As a systems theorist, I may have to take issue with your attacking the idea of “love is work”. In trying to think more deeply about some models in business relationships, I’ve gotten down to the basics of material, energy (and sometimes information).
I think that love takes energy. (I could probably get a Maslow bigot to cite the hierarchy of needs for you). Following the logic, however, the work of love probably requires less energy than the work of being isolated, and has greater benefits (potentially synergetic). It’s a different type of situation when you have more than one person going through life as an individual, rather than as part of a group. (I often make jokes to working mothers that they need a wife to get household things done. Not necessarily polygamy … although that could be a solution).
From my economics training, I’m not going to try to quantify amounts of love, and then compare to amounts of hate. I’m not sure that love is naturally part of human nature, because we rapidly get into nature-nurture discussion, and I think the majority of children have mothers who cared (to a greater or lesser degree).
I see it this way: To open to that flow requires attention and awareness. It requires a certain understanding of the process of love. Yes, a bit of work.
When the flow is blocked, when I’m relatively closed from anger or frustration or any negative emotional reaction, usually I want him to do something and he’s not up for it. I’m usually tired with low blood sugar.
When we disagree I can get angry or I can get curious. When I get curious, I’m more open and then he’s more open. It’s way less work and we get creative together.
So, yes, paying attention is work, but it’s a whole lot less work than the alternative. And as it becomes a habit, it’s hardly any work at all.
And I see love as genetic and physiological. The feeling and expressions that show we are open to others. It creates bonds not just in us but in animals too. Read Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals.”
Jaak Panksepp, author of “Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” slowed down the audio recording of mice and discovered that they laugh when tickled.
It’s all in place to assure bonding and survival.
In corporate life, it’s about the flow of information/ideas, matter, and energy toward achieving the mission/vision/purpose of the company. Good feelings about that mission/purpose represent an openness to it, encourage a flow of information, matter, energy toward it.
A simple mental model, maybe, but I find it extremely useful and practical for getting things done in all aspects of my life.