Can you feel alone in a crowd? Unloved in a decades-long marriage? Indeed, that’s often when loneliness strikes hardest: when you experience social connections and seemingly intimate relationships, but they don’t feel satisfying.
This apparent contradiction is at the heart of How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, a new book by happiness scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis.
The pair surveyed a representative sample of 1,998 American adults and found that two-thirds yearned to feel more loved or loved more often by the people in their lives, and 40 percent wanted to feel more loved by their romantic partner. The authors noted a strong negative correlation between loneliness and feeling loved, expressed qualitatively in comments like, “I have plenty of friends, and I spend a lot of time socializing. But honestly? I don’t know if anyone deeply loves me.”
How to Feel Loved vividly expresses the disconnect between people in our lives expressing love and our experience of feeling that love, and puts the power back in our hands. Lyubomirsky and Reis make a powerful case that by approaching our relationships with vulnerability, curiosity, self-acceptance, and optimism, we can get the love we need. They outline specific strategies for shifting our mindsets and interpersonal interactions to achieve more rewarding outcomes.
I spoke with Lyubomirsky and Reis about the research underlying their book and their recommendations for readers.
Katherine Reynolds Lewis: The collaboration at the heart of this book–a happiness scholar teaming up with a relationship scientist–seems long overdue. What are you trying to achieve with How to Feel Loved?
Sonja Lyubomirsky: A lot of people are loved, but they don’t feel loved. If you don’t feel loved, it’s as though it’s not there. Feeling loved and feeling connected is really the key to happiness. Almost all of the interventions shown to make us happier, the reason they work is they make us feel more connected to and loved by others. We know relationships are so important to happiness; the Harvard Adult Development Study is very famous for showing that. Harry and I started talking and we realized happiness researchers and love researchers don’t really talk as much as they should.
KRL: Your book has such potential to make a difference because people have relationships, they have social connections, but they don’t feel loved, and that often leads to despair and spiraling. How does this connect to our epidemic of loneliness?
SL: Loneliness is such a huge problem, especially among young people, and really, a lonely moment is a moment where you don’t feel loved. So they’re very, very connected, very, very relevant to each other.
Harry Reis: Most people, when they go about trying to get more love, they do it in a way that not only is wrong, but may actually be counterproductive. And so what we’re trying to do is give people a new approach that we believe will be more effective.
One of the ironies in this is that when people are in relationships that aren’t satisfying enough for them, that may actually be a more devastating feeling than not being in relationships. When you’re alone, when you’re isolated, you can do self-fulfilling kinds of activities. But when people are in a relationship, they begin to question: Why is this unsatisfying? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not doing things right? And that can actually be a more powerful negative feeling than being isolated.
SL: We also had this realization that for a lot of problems in relationships, often the source is a sense of not feeling loved, or not loved enough. Take the show Couples Therapy. You see them fighting and it’s so obvious that at the root of it is that no matter what he does, she’s not feeling loved; no matter what she does, he’s not feeling loved enough.
Katherine Lewis: In the book, you write about the relationship saesaw, which you intentionally misspell using the word “sea” to align with your metaphor that many of our personal attributes are hidden underwater. Can you explain what you mean by that, and how it functions when it’s done well?
Harry Reis: The relationship seasaw is the idea that there’s a reciprocal process of lifting and being lifted in this dynamic interaction. When you lift somebody up, meaning you support them, you encourage them, you show curiosity about what makes them tick, it makes them feel good, it makes them feel loved, but it also encourages them to reciprocate that feeling, and so then they will lift you up. There is this dynamic back and forth between opening up, but also in listening and encouraging the other. That gives people a sense of connection, a sense of chemistry.
SL: Another way to think about it is that the key to feeling loved is to be truly known to the other person, and also truly know the other person. It’s like an underwater seasaw. Most of us are kind of underwater. We’re not really showing most of ourselves to the other person. We’re only showing the tip, maybe only the positive sides of us. By pressing down the seasaw with curiosity and warmth and acceptance and listening, we’re helping the other person reveal more of themselves and to share more. Otherwise, it’s actually kind of hard to take down those walls. Reciprocity is a really powerful norm of social behavior, evolutionarily adaptive, obviously, and so they’ll reciprocate by showing curiosity and warmth and acceptance in us, and encouragement and support, and really listening to our story. That doesn’t actually happen that often.
KL: It really is a powerful revelation that feeling more loved is within our control. It has the potential to truly change lives through the new mindsets and the actions that you outline. So you can’t explain everything that took you 300-plus pages in the book, but can you give a brief overview of the five mindsets–Sharing, Listening to Learn, Radical Curiosity, Open Heart, and Multiplicity–and pull out one or two of them to discuss in more depth?
SL: I feel like our book has an empowering message, because most people, when they think about feeling more love, they think I need to make myself more lovable, more desirable, more appealing, show off to the other person how wonderful I am. But it’s not about changing yourself; it’s not about changing the other person; it’s about changing the conversation. Because a relationship really is a series of conversations.
The mindsets are five different perspectives that we encourage people to embrace as they approach their next conversation with their romantic partner, or their neighbor, or their mom, or their colleague.
I’ll start with the sharing mindset. I might feel maybe you wouldn’t love me if you really got to know me, all my messy, complicated insights and contradictions and some negative qualities. Sharing allows us to take down our walls a little bit. You have to share at the right pace. We’re not talking about revealing your deepest secret or trauma right away.
It might be starting small, like, you ask me, “How are you?” And instead of saying, “Fine,” which is what we always do, I say, “Oh, well, I actually had kind of a rough morning,” or “I’m struggling a little today.” It could just be saying something real, your true opinion about something that’s going on.
HR: When people don’t feel loved, often what they do is say, “You need to make me feel more loved.” Of course, that kind of thing doesn’t work very well. It’s externalizing the problem. It’s putting pressure on the other person. You need to change the conversation in a way that can allow that to happen, rather than waiting for the other person to do something, because it’s like waiting for Godot.
When we listen to another person, we’re often preparing our response. What that does is it distances you from the other person. It doesn’t allow you to connect with them. The listening-to-learn mindset is the idea that you need to really be paying attention so that you can actually learn something about the other person. You need to be curious about what they’re saying. And then, and this is the important part, you need to encourage them to go deeper. One of the most powerful things you can say is a really simple three-word phrase: “Tell me more.”
SL: The first step in helping yourself to feel more loved is to try to make the other person feel more loved, by listening to them, helping them open up, showing curiosity in them, showing warmth and acceptance. But one thing that surprised us is when we wrote our first draft, we sent it to a few friends and colleagues. Two friends of mine wrote to me, and they’re not psychologists, but they’re writers and smart people. They told us that our book led them to break up with their girlfriends. One guy said, “Your book made me realize that she’s not really sharing.” The other guy said, “I realize my girlfriend has stopped showing curiosity about my work,” which was very important to him.
So we created a quiz, actually. It’s on howtofeellove.com, our book website. It tells what your strongest mindset is, and what’s the mindset that’s in most need of improvement, and then we give some tips on how to do that.
HR: If both people are committed to the relationship and want to work on it, this can be a powerful stimulus to improving the relationship.
SL: We have this sort of inner chatter. As I’m talking to you, even now, I’m thinking what I’m going to say next, I’m thinking what I’m going to have for lunch. To quiet that inner chatter and truly be present, we all can do that, but we just need practice. All of these mindsets are totally accessible.
KL: Finally, could you talk about the multiplicity mindset, Sonja?
SL: Actually, the word comes from trauma research. The idea is that when you have a trauma, it doesn’t define you. You are a person with many, many, many facets. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. We are like a quilt of both positive and negative qualities.
Sometimes I’m kind, and sometimes I’m selfish, and sometimes I’m loyal, and sometimes I’m narcissistic. We’re all of those things; they’re all a spectrum. Try to recognize that in other people. Sometimes they might reveal something a little bit uncomfortable, or a little bit negative. Try to look at that with this lens of multiplicity. One bad action doesn’t define us. We have these messy insides; we have a lot of contradictions. That really helps us feel more loved, by ourselves, too.
KL: You are challenging people to grow and be their best selves. Even though many of these steps are simple, at heart, to accept your own self and be comfortable revealing, and then accept others is demanding a lot from folks.
SL: It takes a lot of effort. All of our mindsets take effort, they take intention, and they sometimes are challenging, but so worthwhile.
Email Us on editorial@nnafrica.com
