Greg's Real Love Blog

The other day I got a call from a woman, Shelley, who described her relationship with a man she was living with, a man who alternated between being emotionally abusive and emotionally cold and withdrawn. She responded with all the Getting and Protecting Behaviors, so you can imagine how their relationships was going. Both of them were a complete mess. Then she asked me what she should do.

Now, I don’t propose to know what anybody should do, but I have had enough experience with human relationships to make reasonable suggestions based on what I see in any given set of circumstances. So I said to Shelley, “Is there any doubt in your mind that your boyfriend is terribly empty and afraid?”

“No,” she said.

“How about you?” I asked. “Is there any doubt that you are empty and afraid?”

She paused, so I continued, “This is not an accusation of you, sweetie, just an attempt to make an accurate description, which is absolutely necessary before you can make a good decision about what to do next. If you don’t recognize what is true, how can you make good decisions about what to do?”

“But I don’t think I’m empty and afraid all the time,” she said.

I chuckled. “So if your boyfriend is doing everything you want—which is pretty rare—then you do well. But the moment he becomes difficult—angry or withdrawn or whatever—you don’t do well at all, do you?”

“No, not really.”

“So if you’re getting everything you want, you’re not empty and afraid, but do you see how that doesn’t mean much? Your emptiness and fear are either right out in the open or lying right under the surface all the time, so you’re not really in a better position than your boyfriend. Do you see that now?”

“Well . . .”

“It’s your Getting and Protecting Behaviors that prove it. You feel like a victim almost all day, every day. You get angry very easily. You withdraw from your boyfriend and from other people a lot. These Getting and Protecting Behaviors exist only in response to emptiness and fear, proving that you really are empty and afraid almost constantly. It’s critical that you see that.”

“It’s starting to make more sense now.”

“So both you and your boyfriend are empty and afraid. You’re both drowning and confused. In that condition, what are the odds you could have a healthy, fulfilling relationship?”
“Not good?”

“Really, more like zero.”

“So what are you suggesting.”

“What do you want more than anything?”

“To be happy.”

“Perfect goal. Just perfect. And that will require that you get a great deal more Real Love in your life. That’s the only way you could be happy. You’re just barely learning how to do that, and every time you move a tiny step forward, you have a negative interaction with your boyfriend, who can suck all the love out of a room in an instant, and then you’re right back to the beginning again. Is that fair to say?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Keep in mind that I’m not criticizing him here. I’m really describing your inability to deal with difficult situations. Imagine that you’re a seedling, just barely coming out of the ground. In order to grow, you need the very best of soil, sun, water, and temperature. In fact, without the right environment, you might die. Would it be wise for us to put you out in the desert?”

“No.”

“Or on a mountaintop, in the snow?”

“No.”

“Not because there is something inherently wrong with those places—deserts and mountaintops can be great places for some things—but we’d be foolish to put you there because those places would simply be too difficult for the growth of most seedings. And that’s the case with you and your boyfriend. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with him. He has his own path to walk, his own lessons in life to learn—and I find no fault with that—but at this point he’s just too difficult an environment for you. You can’t learn and grow around him.”

“You’re saying I should leave him.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m not saying you should do anything. I’m just describing how things are. You’re just learning what happiness and Real Love are. You’re far too weak to be in an environment as difficult as the one created by your boyfriend.”

“How do you know I can’t learn this while I’m living with him?”

“Oh, I suppose there exists a mathematical possibility that you could do it, but why would you want to? Your primary goal is to be happy, not to succeed in a relationship with this particular man. In fact, the second goal may make the first goal impossible.”

“But how do you know?”

“Suppose you’re a horse trainer. You want to run a horse in an important race, but the horse is limping, and you want my opinion—as an expert horse veterinarian—about whether the horse can win the race. After examining the horse physically and with X-rays, I discover that the horse has a serious fracture of his ankle. It’s a miracle that the horse can even walk, but I tell you that if the horse attempts to run, the ankle will surely shatter. I know this from extensive experience with thousands of horses. Will you ignore my advice and run the horse in the race anyway?”

“No, but—”

“And that’s the kind of advice I’m giving you now. I’ve intimately interviewed thousands of people in relationships and watched the results of their decisions and their behaviors. Both you and your boyfriend are literally crippled emotionally, and you want to know if you can run a race together. Sure, you could try, but the odds of your running successfully are exceptionally remote, while the odds that you’ll actually injure each other are quite high. So my question is, Why race?”

“So what should we do?”

“Again, I won’t tell you what you should do, but I can tell you that if you’re unprepared for a race, you might consider preparing for the race. What would we do with the horse with the broken ankle? Assuming the break were reparable, we’d prescribe a course of medical and perhaps even surgical treatment, followed by a long and intensive course of physical rehabilitation. Then, after a long period of rehab and testing, we’d try walking the horse, then jogging, then running. Someday we might even consider racing.”

“It would be the same with you,” I continued. “I would suggest that you study the principles of Real Love like your life depended on them, which it does. You’ll find that learning about Real Love and finding it is much, much easier when you don’t have someone around you who is constantly draining you with his emptiness and fear—like your boyfriend does. So then what you do is practice telling the truth about yourself so you can get all the love you can from people who actually have it to give. You do this with a wide variety of people, and all this practice with Real Love is a kind of emotional and spiritual rehabilitation. The more you get loved, the stronger you become, the more whole you feel, and eventually you’ll be able to participate in a healthy relationship.”

Most people are in such a hurry to be in a relationship, but because they’re completely unprepared to be unconditionally loving, they simply can’t have the kind of relationship they want. Every ounce of effort we exert to prepare ourselves for a relationship will repay us a hundredfold when we’re actually involved in one. If we attempt to take shortcuts, however, and become involved in a relationship before we’re prepared, the price we’ll pay is usually heavy indeed.

Delightfully, the preparation itself can be great fun. Finding Real Love and growing in our ability to love is a wonderful experience, not something we endure until we can find a relationship.

Sometimes when I say, “It’s always about Real Love,” people think I’m overstating the case a bit. If so, it’s not by much. Real Love plays a pivotal role in every human interaction, and if we forget that, we will pay a heavy price. If, on the other hand, we do remember the role of Real Love, we can achieve results in our personal lives and in our relationships that are little short of miraculous.

Let me illustrate just one such application of the power of Real Love by sharing an event that occurred with us here at RealLove.com.

A man came to the RealLove.com website and was enjoying some of the many free benefits available to those who are not full members. He ordered a downloadable audio book, and when he subsequently had difficulty opening the file and using the book he had paid for, he sent us an email that included the following:

“I spent good money for this audio book, and now it doesn’t work like you promised it would. I guess Real Love doesn’t compensate for incompetence.”

It was obvious that he was blaming us not only for the failure of his product to work but also for the frustration and irritation he was feeling as a result of the inconvenience he was experiencing. In addition to the above message, the customer also described what he had done to make the product work, and immediately it became clear that he had virtually ignored the very detailed instructions that had come with the download.

Our webmaster, Mike, could easily have become offended at the tone and content of the email, since he had done nothing wrong but was being bitterly blamed for this man’s misfortune. Mike recognized, however, that the customer was simply feeling empty and unloved. In that condition, when something went wrong, he felt even more powerless than usual, which in the absence of Real Love was quite intolerable. Mike recognized that this man lashed out at us only because it enabled him to briefly regain some feeling of power.

Mike recognized that the customer’s anger was not about a few dollars or a few minutes’ inconvenience, but that it was all about the lack of Real Love in his life. For that reason, he knew that to argue with the man—or to point out that the customer has been entirely wrong in his application of the directions—would be fruitless for everyone.

So with that understanding, Mike called the customer at home, and the man immediately launched into a diatribe about our incompetence and his desire to have nothing to do with us again. Mike waited for the customer to express himself for a time and then said, “I know this must be very frustrating for you. Sure, you spent money on the download, but that wasn’t all of it. You had your hopes set on everything working right and being able to listen to what you’d ordered. So I understand how this is a big disappointment.”

Immediately Mike had expressed an understanding of the customer’s feelings—and an acceptance of them—which is a big part of unconditional love. The man became quiet. He wanted to hear more.

“All I can say,” Mike said, “is that the instructions for downloading the audio book—which I wrote—must not have been clear enough. So can I help you with that? Can I walk you through the process step by step so you can have access to the recording right now?”

Mike walked the customer through the process, and within three minutes, the audio book was functioning on the man’s computer.

Later that day, Mike received an email from the customer, who confessed that after Mike had helped him, he recognized that he had not followed the instructions he had originally received. He also said that he was so impressed with the service he had received that he wanted to order the Platinum Membership in RealLove.com, which is the highest level of membership.

We all want to feel loved, and if we don’t have that feeling, we will react badly to whatever situation we’re in. When we can remember that the people around us all have this need, we can often work miracles in helping them with whatever problems face them. I must emphasize that Mike’s intent was genuinely to help this customer feel cared for, not to win him over as a paying customer. If we help people with an expectation of some reward for ourselves, they will sense our selfish agenda, and they will not feel loved.

Preparation is Much Easier than Repair

A creek runs through our backyard, and if it rains hard for many days, the creek rises to the point that it overflows and eventually turns the entire backyard into an impressive river. In the twenty-one years we have lived here, the river has risen up to the edge of the foundation of the house twice, and on one occasion it entered the first floor of the house to a significant degree.

As more homes have been built downstream from us, additional bridges have been built across the creek, which have restricted the flow of the creek to some extent. Any limitation of flow increases the potential for flooding in our yard, so I decided to protect our home from flooding by building a two-foot-high concrete wall all around the back of the house.

I resolved to build the wall in three sections. For those of you have never built anything out of concrete, it’s often delivered by a truck in a semi-liquid form, with the approximate consistency of oatmeal porridge. It is then poured into a wood or metal container that molds the concrete into the desired shape: a foundation, a sidewalk, or wall, for example. Then when the concrete hardens over a period of a day or so, the container—called a form by those in construction—is removed from the concrete, leaving the desired structure in hardened concrete. In the case of our wall, picture a vertical sandwich with two pieces of plywood being the pieces of bread, and six inches of concrete being the “meat” of the sandwich.

I had poured concrete on many occasions, so even though I had never poured it in the form of a wall, I was nonetheless confident in my ability to complete the job. Three of my sons and I built the forms and began shoveling the liquid concrete into them. Then we discovered that the weight of the concrete—three and a half feet high, including the foundation—was considerably greater than we had anticipated. If you want to get an idea of the pressure exerted by that much concrete, rest a three and a half foot pillar of concrete on your foot.

As we poured, the pressure of the concrete pushed the bottom third of the forms apart, giving us a wall wider at the base than at the top. Then the forms began to bulge in the middle, and in some places, the wall began to lean. This was all quite a problem, because a concrete truck will only wait so long while you’re working, and the concrete also begins to harden. While some of us carried concrete from the truck to the site and shoveled it into the forms, others of us were hurriedly reinforcing the forms in a variety of ways, with stakes, braces, clips, and supports. It turned into a construction circus. Then we ran out of concrete, because I had calculated the volume of concrete based on neat, straight, forms, and considerably more concrete was required to finish the job after our forms bowed outward.

For the second section, we took advantage of the lessons we had learned from pouring the first section. This time we bolted threaded rods through the forms in many places, so they held the forms a uniform six inches apart everywhere. We staked them to the ground much more firmly, so the bottoms didn’t move outward with the pressure of the concrete from above. We also made other improvements, so that when we made the second pour, we accomplished an even longer section in half the time and with much less effort.

The extra effort we put into preparing for the second pour resulted in a faster, easier, and better construction job. And it’s likely that the hours we put into building the wall will someday save us a great deal of trouble if the river rises and threatens our home.

In building a concrete wall, we can’t take shortcuts, or we pay a heavy price. We all learn that general lesson when it comes to building walls, building businesses, acquiring educations, and so on, but when it comes to our personal lives, we often believe the rules are different. In our personal lives we think we can cheat. We think we can get away with minimal preparation, and that just is not the case. The more effort we put into preparation in our personal lives, the stronger we become and the easier it is to deal with every difficulty we encounter. It’s ironic that we think we’re “saving” time and effort when we skip preparation, but we pay far more in the future as we deal with the consequences of our lack of preparation.

People often call me in the middle of conflicts and ask what they should do. In that particular moment, it’s often too late to offer any advice that will help. The advice I do give is frequently intended to prepare them to prevent the next conflict or to make the next difficult situation much easier to deal with.

When it comes to your personal life, prepare now. Prepare a lot. Never get tired of preparing. Enjoy every minute of it. Regularly tell the truth about yourself and create opportunities to feel unconditionally accepted and loved. Then practice loving others. The rewards of your preparation will be beyond your comprehension. If you have adequately prepared, when you are assaulted by criticism, anger, conflict, and other difficulties, you will find yourself in possession of a profound peace and an ability to feel loved and be loving—true power—that are beyond price.

When people become acquainted with the principles of Real Love, and as they persist in living them, they invariably find a level of happiness they had never known. Many of them then ask me this question: “Why doesn’t everyone embrace Real Love? The happiness associated with Real Love is so fantastic, I don’t understand why everyone isn’t running to get more of it.”

One prominent answer to that question is that most people haven’t the slightest idea what genuine happiness is. And why would they?

* They’re as happy as most of the people around them.
* They’ve seen no reason to suppose there is some higher level of joy out there.
* No matter how hard they’ve worked, their level of happiness stays right about where it is, with minor fluctuations here and there.

Permit me a metaphor. Imagine that you’ve lived in the interior of Antarctica your entire life, so all you’ve ever known is temperatures between minus 20 and minus 100 degrees F. One day, however, the temperature rises from minus 40 to zero degrees. Compared to what you’ve known all your life, you’d think zero degrees was “warm.” Living in Antarctica, how would you possibly know what genuine warm was? How could you know what it could be like to bask on a beach in Grand Cayman, where the temperatures might vary between 90 and 98 degrees in the afternoon?

Most people find themselves in a similar position emotionally. In the absence of sufficient Real Love, they haven’t the slightest idea what genuine happiness is. They live in a constant state of minus 40 degrees emotionally, and when they can get enough Imitation Love—in the form of praise, sex, money, power, conditional acceptance, and so on—that feels so good that they honestly believe they’re happy, even though they’ve only moved from a condition of minus 40 degrees emotionally to perhaps zero degrees.

Once we have tasted Real Love sufficiently, however—both in quantity and consistency—we can’t be fooled by what we once thought happiness was. Once we have tasted the real thing, Imitation Love loses its appeal and therefore its ability to seduce us. Most of us have settled for garbage—Imitation Love—all our lives. Once we’ve tasted chocolate cake, we won’t be fooled by garbage again.

And that is precisely why we need frequent contact with wise men and women, to get enough of a taste of Real Love that we really know what genuine happiness is, so we can’t be fooled by Imitation Love anymore.

Never, never settle for Imitation Love in your life, or for the pseudo-happiness that accompanies it. Instead make a commitment that you’ll do whatever it takes to find the Real Love that produces the genuine happiness we all want. No effort we make to find Real Love could ever be too great.