Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  It is my altruism, not my narcissism, that fosters this fantasy. After all, a man can acquire such wisdom at the source of a woman’s orgasm: how to slow down, speed up, be consistent, be nonlinear, be persistent, be unpredictable, be patient, be outrageous, be generous, be witty. There is, in fact, nothing of value, philosophically and practically, that he can’t learn if he can turn the delta of Venus into the site of Vesuvius. Most men will lick and suck and drink a pussy—and I’m not complaining. But it is the rare man who does so with his whole consciousness poised on his tongue. It is this awareness that will move a woman; when her consciousness—on her clit—encounters his, orgasm marks their meeting. Ultimately, it is here—or rather, down there—that a man will learn how to be a winner or a loser, with women as in life. TRINITY If old-fashioned fucking-for-two remained a minefield for me, fucking-for-three continued to be a delight. The Pre-Raphaelite redhead plotted reunions, and we three got together every month or so with unplanned regularity for over a year. I returned to my New Year’s Eve lovers again and again, hungry for love and freedom—a previously impossible duet in my experience. Says Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter the kingdom. One day, I ventured down on the Pre-Raphaelite. First time. Terrified. Curious. I wanted to see her pleasure in order to know my own. She was a genuine redhead. Eating pussy when you are a heterosexual woman is overwhelming. To confront a pussy that close for the first time—you can’t ever get that close, at that angle, to your own—is like looking narcissism in the face with a resounding Yes! Profound. Wet. It can sometimes be so hard to be oneself in one’s own sex life. With another woman, a woman’s identity receives a brutal jolt: she is me, I am her, her pleasure is mine, mine is hers. The source, the center, the origin of the human race becomes your only view. I bonded with my own sex and learned to love myself. I also developed a new compassion for the male divers. A pussy is a wild and watery landscape of hills and valleys and ravines and mighty holes that suck one in like quicksand. Once in, you cannot escape. Diving is an act of bravery. The redhead, however, demonstrated less hesitancy, and ate me like a woman who knows how. Naughty, considerate, and relentless. Her fingers felt like tongues, her mouth like a baby’s, sucking. I resist men’s fingers. Too rough, too big, too fast. My shield goes up, my clit hides. My orgasms with her were long, open, and free.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Loving is a skill. It takes practice. When you set the goal of learning to love yourself, you’ll find ever-present opportunities to practice this new skill, because you’re never further than arm’s reach, or perhaps better said, heart’s reach. Just like all forms of positivity resonance, however, self-love first requires safety and connection. Beating yourself up with the continual harshness of self-criticism is no way to make yourself feel safe in your own company. Likewise, if your self-assessments are unflappably sunny, unhinged from reality, or otherwise blind to your ingrained bad habits, you can hardly feel safe either. A true friend, after all, is the one who tells you the truth. He or she affirms you realistically and often, and yet does not abandon you or grow silent when a negative assessment is prudent. Creating a sense of safety within your own skin is just the same. To access self-love, disengage from harshness in your self-talk, but not from reality. Affirm your positive qualities, but refrain from delusion and self-deception. Be your own compassionate truth-teller. Love’s second precondition is connection. This is no less true for self-love than for positivity resonance with others. Truly loving yourself requires that you slow down enough to truly meet yourself heart to heart, letting the heart of your I resonate with the heart of your me. Allow time to reflect on your inherent strivings for goodness. Tune in to the messages your body sends you. You can’t simply rush from one activity to the next, attending forever outward, and expect to fall into self-love. Indeed, you might let rushing about serve as your cue to switch gears. Self-love, we’ve seen, is not the same as having an inflated, narcissistic view of yourself or high self-esteem. These often hinge on good outcomes, making you rigidly guard against negative feedback. When bad news crashes through, it sends you into a free fall. Self-love, by contrast, is steadier, more peaceful. This inherent calm arises because it’s not predicated on good outcomes. You can learn to be a friend to yourself through thick and thin, through good times and bad. Indeed, it’s in the toughest times that harboring compassion toward yourself makes the biggest difference. Practice standing by your own side during hard times, with openness and goodwill, and you’ll appreciate the steady security self-love offers you. It safeguards you from plunging into despair. Self-love buys you even more. It’s the currency in which all other forms of positivity resonance trade. When your reserves of self-love are low, you can scarcely meet the gaze of others, seeing yourself as either beneath or above them. A chasm forms between you and others that slashes your odds of forging true connections. Yet when you practice and bank self-love, you become rich with emotional reserves. You’re more able to recognize sources of goodness in others, to see and fulfill others’ yearnings to connect, no matter their circumstances. The next chapter describes how to do just that. CHAPTER 7

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What the brain images show is that, compared to imagining neutral, nonpainful situations, imagining yourself in these painful situations lights up the well-known network of brain areas associated with pain processing, including the insula, that area linked with conscious feeling states. When you are later asked to imagine these same painful events happening to a loved one—your spouse, your best friend, or your child, for instance—these same brain areas light up. By and large, then, your loved one’s pain is your pain. By contrast, when you imagine these painful events happening to complete strangers, a different pattern of activation emerges altogether, one that shows little activation in the insula and more activation in areas linked with distinguishing and distancing yourself from others, and actively inhibiting or regulating emotions, as if to prevent their pain from becoming your pain. At the level of brain activity during imagined pain, you and your beloved are virtually indistinguishable. Whereas the Taipei research team defined love to be a lasting loving relationship (what, for clarity’s sake, I call a bond), the work from Hasson’s team at Princeton tells me that neural synchrony and overlap can also unfold between you and a complete stranger—if you let it. Positivity resonance between brains, as it turns out, requires only connection, not the intimacy or shared history that comes with a special bond. Even so, the distinctions revealed in the Taipei study, between imagining your loved one’s pain and imagining a stranger’s pain, underscore that stifled emotions and guarded personal boundaries, while at times necessary and fully appropriate, can also function as obstacles to positivity resonance. As we’ll see in the next section, your attunement to various opportunities for positive connection with others is supported not just by neural synchrony, but by the hormone oxytocin as well. Biochemistries in Love Oxytocin, which is nicknamed by some the “cuddle hormone” or the “love hormone,” is actually more properly identified as a neuropeptide because it acts not just within your body but also within your brain. Oxytocin has long been known to play a key role in social bonding and attachment. Clear evidence of this first emerged from experiments with a monogamous breed of prairie voles: Oxytocin, when dripped into one animal’s brain in the presence of the opposite sex, creates in that animal a long-lasting preference to remain together with the other, cuddled up side by side, behavior taken as evidence that oxytocin sparked the formation of a powerful social bond between them.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He was the one who looked beautiful to me when we fucked, the others all looked like men with contorted faces—best not to look. He didn’t grunt, or groan, or squeak during sex. He beamed and glowed, eyes wide open, shaking his head, saying, “Wow! Wow!” and then he’d fuck me some more. He was the thirty-third man, and the only one I really liked to fuck. The others were just men and I allowed it. Resentfully. Most men fuck in and out, in and out, in and out, on and on. But he fucked like he was actually going somewhere. And he was. He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat. The others regarded my little fur ball as a hindrance, an obstacle, even a threat. They just didn’t get it: love me, love my pussy. He was my blood. He was the one who never got real. He was the one I never conquered. He was one I had the most fun with. He had the only cock I worshiped. He was the one with whom I couldn’t tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure. With the others my pleasure was the only pleasure. He was the guy who could fuck for three hours . . . and still not come. He was the one who showed me real physical joy. The others just made me come. With him I came to . . . the Kingdom. He was sweet-sweet-sweet. He was the one who oozed love. Through his fingertips, his movement, his skin, and his cock. He gave me nothing outside of bed. In bed he gave me everything that I, as a woman, could ever desire. He fucked like a rolling ocean. I didn’t have those powerful but so brief and geographically specific outward climaxes with him, it was the building of an inward tidal wave that flooded my body, my brain, and then spilled into my soul. He never, unlike the others, asked me to be “his”—but I was. He was the one who treated me like his—in bed. All the others treated me like theirs out of bed, but in bed I could smell their fear. With him sex was about transcendence, with the others power. He swooped in and out of my pussy, my ass, my life. Others smothered, wishing, foolishly, to colonize what they coveted. Fucking him was like breathing in wide open space. If I never loved again I would die having known a big, big love. There was always that moment when he fucked me when all my thoughts ceased and turned to God: I was entering His territory. He didn’t please me. He possessed me. He, you see, was the one I really loved. Having now imagined its demise, I mustered the courage to proceed with the affair. #101

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Witness how you experience resistance and even lean in toward it. I can guarantee there’s more to learn by leaning in than from turning away. When you avoid a challenge like this, you forfeit opportunities for experiential learning that yields wisdom. Yet when you approach these areas of resistance, your return on this investment is better awareness and understanding, both of yourself and of love. Knowing that it can be all too easy to zoom past using yourself as your target as you begin your LKM practice, you might decide up front that you’ll focus exclusively on yourself for several weeks. Even mark off this time on your calendar. This is in fact how LKM has been taught to the participants in my team’s research studies. The very first guided meditation our study participants are offered focuses exclusively on the self, and they are instructed to stay working with this particular meditation daily, for the first two weeks. This is not self-indulgence. Rather, many LKM teachers find that exploration of self-love provides a solid foundation from which to later expand love’s reach. You can use this reasoning if you need to justify this level of self-focus to yourself: Self-focus has been part of LKM practice for millennia, and it will help you deepen your skills for extending your experiences of love to many, many others. You can start in small ways simply by becoming aware of your body. Your body has its own pace, your mind another. Simply attending to your body coaxes you to slow down. Once you tune in to your physical sensations, you might discover a need to shift positions, stretch, or give yourself a few minutes of massage. Doing so is a form of self-love that instantly creates more comfort and ease. Just as eye contact is a key channel for making a connection with another person, awareness of your own body sensations is a key channel for self-love. It’s the platform from which you can offer yourself compassionate attention. Try This Meditation Practice: Self-Love Find a comfortable place to sit where you won’t be disturbed. If you’re in a chair, make your way to the back of the chair so that your lower back is well supported. Ground both of your feet flat on the floor. Sit upright, with your spine, neck, and the crown of your head pulled skyward. Gently pull your shoulder blades backward and downward, raising your rib cage slightly. These postural shifts will create a true physical openness for your heart, an openness consistent with the positive emotions you aim to cultivate. Gently lower your gaze to reduce visual distractions. If you’re comfortable, close your eyes. Begin by taking two or three deep breaths, and bring your awareness to your heart. Visualize how each in-breath affects your heart physically.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Jordan —susurro contra su piel. No sé por qué digo su nombre, pero creo que tengo miedo de que no esté realmente aquí y todo esto sea un sueño. Sus dedos se enredan en mi cabello, y me deslizo sobre ella. Alejando el sudor de su frente, la miro fijamente, observando sus mejillas sonrojadas y sus ojos brillantes, su pequeña camisa se ha levantado, exponiendo sus hermosos pechos y pezones. Bajo, tomando uno en mi boca, chupando y arrastrándolo como a su clítoris. Gime y sus manos regresan para envolverse alrededor de mi nuca. Cambio al otro, arrastrando una mano por su cuerpo e intentando asimilarla tanto como pueda. Sé que todo lo que hacemos está mal, y no sé cómo voy a explicar esto a alguien, pero aquí mismo —en este momento— no quiero estar en ningún otro lado. Ojalá pudiera morir tan feliz como lo estoy ahora. Aquí, en la oscuridad de la noche, en esta habitación oscura, detrás de una puerta cerrada, no necesitamos explicarle nada a nadie. Porque solo este momento, es nuestro. Me levanto de la cama y me pongo de pie, desabrochando mi cinturón y abriendo mis jeans. Busco en la mesita de noche y saco un condón de la caja, volviendo a levantarme y mirándola. Tiene las piernas cerradas, una rodilla ligeramente arqueada y las manos a los costados, frotando el edredón mientras me mira. —¿Estás segura de esto? —le pregunto. Asiente. Me quito las botas y el resto de la ropa, poniéndome de pie otra vez. Al abrir el paquete, la miro, pero sus ojos se han reducido a otra cosa, su respiración se hace cada vez más superficial. Siento una sonrisa curvar las comisuras de mis labios, preguntándome cuántas otras palabras adultas sabe. Pero no tengo la oportunidad de preguntar. Se sienta, balanceando sus piernas sobre el borde de la cama, y va por mi polla, llevándosela a la boca. Gimo y jadeo al mismo tiempo, su lengua está húmeda y caliente cuando se retira y chupa la punta. —Jordan, por favor. —Agarro la parte posterior de su cabello, tratando de alejarla suavemente—. Eso me pondrá al borde, y quiero que te corras de nuevo. Empujándola hacia atrás en la cama, me poso sobre ella, derritiéndome en su boca y besándola profundamente. Me acurruco entre sus piernas, y dobla sus rodillas mientras desliza sus uñas por mi espalda. Deslizando mi mano debajo de su cuerpo, agarro su culo y presiono nuestros cuerpos, el mundo gira detrás de mis ojos cerrados. Tenerla debajo de mí, piel sobre piel... mi polla está tan dura que no puedo soportarlo. Esto es mío. Recostándome sobre mis talones, me coloco el condón, sin apartar la vista de ella. —Estoy un poco asustada —dice, la preocupación arrugando su frente. Me detengo, tratando de no apretar el puño alrededor de mi polla con demasiada fuerza. ¿Asustada? —¿Qué pasa si hago demasiado ruido? —susurra.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay. And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent. The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief. That, however, is to get ahead of my story. I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide; that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlastingly." "Still I had thought that on the morrow—the intoxication passed—you would have shuddered at the thought of having a man for a lover?" "Why? Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was the fault of my blood, not myself. Who had planted nettles in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my very childhood. I began to feel their carnal stings long before I could understand what conclusion they imported. When I had tried to bridle my lust, was it my fault if the scale of reason was far too light to balance that of sensuality? Was I to blame if I could not argue down my raging motion? Fate, Iago-like, had clearly shewed me that if I would damn myself, I could do so in a more delicate way than drowning. I yielded to my destiny, and encompassed my joy. "Withal, I never said with Iago,—'Virtue, a fig!' No, virtue is the sweet flavour of the peach: vice, the tiny droplet of prussic-acid—its delicious savour. Life, without either, would be sapidless." "Still, not having, like most of us, been inured to sodomy from your school-days, I should have thought that you would have been loath to have yielded your body to another man's pleasure." "Loath? Ask the virgin if she regrets having given up her maidenhood to the lover she dotes on, and who fully returns her love? She has lost a treasure that all the wealth of Golconda cannot buy again; she is no longer what the world calls a pure, spotless, immaculate lily, and not having had the serpent's guile in her, society—the lilies—will brand her with an infamous name; profligates will leer at her, the pure will turn away in scorn. Still, does the girl regret having yielded her body for love—the only thing worth living for? No. Well, no more did I. Let 'clay-cold heads and lukewarm hearts' scourge me with their wrath if they will. "On the morrow, when we met again, all traces of fatigue had passed away. We rushed into each other's arms and smothered ourselves with kisses, for nothing is more an incentive to love than a short separation.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Despite all my recollections of his cruelty, all my thoughts upon his disinclinations toward women, upon the depravity of his tastes, upon the gulf which separated us morally, nothing in the world was able to extinguish this nascent passion, and had the Count called upon me to lay down my life, I would have sacrificed it for him a thousand times over. He was far from suspecting my sentiments... he was far, the ungrateful one, from divining the cause of the tears I shed every day; nevertheless, it was out of the question for him to be in doubt of my eagerness to fly to do his every bidding, to please him in every possible way, it could not have been he did not glimpse, did not have some inkling of my attentions; doubtless, because they were instinctive, they were also mindless, and went to the point of serving his errors, of serving them as far as decency permitted, and always of hiding them from his aunt. This behavior had in some sort won me his confidence, and all that came from him was so precious to me, I was so blinded by the little his heart offered me, that I sometimes had the weakness to believe he was not indifferent to me. But how promptly his excessive disorders disabused me: they were such that even his health was affected. I several times took the liberty to represent to him the dangers of his conduct, he would hear me out patiently, then end by telling me that one does not break oneself of the vice he cherished. Chapter 12 "Ah, Therese!" he exclaimed one day, full of enthusiasm, "if only you knew this fantasy's charms, if only you could understand what one experiences from the sweet illusion of being no more than a woman! incredible inconsistency I one abhors that sex, yet one wishes to imitate it! Ah! how sweet it is to succeed, Therese, how delicious it is to be a slut to everyone who would have to do with you and carrying delirium and prostitution to their ultimate period, successively, in the very same day, to be the mistress of a porter, a marquis, a valet, a friar, to be the beloved of each one after the other, caressed, envied, menaced, beaten, sometimes victorious in their arms, sometimes a victim and at their feet, melting them with caresses, reanimating them with excesses.... Oh no, Therese, you do not understand what is this pleasure for a mind constructed like mine....

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing. From this vantage point, love, compassion, and other deeply moving spiritual experiences become holy states that you can cultivate through your own intentional efforts to be present, grounded, and mindfully aware of both yourself and others. Learning to trust that your deepest emotions can lead you somewhere good is what my collaborator and American Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg calls faith in her 2002 spiritual memoir by the same name. Faith, or alternatively trust or confidence, is the usual translation of the ancient Pali word saddha, which Salzberg points out literally means “to place the heart upon.” Like Armstrong and Nhat Hanh, Salzberg emphasizes that faith is a verb, an action—something you do—not a received definition of reality or belief system that explains away life’s mysteries. In Buddhism, to have faith is to open your heart to your experiences, or as Salzberg puts it, to be willing “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” Faith is a way of leaning in toward your feelings of love and oneness, trusting that—somehow—they will nourish you and lead you closer to your spiritual higher ground. Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience. From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book, Spiritual Evolution, he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Others play bit parts. They are not particularly consequential to the overall arch of your plotline, and by consequence they often undergo little character development in the script that your mind follows. You sometimes even treat them as though they were mere props, inanimate objects that populate the setting, yet bear no real importance to you or your day. Why wouldn’t it be this way? The play is all about you. You see where the illustration is going. Each person is, after all, the star of his or her own play and day. If you dropped the script of your own day and picked up the script of another person’s day, this other person would suddenly undergo considerable character development. You’d come to appreciate his or her own wishes, plans, and goals. You’d understand that this person isn’t merely a bit part or prop, but rather fully human, like you. Just like you, this person is full of yearnings and strivings, hopes and insecurities. This is true of every person. It’s equally true of all those with whom you cross paths, as well as all those you’ll never meet, not even once. LKM opens the doors of perception to break you out of your cocoon of self-absorption and restore others to their full humanity. It challenges your natural tendency to treat others like props or thinly developed characters who play only bit parts in your own self-centered play. By widening your awareness, LKM opens your eyes, mind, and heart to seeing others more fully, with warmth, kindness, and tender wishes for their well-being. The practice expands your outlook in ways that help you create the safety and connection between you and another that can seed positivity resonance. Like other meditation practices, LKM involves quiet contemplation in a seated posture, often with eyes closed and an initial focus on the breath and the heart region. You might start by setting an alarm to chime softly after ten or so minutes, so that you can experiment without concern for the time. As the practice becomes more familiar and comfortable, you can experiment with longer meditation times, aiming for twenty to twenty-five minutes of daily practice whenever possible. I’m not suggesting that you become a monk. Keep in mind that randomized controlled trials from my lab and others have revealed a wide array of benefits after just a few months of practicing LKM for an average of sixty minutes a week, which translates into three to four times a week for just fifteen to twenty minutes each. LKM is a bit like guided imagery, although the practice targets loving feelings more than visual images per se. You encourage those warm feelings to rise up by repeating a set of phrases—silently, to yourself—each of which is a wish for another’s well-being.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Then, repeat the classic phrases for each subset of your focus, calling forth your heartfelt goodwill. May all children feel safe. May all children feel happy. May all children feel healthy. May all children live with ease. As you extend these wishes, gently coax yourself to truly feel the sentiment that underlies that simple word all. Give this one word just a bit more emphasis than the other words, to nudge your heart just a bit wider with each wish you offer. May all adults feel safe. May all adults feel happy. May all adults feel healthy. May all adults live with ease. As you end this practice session and move on into your day, know that each person you encounter has already been the focus of your loving intention today. Use that awareness to forge new micro-moments of connection. Unlock Your Opportunities for Focusing on Others Outside the formal practice of LKM for all people, it can be heart-stretching simply to notice how much of your attention each day is devoted to your own concerns. There’s nothing inherently wrong with self-concerns. You are responsible, after all, for navigating yourself through your day, and at times doing so can require planning or strategic self-presentation. Problems arise only when you get swept up in swirls that appear to run on indefinitely. It can seem, sometimes, as if you’ve entered a hall of mirrors, completely alone. All you see reflected back at you is yet another view of the same self-concern, and you can no longer find the way out. Redirecting your focus toward others is the way out. Your intent, of course, matters. Focusing on others comes in many forms, not all of which are generous. It can be yet another selfish act. I spent several years early in my career cataloging the psychological damage done to girls and women who face the message that they can be reduced to how they look. The question an objectifying stance asks is, “What can you do for me?” By contrast, a genuine wish to understand and appreciate who this other person is asks, “Who are you?” and trusts that taking steps to find out will reveal inherent goodness. From this openhearted perspective, caring sentiments surface quite effortlessly. One way to become more mindful of the degrees of your focus on self versus others is to revisit a typical day—your yesterday—and comb through it episode by episode. In doing so, you uncover the sheer number of untapped opportunities for creating micro-moments of positivity resonance. This added awareness can then inspire you to begin turning toward these recurrent opportunities, rather than let them slip away unnoticed. Try This Micro-Moment Practice: Reconstruct Your Yesterday to Uncover Opportunities for Love Here I walk you through how you can adapt an assessment technique developed by a former collaborator and mentor of mine, Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow . It’s called the “Day Reconstruction Method,” or DRM for short.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Any positive emotion can draw you to smile and carry yourself with a more open posture. And so any positive emotion can be taken by those around you as a sign to relax and connect. When someone feels safe enough to accept that invitation and joins you with his or her own heartfelt good feelings, love’s positivity resonance fires up. The nonverbal gestures unique to these shared micro-moments of love eluded scientists for decades. In part, this reflected early methodological choices, like overreliance on posed expressions and still photographs. More recently, scientists have taken a more holistic and dynamic look at the spontaneous nonverbal expressions that flow between two people engaged in ordinary conversations infused with mutual positivity. Widening their approach has enabled scientists to uncover the unique nonverbal fingerprint of love. Love, this new evidence shows, is characterized by four distinct nonverbal cues. The first cue, not surprisingly, is how often you and the other person each smile at each other, in the genuine, eye-crinkling manner. A second cue is the frequency with which you each use open and friendly hand gestures to refer to each other, like your outstretched palm. (Hostile hand gestures, like pointing or finger-wagging, are by definition excluded from this category of gestures.) A third cue is how often you each lean in toward each other, literally bringing your hearts closer together. The fourth cue is how often you each nod your head, a sign that you affirm and accept each other. Taken together, these four nonverbal cues—smiles, gestures, leans, and nods—both emanate from a person’s inner experiences of love and are read by others as love. Love, displayed in this way, also matters. It has force. It forecasts not only the social support people feel in their relationships but also how they deliver direct criticism, which (as I describe in a later section) has been found to predict the long-term stability of loving relationships. These four nonverbal gestures are thus a dependable and consequential sign of love. Other nonverbal gestures can also reveal love—literally if the timing is right. For instance, when people come together and connect, their actions often come into sync, so that their hand movements and facial expressions mirror each other to a certain degree. Spontaneously synchronized gestures like these can make two separate individuals come to look like one well-orchestrated unit. This phenomenon extends beyond pairs: Just as birds migrate in flocks and fish swim in schools, large groups of people at times spontaneously move in synchronized ways. You can begin to appreciate how a football game or a concert can trigger positivity resonance on a grand scale. Through intense synchronized cheers, chants, marches, or dance, these and other ways of keeping in time together forge deep feelings of group solidarity—even throughout an entire arena.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  First, that’s because any of the other positive emotions—joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and so on—can be transformed into an instance of love when felt in close connection with another. Yet casting love as shared positive emotion doesn’t go nearly far enough. Second, whereas all positive emotions provide benefits—each, after all, broadens your mind-set and builds your resourcefulness—the benefits of love run far deeper, perhaps exponentially so. Love is our supreme emotion that makes us come most fully alive and feel most fully human. It is perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health. My approach to love is also different because it crosses emotions science with relationship science. From relationship science, I adopt the idea that love draws you out of your cocoon of self-absorption to attune to others. Love allows you to really see another person, holistically, with care, concern, and compassion. Within each moment of loving connection, you become sincerely invested in this other person’s well-being, simply for his or her own sake. And the feeling is mutual. You come to recognize that, in this loving moment, this other person is also sincerely invested in your well-being; that he or she truly cares for you. Relationship scientists cast this sense of mutual care as an abiding attribute of intimate relationships. By contrast, I see mutual care as a momentary state that rises and falls in step with changes in context and emotion. Truth be told, a happy accident pressed me to see love in a whole new light. I was minding my own business as an emotions scientist about eight years back, testing hypotheses drawn from my broaden-and-build theory. My main goal at the time was to find a way to probe the long-range effects of accumulated positive emotions. Would they build people’s resources and transform their lives for the better as the theory predicted? To support definitive claims about cause and effect, I needed an experiment, complete with randomization and rigorous measures. I needed to compare one group of people who increased their daily diets of positive emotions to another group that didn’t. The vexing question was how? How can people reliably and sustainably increase their daily intake of positive emotions? The methods that I and other scientists had used in the lab to test the short-range effects of positive emotions—the music, the film clips, the cartoons, the unexpected gifts of candy—wouldn’t do. They fall flat and lose their charge with repetition. That’s because we humans adapt: Even the most potent emotion-eliciting stimulus fades into the background like wallpaper with repeated exposure.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  From a practical standpoint, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t ask you to upgrade your vision of love if I didn’t see a big payoff for doing so. When we unravel love in chapter 2 , you’ll begin to understand it in terms that your body knows. For now, suffice it to say that although you may subscribe to a whole host of definitions of love, your body subscribes to just one: Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being. I want to emphasize, though, that love isn’t simply one of the many positive emotions that sweep through you from time to time. It’s bigger than joy, amusement, gratitude, or hope. It has special status. I call it our supreme emotion. First, that’s because any of the other positive emotions—joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and so on—can be transformed into an instance of love when felt in close connection with another. Yet casting love as shared positive emotion doesn’t go nearly far enough. Second, whereas all positive emotions provide benefits—each, after all, broadens your mind-set and builds your resourcefulness—the benefits of love run far deeper, perhaps exponentially so. Love is our supreme emotion that makes us come most fully alive and feel most fully human. It is perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health. My approach to love is also different because it crosses emotions science with relationship science. From relationship science, I adopt the idea that love draws you out of your cocoon of self-absorption to attune to others. Love allows you to really see another person, holistically, with care, concern, and compassion. Within each moment of loving connection, you become sincerely invested in this other person’s well-being, simply for his or her own sake. And the feeling is mutual. You come to recognize that, in this loving moment, this other person is also sincerely invested in your well-being; that he or she truly cares for you . Relationship scientists cast this sense of mutual care as an abiding attribute of intimate relationships. By contrast, I see mutual care as a momentary state that rises and falls in step with changes in context and emotion. Truth be told, a happy accident pressed me to see love in a whole new light. I was minding my own business as an emotions scientist about eight years back, testing hypotheses drawn from my broaden-and-build theory. My main goal at the time was to find a way to probe the long-range effects of accumulated positive emotions. Would they build people’s resources and transform their lives for the better as the theory predicted? To support definitive claims about cause and effect, I needed an experiment, complete with randomization and rigorous measures. I needed to compare one group of people who increased their daily diets of positive emotions to another group that didn’t. The vexing question was how ?

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Love is also deeply personal. It unfurls within and throughout your mind and body like a wave, cresting with each new micro-moment of connection—that smile, that laugh, or that knowing and appreciative glance that you share with another. Yet even as these micro-moments are deeply personal and fleeting, they’ve also been targets of increasing scientific scrutiny. So now, for the first time, you can know and appreciate love not only through a personal, subjective lens but also through a scientific, objective lens. Through this scientific lens, you can better see and appreciate how your body and brain were made for love, and made to benefit from loving. Learn to seek love out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision. Opportunities for love abound. It’s up to you to nourish yourself with them. Acknowledgments The ideas about love that you’ll encounter here have been gestating in my mind and heart for years. Fittingly, they first arose through my connections with others. Some of these connections have been fleeting, others long-standing. Some have been mutual connections, with ideas forged through rich conversations and collaborations, others have been more one-sided, as I’ve privately mulled over and expanded on the words of other scholars. For the foundational idea that love is best seen as any positive emotion shared within a safe, interpersonal connection, I thank Carroll Izard. His 1977 book described love as moments of shared joy and shared interest, and convinced me that any accounting of the positive emotions should not omit love. What little I wrote about love in my first presentation of the broaden-and-build theory owed a great deal to Izard’s influence on my thinking. A deeper shaping of my views on love comes from the pioneering work on high-quality connections by my friend and University of Michigan colleague, Jane Dutton. I’ve long been inspired by her ways of seeing and describing the connective tissue that binds and energizes people in long-standing relationships and one-time encounters alike. Apart from her inspiring theoretical work, Jane is also an inspiring person, and I am thankful that our friendship has withstood the strain of my move from Ann Arbor. Other scholars whose work has deeply influenced my thinking about love and related ideas include Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, John Cacioppo, Laura Carstensen, Sy-Miin Chow, Steve Cole, Michael D. Cohen, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Richie Davidson, Paul Ekman, Ruth Feldman, Shelly Gable, Eric Garland, Karen Grewen, Melissa Gross, Uri Hasson, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, David Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Dacher Keltner, Corey Keyes, Ann Kring, Bob Levenson, Kathleen Light, Marcial Losada, Batja Mesquita, Paula Niedenthal, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Keith Payne, David Penn, Chris Peterson, Bob Quinn, Cliff Saron, Oliver Schultheiss, Leslie Sekerka, Marty Seligman, Erika Rosenberg, Robert Vallerand, George Vaillant, and David Sloan Wilson. Although these people span the spectrum from my dearest friends to those I’ve yet to meet, the theoretical and empirical contributions of each have inspired me to build upon them.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Through eye contact and close attention to all manner of smiles—and the embodied simulations such visual intake triggers—your gut instincts about whom to trust and whom not to trust become more reliable. Rather than avoid all new people out of fear and suspicion, oxytocin helps you pick up on cues that signal another person’s goodwill and guides you to approach them with your own. Because all people need social connections, not just to reproduce, but to survive and thrive in this world, oxytocin has been dubbed “the great facilitator of life.” It, too, can jump the gap between people such that someone else’s oxytocin flow can trigger your own. A biochemical synchrony can then emerge that supports mutual engagement, care, and responsiveness. The clearest evidence that oxytocin rises and falls in synchrony between people comes from studies of infants and their parents. When an infant and a parent—either mom or dad—interact, sometimes they are truly captivated by each other, and other times not. When an infant and parent do click, their coordinated motions and emotions show lots of mutual positive engagement. Picture moms or dads showering their baby with kisses, tickling their baby’s tiny fingers and toes, smiling at their baby, and speaking to him or her in that high-pitched, singsong tone that scientists call motherese . These parents are superattentive. As they tickle and coo they’re also closely tracking their baby’s face for signs that their delight is mutual. In step with their parent’s affectionate antics, these attentive babies babble, coo, smile, and giggle. Positivity resonates back and forth between them. Micro-moments of love blossom. Of course, not every infant-parent interaction is so rosy. Some pairs show little mutual engagement. Some moms and dads rarely make eye contact with their infants and emit precious little positivity, either verbally or nonverbally. These pairs are simply less attuned to each other, less connected. And in those rare moments when they are engaged, the vibe that joins them is distinctly more negative. They connect over mutual distress or indifference, rather than over mutual affection. It turns out that positive behavioral synchrony—the degree to which an infant and a parent (through eye contact and affectionate touch) laugh, smile, and coo together—goes hand in hand with oxytocin synchrony. Researchers have measured oxytocin levels in the saliva of dads, moms, and infants both before and after a videotaped, face-to-face parent-infant interaction. For infant-parent pairs who show mutual positive engagement, oxytocin levels also come into sync. Without such engagement, however, no oxytocin synchrony emerges.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Mi hermana tiene un cambio de ropa en su auto —responde, todavía sonando impaciente conmigo—. Estoy bien, y estaré en casa más tarde, ¿de acuerdo? Llega al Mustang blanco de Cam en el atestado estacionamiento y va al lado del conductor. —Detente. —Acercándome por detrás, pongo mi mano en la puerta frente a ella—. Solo déjame explicarte. Se gira, con una mirada comprensiva en su rostro. —Oh, estoy segura que tienes una excusa. Una muy buena. No te preocupes. Se da la vuelta y busca el mango, pero necesito que escuche. Sólo por un segundo. —Detente. Por favor. —Respiro con fuerza, mirando la parte posterior de su cabeza—. Jordan, yo... Trago saliva, solo quiero que se gire y me mire con su dulce sonrisa y sus dulces ojos otra vez. Dejo caer mi voz a apenas un susurro. —No puedo perderlo —le digo. Se congela, y lo único que puedo escuchar es su respiración. ¿Se arrepintió cuando se despertó esta mañana? Finalmente se da vuelta y me mira, asintiendo con calma. —Lo sé —dice en voz baja—. Entonces tienes que perderme, lo entiendo. Tampoco quiero lastimarlo. Gira nuevamente para abrir la puerta, pero mi cabeza cae hacia su cuello y mis ojos se cierran. Es como el agua que se desliza entre mis dedos, y me estoy muriendo aquí. —Me estoy enamorando de ti —le susurro. Se da la vuelta lentamente otra vez, y no sé si debí haberle dicho eso, pero alzo mis ojos cansados, observando su expresión tranquila. Sus ojos se ven igualmente derrotados y algo atrapado entre el deseo y la lucha por contenerse. —Sabía que estabas ahí en algún lado —le digo, esbozando una sonrisa triste— . Las novias, mujeres con las que salí, la madre de Cole... Nunca quise casarme con nadie, porque no eran lo que estaba buscando. Comencé a pensar que mis expectativas eran demasiado altas, y tú no existías. —Le aprieto la nuca y deslizo los pulgares por su garganta—. Resulta que la chica de mis sueños pertenece a la única persona que me mataría lastimar.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  After a moment he said, “Until I knew you, I was a Don Juan, Elena. I never wanted to really know a woman. I never wanted to stay with one. My feeling was always that a woman used her charms not for the sake of a passionate relationship but to win from a man some durable relationship—marriage, for instance, or at least companionship—to win, finally, some kind of peace, possession. It was this that frightened me—the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love. What attracts me to you is that you have remained the mistress. You maintain the fervor and the intensity. When you feel unequal to the great battle of love, you stay away. Another thing, it is not the pleasure I can give you which attaches you to me. You repudiate it when you are not emotionally satisfied. But you are capable of all things, of anything. I feel that. You are open to life. I opened you. For the first time I regret my power to open women to life, to love. How I love you when you refuse to communicate with the body, seeking other means to reach into the entire being. You did everything to break down my resistance to pleasure. Yes, at first, I could not bear this power you had to withdraw. It seemed to me that I was losing my power.” This talk again inspired in Elena a sense of the unstable in Pierre. She never rang his bell without wondering if he might be gone. In an old closet he had discovered a pile of erotic books concealed under blankets by the former occupants of the place. Now he met her every day with a story to make her laugh. He saw that he had saddened her. He did not know that when the erotic and the tender are mixed in a woman, they form a powerful bond, almost a fixation. She could think only of erotic images in connection with him, his body. If she saw a penny movie on the boulevards that stirred her, she brought her curiosity or a new experiment to their next meeting. She began to whisper certain wishes in his ear.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  He can’t believe his luck, how she came into his life out of nowhere, when he least expected it. And this one’s a keeper. It’s not just the sex. Everything about her makes him happy. She’s so bright, so sweet. The kids are going to be crazy about her. He can’t believe he’s thinking this way. Thinking about a future with this woman. But he is. [image file=Image00006.jpg] EVERY DAY LAMB SANG in the outdoor shower. “All You Need Is Love,” “Come Together,” “We Can Work It Out.” He was happy. He was in love. The happier he was over Abby, the unhappier Caitlin grew. And he didn’t seem to notice. One day Vix overheard Daniel telling Abby, “This place is a dump. They don’t even have a TV or a dishwasher.” You didn’t have to be a genius to see that Lamb had as hard a time making do as her parents. All you had to do was look around at the shabby furniture, the beat-up cars, the clothes they wore. They even ate poor. No meat, not even hamburgers. “I’d like you to remember you’re a guest in this house,” Abby told Daniel. “And I expect you to behave in a way that doesn’t embarrass any of us.” “I don’t see why you had to drag me here,” Daniel said. “This is supposed to be my vacation.” “You’ve been at camp all summer,” Abby told him. “You’ve had plenty of vacation, but I’ve got just these two weeks.” “Dad says your whole life is a vacation.” “Don’t start, Daniel …” “If you’d let Gus come I’d get off your back.” Abby sighed. “We’ve already been through this. Two weeks without a friend won’t kill you.” “It might,” Daniel said. Vix was embarrassed for eavesdropping. She decided not to tell Caitlin what she’d overheard. It was too … personal. That night they played mini golf. Daniel held his club like a pro, one hand over the other, thumbs locked. He checked his feet to make sure they were lined up properly. He took two practice swings on each shot. Caitlin and Vix hooted. Daniel told them to shut up. He was trying to concentrate. He took the game seriously. His father played. His father had an eight handicap, whatever that meant. They’d played mini golf to celebrate Vix’s twelfth birthday, on the last day of July. Sharkey had shot a hole in one that night, winning them a free game. Nobody won a free game this time. After, over ice cream at Mad Martha’s, Daniel started in on Abby about inviting a friend. Abby said no as if she meant it, but Daniel didn’t give up. He campaigned all the way home. Finally, Lamb said, “It’s okay with me if he wants to invite somebody.” “All right,” Abby said. “All right!” He’d finally broken her down. “You can call Gus when we get back.” Two days later Gus Kline arrived, shaggy-haired, open-faced, loud, and slovenly.