What is Love?

	As a marriage, family, and sexuality therapist, I have had the opportunity to interact with couples, families, and individuals from all walks of life who maintain various beliefs about relationships.  Perhaps the most frequent and compelling conversation that emerges in my private practice and work in the community is how people define what love is and what it means to them.  Oftentimes in couple’s therapy, one of the individuals will pause and look around as if gathering his or her thoughts about how to define a concept previously taken for granted.  Eventually, one of the two individuals will shout out a phrase and their partner will chime in with their thoughts about what they believe love REALLY is.  Along the same lines, I recently conducted a workshop at a local university about the dynamics that exist in a loving relationship.  The participants in the workshop came up with myriad ways to define “love” and the types of relationships that they wanted to have with their partners.  Here are some of their responses about what love is:   § “A commitment to someone” § “Doing things for people that you don’t do for everyone else” § “A strong feeling that you have for another person” § “Wanting to spend a lot of time with the person” § “The feeling you get before you reach orgasm during sex” § “The butterflies I get when I am around the person” § “The peace I feel when I think about spending time with my husband”   Like the couples who I see in my practice, the participants in the workshop spent a great deal of time talking about how love is received and manifested and how it is a product of our families, cultures, and personalities.  We discussed how the people around us (i.e. parents, friends, co-workers, etc.) help shape our beliefs and attitudes about what love is, how we love ourselves, and how we love others.  From my professional experience in meeting with couples, families, and individuals, I have found that love involves intimacy, passion, commitment, and patience.  Intimacy is how we relate, communicate, and express ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and sexually to our partners.  Taking time to get to know our individual needs and desires and then sharing our concerns and issues with our partners gives the relationship an opportunity to grow in a healthy way.  Intimacy refers to how a person demonstrates “closeness” when he/she is with his or her partner.  For my couples, I will typically ask them to do an exercise where they are asked to clarify and articulate their own values about touching/affection, communication styles (i.e. talk/not talk; use of body language and gestures), assertiveness, initiation, and sexual expression.  As the couples reveal their likes/dislikes, challenges/strengths, and values about the ways they are intimate with one another, they discover that many of their issues have gone unresolved because they (1) didn’t take the time to find out their partner’s beliefs/attitudes an d/or (2) they didn’t have the  “tools” (i.e. use of reflective listening, empathy, acknowledgement of differences, etc.) to effectively express themselves to one another.   Intimacy comes from holding a partner’s hand, giving each other bubble baths, caressing each other’s hair, watching television together, walking in the park together, eating together, reading a favorite book and sharing ideas, going shopping together, sitting quietly together in the living room, attending a church together, etc.  Quality time (QT) is a term that many people use in order to signify the amount of time and intimacy that is present in a relationship.  Using QT to get to know our partners on an intimate level is needed for a loving relationship.      Passion is the driving force or motivation experienced by individuals to initiate, sustain, change, or sever a relationship.  It’s the excitement, enthusiasm, and zeal that we feel when we are with our partners.  When passion has waned or no longer exists, the relationship becomes strained—unless the passion is rediscovered or reshaped into a new and meaningful option.  In many relationships, passion usually starts out very strong because we are very interested in learning about our partners and spending time with them.  We often may feel the “butterflies” or do things that we may not normally do (i.e. drive across town to see each another, send flowers, write poetry, etc.) in order to feel closer to that special someone.  I once counseled a man who indicated that he felt so passionate about a former lover that after spending several hours on the phone with her, he got into his car at 2 a.m. and drove 400 miles to bring her the morning paper and breakfast  in bed.   Commitment is the type of bond that we have with someone else.  How close or distant we feel to a person is another way to identify this component of love.  Commitment can be explicit (i.e. expressing to one another that you feel a strong connection that is physical, emotional, spiritual, and/or sexual) or implicit (i.e. you assume there is an agreement that you are attached physically, emotionally, spiritually and/or sexually).  In my practice, I have found that couples with strong commitment or attachment bonds usually communicate with one another either verbally or non-verbally about their level of commitment.  Those couples experiencing difficulty typically don’t identify to their partners the level or the type of commitment that they have.  Loving someone is identifying how you feel about the different forms of commitment and then articulating these feelings to your partner.  A person can be physically committed (abstaining from kissing or having sex with a nyone else), but feel emotionally unattached to his or her primary partner.  On the other hand, one could feel emotionally attached to a primary partner but be sexually connected to someone else.  If the relationship is important to you, take time out to figure out how you feel about YOU being in a relationship and then take time to find out how your partner feels.   Patience is the final component of love.  Loving ourselves requires us to be patient with learning about ourselves through life experiences.  Similarly, loving our partners requires us to be patient with them as they learn life’s lessons by experience.  Being patient with our partners may be difficult if we are not patient with ourselves.  For example, I have spent time with many couples who have been unwilling to give their partners time to figure out how they feel about the relationship, about living in their parents’ house, having children, getting a new job, moving, etc.  They pressure themselves and their partners to make uninformed or hasty decisions that typically end up straining their relationships.  It is important to keep in mind that people process different ideas at different rates and we need to afford them and ourselves the latitude to make good decisions.  Healthy, loving relationships involve intimacy, passion, commitment, and patience.  “True” love begins when we take the time to figure out how we feel physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually about our individual selves and our partners.  Love can encompass all those things mentioned before and it is important that we understand what love means to us as well as what it means to our partners.   By Dr. James, BDO Health Expert www.blackdoctor.org

Acts of Kindness

1. Arrange a visit to a local nursing home to spend time with residents.
2. Visit a kids ward at a local hospital to play games with the kids.
3. Pick an under resourced school and arrange to clean up the grounds
4. Perform some basic repairs at the house of a church member who cannot afford to do so.
5. Sponsor and organize an oil change day for single mothers or offer to be a big brother to a boy whose father isn’t in the picture.
6. Perform projects in the Wake County Homeless Shelters (Feeding hungry, food/clothing drive, etc. )
7. Assist Women’s shelters with basic needs (i.e. clothing drive, organizing materiels, etc.)
8. Partner with Habitat for Humanity and help build home
9. Get involved with Big Brothers/Big Sisters to mentor kids
10. Work with Junior Achievement in Inner City Schools
11. Partner with other churches in a specific area of the city to clean-up, repair, and renovate a park for kids & families.
12. Partner with local food banks to stock their shelves.

Steps to Fulfillment

How can you find forgiveness, deliverance from sinful thoughts and practices, resist temptation, and develop holy habits so you will please God with your sexuality?

The Bible offers several important truths to help.

1. God made you as a sexual person (Gen. 1:27). Recognize sexual desire as being a wonderful God-given fact of life. But also realize that how you respond to sexual desire shows whether you have chosen to follow God’s route to fulfillment or your own (Gal. 5:16-19).
2. Think about what is really going on in your heart when you choose a form of sexual expression that God has forbidden. Admit that in rejecting God’s ways, you have actually rejected God for the sake of being able to have immediate, though short-lived, sexual pleasure. Confess that you have been pursuing your own selfish gratification, and accept His forgiveness (Heb. 10:22; I John 1:9).
3. Fill your mind with God’s thoughts by knowing what the Bible says (Ps. 119:11). Remember that when Jesus faced temptation He chose to call on the words of Scripture (Matt. 4:1-11). The written Word of God is the “sword of the Spirit,” one of our defenses against Satan’s attempts to harm us (Eph. 6:17).
4. Ask for and rely on God’s help (Matt. 6:13; 7:7-11; Luke 18:1; 22:40; Rom. 8:26,27). Don’t trust your own ability to resist temptation (Heb. 4:16). Discover that self-control is found by choosing to let the Spirit of God control you (Eph. 5:18).
5. Realize that faith in the Lord may mean a willingness to experience discomfort for a while rather than to enjoy immediate but short-lived pleasure (Gen. 39; Heb. 11:25).
6. Realize that God has provided a way for you to escape every temptation (I Cor. 10:13). Look for it and take that route!
7. Keep in mind that real love will not allow you to fulfill your sexual desires at the expense of others (I Cor. 13:4-7; I Thess. 4:6).
8. Don’t put yourself in situations where you know temptation will be great. Don’t ever plan on sinning or make it easy to fall (Rom. 13:14).
9. Seek the help and encouragement of other believers who can support you in your desire to be faithful to the Lord (Heb. 10:24, 25; James 5:16).
10. Don’t become complacent or overconfident when you have a victory over sinful desires. Always be on guard (I Cor. 10:12).
11. Take radical action against impurity. Don’t toy with it and take halfway measures (Matt. 5:27-30). Think of what encourages lust or makes indulging in immorality so convenient, and then change your patterns of behavior.
12. Keep your eyes on the example of Jesus (Heb. 3:1; 12:2-4). Believe that in time, choosing His ways will enable you to see the wisdom of His point of view.
13. Develop a close relationship to Jesus, and He will produce holiness in you (John 15:1-17).

(RBC-Discovery Series)