Creating Surprises: An Excellent Way to Show Love

Source: Alexas_Fotos/Pixabay A few days ago, when I slid into the driver’s seat for the first time since the anesthetic haze following surgery had cleared, I buckled up for my debut solo excursion in nearly a month. I noticed how spotless the windshield looked. The car was immaculate. Lint and debris had disappeared from the seats and floor mats. Bottles of water sat in the spaces designed for them. Clearly my husband had intended to surprise me. I was delighted. His unexpected actions have long left me [...]

“Showing Up” Powerfully Demonstrates Your Love

Being there for performances, events, dates and times of need shows love. Source: cocoparisienne/Pixabay Woody Allen is often credited with saying “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” I don’t know what the statistics would say about the proportion of love that is expressed through “showing up” but my guess is that, in successful relationships, it is large. “Don’t tell me, show me.” “Don’t talk the talk; walk the walk.” There was even the hit song from My Fair Lady, “Show me”. What do we show up [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Expressing Love Through Observing

Observation, the first task of scientific inquiry, can also express love. Source: nightowl/Pixabay With careful observation, people can identify the sources of their own happiness, meaning and joy. For example, using discernment, they can evaluate what money can and cannot buy. Yes, it can secure a good bit of comfort, beauty and freedom, providing relief, pleasure, and opportunity. But it cannot buy respect, love, trust, or creativity. While purchased pleasures can also offer distraction from intensity or relief from the grind of discipline, they can also [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Allocating Resources

Source: liuhonghezhengsji/Pixabay We each have resources available to us. Internal resources, such as our genetic potentials, developed talents, memories, personality styles. Motivations that animate us intersect with external resources — including time, money and energy — accessed through or heavily influenced by our environment at any moment. We constantly make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, about ways in which we use our resources. When we choose to use them in the service of a relationship or of someone we care about, we are showing [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Recognizing the Relationship

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Recognizing the Relationship Understanding and honoring the "we" transcends meeting individual needs. Source: takazart/Pixabay On February 26th, the film La La Land, nominated in 14 categories, won six Academy Awards. Musicals have always been my favorite film genre, watching dance my favorite spectator entertainment. From Busby Berkeley through Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron to Gene Kelly and now Robert Fairchild, I feel the thrills of freedom and yearning in a dancer’s movements as I watch, [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Helping

Photo by epicioci/Pixabay This week’s topic pushed me into a careful consideration of words and their nuances. Ten days after a significant surgical repair, I was feeling profoundly grateful for all the caregiving provided by my loving husband and I wanted to write about "Caregiving" — providing help to someone who needs it. But “Caregiving” conjures up images of dependency more profound and perhaps more permanent than I wanted to address. Similarly, “Support” didn’t capture the phenomenology of need. I was indeed dependent [...]

2018-01-31T21:03:58+00:00March 20th, 2017|Categories: Aspects of Loving, Life, Refracted|

52 Ways to Show I Love You: No Stealing

Thou shalt not - Photo by aitoff/Pixabay One of the five Buddhist precepts is “Do not take anything not freely given”. The same commandment appears as “Do not steal” in the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 20:15 and Leviticus 19:11) and the Western religions that grew from it. One way of thinking about that commandment is to realize that taking what is rightfully in one person’s domain is theft unless done with that person’s explicit permission. Showing love means to [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Giving

Offering earth's finest - Photo by Hietaparta I asked a granddaughter to describe her favorite gifts. They were those that led to discovery, that made her smile, or that helped her feel recognized and understood. She described receiving two clean mayonnaise jars for her birthday, one labeled “Quotes” and the other “Happiness." Inside the “Quotes” jar, her friend had placed 100 handwritten quotations on brightly colored post-it notes, each folded in half. The “Happiness” jar was empty.  An [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Remembering

David and I had been living in different cultures.  Twenty years ago, what were peripheral holidays in France were major occasions in the United States, thanks in part to Hallmark and other corporate marketing strategies.   When he visited me in the United States and I observed celebrations with food and festivities, he enjoyed them and I (wrongly) assumed he understood how much joining in such national or religious rituals meant to me.  (They still do - see my initial post [...]

52 Ways to Show I Love You: Choosing

  Where to go? What route to take?  Photo by Antranias Every day we make countless choices, some consciously and many unconsciously.  Do we look at our motivation?  The consequences of the countless decisions that affect our relationships?  Through them, we are forever balancing closeness and distance, self-interest and that of the one whom we love.  What do we need and want?  What does the other person need and want? With the transition to parenthood, we learn to [...]

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