We readily say: “I love them.”
This sentence seems to describe what we give to the other person. Yet when we explain it, we often speak about what we receive.
“I feel good with him.” “She respects me.” “He makes me feel valued.” “She takes care of me.”
We believe we are describing our love. We are mainly describing our experience with that person.
This confusion can organize an entire relationship around our expectations. Because loving means, to us, feeling something thanks to the other person, we monitor what they must do to sustain our feeling.
Meanwhile, one question remains almost unanswered:
What do we do so that this person also feels something they can call love?
How am I loved, and how do I love?
Ask someone why they love their partner. They may speak about their presence, respect, thoughtful gestures, or the security or pleasure they bring.
These answers may be true. But they answer “How am I loved?” more than “How do I love?”
The same mechanism appears when we describe what we do not like. We draw up an inventory of what the other person brings out in us: anger, humiliation, fear or distance.
We readily attribute our negative feelings to the other person, but call the positive feelings we experience thanks to them “our love.”
The sentence “I love them” can therefore contain two realities:
“I like the way I feel with this person.”
“I make room in my life to contribute genuinely to theirs.”
A relationship needs both. Confusing them prevents us from seeing which one is missing.
The love we receive passes through our reasoning
Our partner takes an action. We interpret it. That interpretation changes an emotion, then we classify the experience: love, rejection, attention, control or indifference.
Silence can represent respect for a need for calm to one person and feel like abandonment to another. A gift can be received as thoughtfulness or as a way to avoid a conversation.
Our emotion remains real even when our interpretation is inaccurate.
If we feel abandoned, that suffering exists. It does not yet prove that the other person intended to abandon us. We need to distinguish the feeling, the meaning attributed to the action and the observable facts.
The other person cannot order us to feel loved on the grounds that their intention was good. Nor can we conclude that every unpleasant feeling proves an absence of love.
Received love is an experience, not just a declaration.
Feeling strongly does not prove that we love well
We often love the calm, excitement, desire, security or pride that the other person’s presence makes possible.
This does not reduce love to selfish pleasure. It explains why someone becomes important: they are associated with experiences we want to keep living.
Think of a faucet. When we want water, we go to the place where we have learned to find it. Our partner can become a source of tenderness, recognition or joy.
But the intensity of the need says nothing yet about the quality of the way we love.
We can want to see someone, suffer from their absence and be attracted to their body while behaving possessively, jealously or indifferently toward their needs.
Missing them describes the place they occupy within us. Attraction describes their effect on us. To know whether we know how to love, we must look at our behavior.
What do we protect of their dignity? What room do we give their plans, their rest, their boundaries and their pleasure? What have we learned about their particular way of recognizing love?
The love we give is not measured by the beauty of the feeling we experience. It is tested through the value our behavior tries to bring into the other person’s experience.
Loving requires learning to know a person
We can work more to provide security for the family while the other person mainly experiences our absence. Multiply gifts when they are waiting for a conversation. Correct their mistakes in the name of their potential and make them feel that they are never good enough.
The intention to love and the experience of being loved remain different.
Loving therefore requires attention in two directions: seek real value for the other person, then observe what our action actually produces.
This work requires knowing the person. We need to observe, ask questions, try an approach, listen to the feedback and change the form of our love when it does not reach its recipient.
This does not require us to produce only pleasant emotions. Telling a necessary truth, refusing a destructive request or setting a boundary can cause frustration while protecting the future, dignity or the relationship.
Knowing how to love does not mean maintaining permanent comfort. It means seeking what is good without ever stopping learning how the real person can receive it.
An action can also benefit us
Imagine that we give our partner a car. It makes their travel easier, but we also know that it will get us to work two days a week.
Does this personal benefit remove all value from the action? No.
A relationship often rests on actions whose value circulates between both people. The question is who genuinely benefits from the action and what place the other person occupied in our decision.
If we are the main beneficiary while presenting the action as an immense sacrifice, we are using the vocabulary of giving to embellish our self-interest.
An action does not need to be free of every personal advantage to be loving. It needs to be named honestly.
Reciprocity is not repayment
We give because the other person’s joy touches us, because we want to build a bond or because we hope that each person will do their part in it.
This does not mean that the other person owes us an exact copy of our action.
If we offer a gift, they do not have to buy one of equal value. If we devote time to their project, they do not have to count the hours before giving them back to us.
But pretending to expect nothing can be just as false. We often hope that our effort will be seen, that its cost will be understood and that the person will also participate in the relationship.
Love turned into debt suffocates the recipient. Love that never circulates exhausts the giver.
Living reciprocity does not produce two identical services. It brings two experiences of love into the same relationship.
Feeling becomes loving when the feeling learns to act
We want to be valued, desired, protected and understood. These expectations can belong to the relationship we have chosen.
But the other person has the same emotional architecture. They do not live solely to produce our favorite emotions.
Our relational rights therefore come with duties: learn their expectations, respond to those that are legitimate and check that our intention genuinely reaches their experience.
Knowing how to love does not mean mastering a definitive method. It means developing a skill: listening, translating our feeling into actions, observing their effects and correcting their form.
The feeling can be sincere from the very first day.
The skill of loving, however, continues to be learned.
Does my love reach the other person?
- What am I actually describing when I say “I love you”?
- What experience does my partner receive from my actions?
- What need of the other person have I merely assumed?
- What form of my love needs to be translated better?
- What behavior would show that I am genuinely learning to love?
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