LOVE 2.0
LOVE 2.0
HOW OUR SUPREME EMOTION
AFFECTS EVERYTHING WE FEEL,
THINK, DO, AND BECOME
Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D.
HUDSON STREET PRESS
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Barbara L. Fredrickson, 2013
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fredrickson, Barbara, L.
Love 2.0 : how our supreme emotion affects everything we think, do, feel, and become / Barbara L.
Fredrickson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-60984-2
1. Love—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF575.L8F72 2013
152.4'1—dc23
2012018970
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bell MT Std
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
To you, and to those in whom your love resonates
Contents
Part I. THE VISION
Chapter 1. Love, Our Supreme Emotion
Chapter 2. What Love Is
Chapter 3. Love’s Biology
Chapter 4. Love’s Ripples
Part II. THE GUIDANCE
Chapter 5. Loving Kindness
Chapter 6. Loving Self
Chapter 7. Loving Others, in Sickness and in Health
Chapter 8. Loving Without Borders
Chapter 9. A Closing Loving Glance
Acknowledgments
Recommended Reading
Index of Practices
Notes
Index
PART I
The Vision
CHAPTER 1
Love, Our Supreme Emotion
THE ESKIMOS HAD FIFTY-TWO NAMES FOR SNOW
BECAUSE IT WAS IMPORTANT TO THEM: THERE OUGHT
TO BE AS MANY FOR LOVE.
—Margaret Atwood
Longing. You know the feeling. It’s that ache of sensing that something vital is missing from your life; a deep thirst for more. More meaning, more connection, more energy—more something. Longing is that feeling that courses through your body just before you decide that you’re restless, lonely, or unhappy.
Longing like this is not just another mental state. It’s deeply physical. Your body craves some essential nutrient that it’s not getting, yet you can’t quite put your finger on what it is. Sometimes you can numb this ache with a deep dive into work, gossip, television, or gaming. More often than not, though, these and other attempts to fill the aching void are merely temporary distractions. The longing doesn’t let up. It trails you like a shadow, insistently, making distractions all the more appealing. And distractions abound—that second or third glass of wine, that stream of texts and tweets, that couch and remote control.
Odds are, food is abundant in your life. And clean drinking water is as close as the nearest faucet and virtually limitless. You have access to reasonably clean air and adequate shelter. Those basic needs have long been met. What you long for now is far more intangible.
What you long for is love. Whether you’re single or not, whether you spend your days largely in isolation or steadily surrounded by the buzz of conversation, love is the essential nutrient that your cells crave: true positivity-charged connection with other living beings.
Love, as it turns out, nourishes your body the way the right balance of sunlight, nutrient-rich soil, and water nourishes plants and allows them to flourish. The more you experience it, the more you open up and grow, becoming wiser and more attuned, more resilient and effective, happier and healthier. You grow spiritually as well, better able to see, feel, and appreciate the deep interconnections that inexplicably tie you to others, that embed you within the grand fabric of life.
Just as your body was designed to extract oxygen from the earth’s atmosphere, and nutrients from the foods you ingest, your body was designed to love. Love—like taking a deep breath or eating an orange when you’re depleted and thirsty—not only feels great but is also life-giving, an indispensable source of energy, sustenance, and health.
When I compare love to oxygen and food, I’m not just taking poetic license. I’m drawing on science: new science that illuminates for the first time how love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped. They, in turn, can alter the very ways your DNA gets expressed within your cells. The love you do or do not experience today may quite literally change key aspects of your cellular architecture next season and next year—cells that affect your physical health, your vitality, and your overall well-being. In these ways and more, just as your supplies of clean air and nutritious food forecast how long you’ll walk this earth—and whether you’ll thrive or just get by—so does your supply of love.
It’s Not What You Think
To absorb what the new science of love has to offer, you’ll need to step back from “love” as you may now know it. Forget about the love that you typically hear on the radio, the one that’s centered on desire and yearns for touch from a new squeeze. Set aside the take on love your family might have offered you, one that requires that you love your relatives unconditionally, regardless of whether their actions disturb you, or their aloofness leaves you cold. I’m even asking you to set aside your view of love as a special bond or relationship, be it with your spouse, partner, or soul mate. And if yo
u’ve come to view love as a commitment, promise, or pledge, through marriage or any other loyalty ritual, prepare for an about-face. I need you to step back from all of your preconceptions and consider an upgrade. Love 2.0 offers a different perspective—your body’s perspective.
If you were asked today, by a roving reporter or an inquisitive dinner party guest, to provide your own definition of love, your answer would likely reflect a mishmash of shared cultural messages and your own deeply personal experiences with intimacy. However compelling your answer, I’d wager that your body has its own—quite different—definition of love. That’s what this book is about. Love is not sexual desire or the blood-ties of kinship. Nor is it a special bond or commitment. Sure enough, love is closely related to each of these important concepts. Yet none, I will argue, capture the true meaning of love as your body experiences it.
The vision of love that I offer here will require a radical shift, a departure from what you’ve come to believe. It’s time to upgrade your view of love. Love is not a category of relationships. Nor is it something “out there” that you can fall into, or—years later—out of. Seeing love as a special bond is extraordinarily common, albeit misleading. A bond like this can endure for years—even a lifetime with proper commitment and effort. And having at least one close relationship like this is vital to your health and happiness, to be sure. Even so, that special bond and the commitments people often build around it are better taken as the products of love—the results of the many smaller moments in which love infuses you—rather than as love per se. When you equate love with intimate relationships, love can seem confusing. At times it feels great, while at other times it hurts like hell. At times it lifts you up with grand dreams for your future and at other times oppresses you with shame about your inadequacies, or guilt about your past actions. When you limit your view of love to relationships or commitment, love becomes a complex and bewildering thicket of emotions, expectations, and insecurities. Yet when you redirect your eyes toward your body’s definition of love, a clear path emerges that cuts through that thicket and leads you to a better life.
There’s still more ground to clear. I need to ask you to disengage from some of your most cherished beliefs about love as well: the notions that love is exclusive, lasting, and unconditional. These deeply held beliefs are often more wish than reality in people’s lives. They capture people’s daydreams about the love-of-their-life whom they’ve yet to meet. Love, as your body defines it, is not exclusive, not something to be reserved for your soul mate, your inner circle, your kin, or your so-called loved ones. Love’s reach turns out to be far wider than we’re typically coaxed to imagine. Even so, love’s timescale is far shorter than we typically think. Love, as you’ll see, is not lasting. It’s actually far more fleeting than most of us would care to acknowledge. On the upside, though, love is forever renewable. And perhaps most challenging of all, love is not unconditional. It doesn’t emerge no matter what, regardless of conditions. To the contrary, you’ll see that the love your body craves is exquisitely sensitive to contextual cues. It obeys preconditions. Yet once you understand those preconditions, you can find love countless times each day.
It’s difficult to speak of love in scientific terms, I’ve found, because listeners have so many preexisting and strong beliefs about it. Many of these beliefs reflect our shared cultural heritage, like all those proliferating songs and movies that equate love with infatuation or sexual desire, or with stories that end happily ever after, or even the realistic marriage ceremonies that celebrate love as an exclusive bond and commitment. Other beliefs about love are deeply personal. They reflect your own unique life history, with its interpersonal triumphs and scars, lessons about intimacy learned and not yet learned. Left unaddressed, these preconceptions can derail any serious intellectual discussion of love. They may even keep you from soaking up the full implications of the new findings on it.
This Approach Is Different
The approach I offer weaves together several new strands of science while keeping an eye toward the spiritual and the practical. With roots extending back millennia to your hunter-gatherer ancestors, this approach also casts forward to your future. It envisions your untapped potential for loving and growth, and your ability to create contexts that nurture love and growth in others, and in the generations to come who will inherit whatever world you help to shape.
The bedrock for my approach to love is the science of emotions. For more than two decades, I’ve investigated that subset of emotions that feel good to you, those pleasing states—of joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and the like—that simultaneously infuse your mind and body. Odds are you shift into and out of states like these dozens of times each day, sometimes when you’re alone, sometimes when you’re with others.
What I’ve found is that even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life. They do this first by opening you up: Your outlook quite literally expands as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions. Put simply, you see more as your vision widens; you see the bigger picture. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mind-set, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. This is because, little by little, these mind-expanding moments of positive emotions add up to reshape your life for the better, making you more knowledgeable, more resilient, more socially integrated, and healthier. In fact, science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself.
These two core facts about positive emotions—that they open you up and transform you for the better—form the two anchor points for my broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which I wrote about in my first book, Positivity, to show how you can put positive emotions to work as you navigate your days to overcome negativity and thrive.
The word positivity is purposefully broad. I chose it to cover the full range of positive emotions and then some. It also spans the psychological conditions that seed your positive emotions as well as their myriad effects—the slowing rhythm of your heart, the opening of your mind, and the relaxed, inviting look on your face. It even encompasses the fruits of positive emotions that ripen for you only a season later—their mounting effects on your relationships, your character, your health and spiritual growth. Here, you could protest and say that I’ve roped too much into this one term. Yet I see real value in using an encompassing word like positivity. It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity.
Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2. Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build: Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life.
The love you crave lies within momentary experiences of connection. Other concepts that go by the word love in our shared cultural vocabulary—the all-consuming desire, the exclusive bonds, the commitments to loyalty, the unconditional trust—are best viewed as key players within the larger positivity system that surrounds love. Each in fact grows stronger as your moments of love accumulate: When you’ve truly connected with someone else, your trust in that person expands, your relationship and loyalty deep
en, and you want to spend more good times together. But that’s only half the story. The causal arrow also runs in the other direction: Each of these players within the larger positivity system—the desire, bonds, commitments, and trust—also triggers subsequent moments of loving connection. Put simply, it’s far easier to connect with another person, when your desire, bond, commitment, or trust is present and strong. So these players are both cause and consequence of loving connections. This is what sustains the complex and dynamic positivity system that forges your often inexplicable ties to family, friends, and community. Love energizes this whole system and sets it into motion.
There’s a lot going on here. It’s no wonder that love puzzles us. Adding to the confusion, the word love is commonly affixed to different parts of the system. So when you tell someone that you love him, you may well be invoking a range of different, albeit closely related concepts. You might, for instance, mean to say that you crave the time you two spend together. Alternatively, you could mean to say that you trust that person and intend to be loyal yourself. Or perhaps professing your love to another serves as a way to elevate that particular relationship as an especially important one in your life, a way to invite or secure that person within your innermost circle. And perhaps most often, your declaration of “I love you” is meant to convey “all of the above.” 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.
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