What an odd title: love is not enough. Is that true? How could that possibly be true? Isn’t love always good? If I love someone, isn’t that good in itself? Isn’t love always good? These are the questions I want to address in this blog. I actually borrowed this title from a movie and a book of the same name about treatment of a child with mental illness: love was not enough to help this boy through his difficulty.
Love is not enough
Love isn’t enough because there is much more in life than love. I will propose at least three other things that are equally important: ideas, property, and experience. The proposal that ideas, property, and experience are equally important to love might astound you. You might say, “How can you dare to say that property is just as good as love? Isn’t love of property some kind of materialism? How can it be right to love property more than loving people? These are difficult questions to address, much less to answer. In attempting to answer these important questions I must begin by describing how we, in this office, understand people. To make sense of this seemingly outlandish statement that “love is not enough” I have to step back a bit and describe our basic philosophy about people.
Making a friendly diagnosis
Importantly, we don’t look for what is wrong with people. We don’t look to make a diagnosis, like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or bipolar disorder. Yes, these problems do exist and that they can be debilitating and serious. We also think that all such diagnoses are substantially overused and fail to see the person before seeing the problem. So we do not start with rendering some kind of diagnosis of what is wrong. Instead of diagnosing what is wrong with people we begin with what we call a “friendly diagnosis,” particularly identifying the strengths of personality that people have. There are many ways of understanding personality, including what is called “temperament,” “personality type,” and “personal development.” For the purposes of this study I will describe how we see temperament. Specifically, we believe an important way of understanding people is to look at four basic temperament styles, namely: lover, caretaker, analyst, and player. I developed the following system of understanding temperament in 1982 and have used it since then. People with these temperaments have the following characteristics:
- Lovers: connections (with other people). Lovers are people who naturally love easily and they love deeply. Most of their love is directed at people, but lover people also tend to love animals a lot, and sometimes can love art, nature, or other forms of beauty. Mostly, however, lovers love people.
- Caretakers: property. Caretakers love property. Yes, this can be a problem because they can be materialistic and spend an inordinate amount of time caring for property. But their real nature is to provide safety to the world by taking care of property: cars, houses, papers, and of course money. Caretakers can also be quite generous with property. They just want property to be taken care of. They see the care of property as a spiritual obligation, however odd this sounds
- Analysts: ideas. Analysts love ideas. They seek to understand things, including people and inanimate things, like machines or politics. They seek truth, whatever form that might be. They give us the best theories and the best science because they use the scientific method of discovery rather than any kind of emotional or otherwise personal opinion.
Part of our “friendly diagnosis” is finding which of these four temperaments predominates with an individual, and then perhaps the secondary temperaments that may also exist with the person. So a person might be caretaker primarily but also lover, and so on. Beyond this temperament “diagnosis” we look at the other factors mentioned about, like personality type (which would include, for instance introversion or extraversion). The task of this friendly diagnostic approach is to find what is right about people, not what is wrong. What is wrong in life for people is the interaction between other people and things and themselves. We call this an “interface problem,” meaning that it is how the individual interfaces with people, property, ideas, bosses, spouses, and groups.
Lovers are wonderful
Sacred literature is full of references to love although among the predominant religions of the world Christianity seems to have more to say about love than Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and other religions. The Apostle Paul said that “love is the greatest gift,” and Jesus gave us the “great commandment,” namely to “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” So while people of all temperaments love, not all temperaments love people the way lovers do. Lovers have the gift of love. The gift of love, at least as spoken by the Apostle Paul, has to do with loving people, but there are other forms of love that are equally gifts.
All people tend to think that what they do naturally should also be natural for other people. My wife, for instance, has a wonderful “eye” for the natural world as well as for human-made structures in the natural world. I, on the other hand, have no such “eye.” Not only am I color blind, and hence unable to distinguish colors the way Deb does, but I can’t see beauty the way she does. I see the same sky, the same seascape, the same faces, the same well-dressed person, and the well-appointed room. But I don’t appreciate these forms of beauty the way Deb does. It is easy for Deb to see such beauty and expect that I see the same. I don’t. I jokingly say that I will enjoy heaven much more than she will because I will see these beautiful earthly things for the first time, and they will be old hat to her.
Lovers who have not matured in love think that we should all see the possibility of loving someone the way they do. Most people can’t love the way lovers love. Those of us who do not have a lover temperament don’t see love the way lovers see it, and can’t love the way lovers love. For lovers, it is easy to love people. Not so for the rest of us. Love for people comes so easily and freely for lovers that it seems to them that it should come easily to other people as well. Lovers have a gift of love that most of the rest of humanity does not have.
Lovers are truly wonderful. They are so full of love. They love without thinking. They love without distinguishing. They love people who we might think are unlovable. They just love. They don’t have to think about it. If you are a lover yourself, you need to recognize that you have something very special. If you have never been around a lover, you are missing a truly wonderful thing: to be loved. But what does love mean?
Love defined (sort of)
I didn’t learn much in Physics class, whether in high school or college. I did learn one important thing, however: all of physics is based on three elements in the universe that are undefinable. These three elements are time, distance, and mass (you can think of “mass” as kind of like weight). Think of it: all of physics is based on these three things that we don’t define. But we know what these things are. We know what time is, and we know what distance is, and we know what mass (sort of like weight) is. We can define velocity (speed) as distance divided by time, like 55 miles per hour, but we do not define distance or time. Love is also undefined, like these three undefined and basic ingredients in the universe: we know what love is but we can’t really define it. Poets, musicians, artists, and novelists do a pretty good job of showing us what it means to love and to be loved, but they never really define it. Love is demonstrated in some way. You know it when you feel it or see it…unless, perhaps you have never seen it or felt it.
Never loved
There are many people who have never been loved. I have a patient whose mother left him when he was an infant and his father was rigid, certainly not loving. He got married quickly once and then quickly divorced. Then he married someone who was his best friend, and remained successfully married for many years, but this was not a marriage of love although he didn’t know it. He had never been loved, and so he had never learned to unleash the power of love inside of him. Until he met someone whom he truly fell in love with. There are many people who have never been loved. And there are many who have never loved, sad as that might seem. Sam didn’t actually know that he hadn’t ever been loved until he actually loved someone. Lovers don’t have this problem. They have always loved. Nobody taught them to love. The rest of us have to be loved first in order to love. We’re not the best at loving. We might love people, perhaps a few people or a lot of people, but we don’t lover everyone the way loves do.
Other forms of love
The other forms of love are those I stated earlier: property, ideas, and experience. We people who have the temperaments of caretaker (lovers of property), analyst (lovers of ideas), and player (lovers of experience) love just as deeply as do lovers, but we don’t love people the way they do. Consider what you really love. This might be a bit difficult if, for instance, you are a caretaker, like me, for whom property is loved, sometimes more than people and ideas. When I help caretakers see that love of property is a good thing, just as good as loving people, they often feel relieved because they have often compared their love of people to people with a lover temperament, and felt inadequate. They are not inadequate in loving; they are good at loving; they just don’t love people the way lovers do. The same is true of players who love experience and analysts who love ideas. Now tell me, which is more important: love of science so much that you develop the polio vaccine or the Internet, or loving you own child? Neither is more important; they are equally good. But they are very different. These other forms of love are just as good as loving people, but this is a hard pill for lovers to swallow…and they usually don’t really believe it. This is where lovers get into real trouble in life, particularly in relationships: they think everyone should love people the way they do.
Being a lover is difficult
You would think that being a lover would be easy: just love everyone, and things will be fine. Love people, and they will love you back. Well, there is no such thing as “loving someone back.” Love is a free gift that is given freely without any strings attached. At least that is what genuine love is: freely given, gracious, and…well, lovely. And lovers do it best. The problem isn’t with love. The problem isn’t that lovers love too much, or that they love the wrong person. You can’t love too much (despite the title of this blog). Love is never wrong. When love is given as it is meant to be given, it is given without any expectations. It is just good to love. No one has to tell me how to love property because I do it naturally. No one has to tell a scientist how to love science, a philosopher how to love ideas, a theologian to love theology, or a soccer player to love soccer. These people just love easily and freely. I don’t expect property love me back. A scientist doesn’t expect the subatomic particles to love him back. He just loves those particles. Players just love experience; they don’t expect the swing to love them back; they just swing.
Lovers get in trouble when they expect to be loved back. And when they expect to be loved back, that means that they have stopped loving, and started something else. This “something else” is the difference between giving and giving in. Giving in is a terrible danger for lovers. Because they see the need for every human person to be loved, they have a tendency to love every living person. That is fine. What is not fine is when lovers give more than they have to give. Lovers are inclined to cross the line between giving what they have into giving what they don’t have. I often tell lovers: give all you have, but don’t give more. Give your money; give your property; give your left arm; give your body; give your life. But never give in. If you give in, you will expect to be loved “in return,” which can never happen. You will resent the person you are loving. You will fall into the trap of thinking that people should love you.
You can never expect people to love you. Love, when it is real, is generous, gracious, and free. It is not given with any expectation. You lovers love deeply and freely, and I applaud you for this wondrous thing you give humanity. Don’t cut down on loving. Love as much as you can. Just watch that you don’t give more than you have to give. Don’t give money you don’t have; don’t give property you prize to someone who doesn’t care about property; don’t give your body to someone expecting that person to return the favor, much less commit to you for live. Because if you give what you don’t have, you will lose this most important give of love.
Losing the gift
There is a real tragic thing that happens with lovers, almost universally. They get hurt. They get angry. They become resentful. And then they stop loving. The world needs you, lovers. We cannot do without you. Note how you have been quite upset, even unkind when you have given too much and expected something in return. This angry person is not you; it is what you become when you fall from giving to giving in. So I will part with what you say all the time: Love ya’
Further Reading
- My blog on mothering
- Almost any poetry
- Almost any music