Love Actually?

Valentine’s Day is an invitation to reflect on love. We are wise to focus on love every day—what could be more important?

As we ponder questions about love, is it possible that what we think is an expression of love is disguised to meet our own needs? Is our love nurtured by being open and authentic or scented with fear? What do we do after the initial fires of love cool?

As the author of the Psychology Today blog “Communication Matters,” I invited Steven A. Beebe of Texas State University to join in the conversation. Steve is an expert on C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Oxford University’s Christian writer best known for books such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters. Writing in the voice and style of his day, Lewis has important insights on love for us today.

Communication and love are always linked, never separate. Lewis’s insights on love and human relationships transcend a specific theology and are well supported by communication theory and research. Lewis’s writing inspires us to pay attention to communication, as Steve noted in his award-winning book, C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication. What does Lewis say about love?

Love Toggles Between Gift-Love and Need-Love

First, Lewis suggests that there is more than one kind of love. In The Four Loves, Lewis makes a distinction between “gift-love” and “need-love”:

• With gift-love, we focus on selfless giving, not expecting to receive anything in return. Gift-love offers our love altruistically and selflessly and is focused on the other person’s needs. Gift-love may or may not be reciprocated.
• With need-love, we realize that “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves” (p. 2). Our expression of love can also meet our own needs for approval or feelings of self-worth. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it is possible, and most often preferable, to meet the needs of others and self at the same time.

Events like Valentine’s Day, birthdays, and anniversaries are prime opportunities to celebrate the people we love most. From this perspective, it seems like gift-love is more important, right? Our Valentine’s gift to our loved one may seem like gift-love, but at the same time, it is also need-love. How so? Giving gifts is one way to understand ourselves as caring or generous. And giving gifts helps communicate who we are to people important to us.

Most of the time, we navigate between need-love and gift-love. In this way, the two kinds of love are not either/or; they are both/and. In the end, both kinds of love are important if they are in balance.

The takeaway: Be aware of the kind of love you are communicating. Lewis’s “gift-love” and “need-love” dialectic is evident in healthy relationships. The way to assess the quality of our love is to determine whether we are more interested in meeting the needs of others over our own needs and wants. Gift-love is other-oriented and centered on the unique person. Our partner will judge the quality of the relationship based on the continuum of gift-love and need-love.

Love Is Vulnerable

Second, love is vulnerable—opening yourself up, disclosing who you are, and being authentic. This is what makes a relationship sustainable and healthy. Author Brené Brown stressed that vulnerability is an important hallmark of any relationship, especially a love relationship.

C. S. Lewis made this point decades earlier:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it [your heart] intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entablements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it [your heart] will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” (from The Four Loves, p.138)

The takeaway: To love is to be vulnerable. Vulnerable love is open, authentic, available, and characterized by trust. To love is to disclose our true selves and be accepted for who we are. Trying to guard love is to diminish it.

Love Is Not a Feeling, but an Action

Third, we often think about love as a feeling, an emotion. That is certainly part of it. However, love is communicated in what we do and say (and do not). Love is action. Sustaining love involves doing, not just feeling. Lewis declared:

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“Love as distinct from 'being in love' is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.” (from Mere Christianity p. 86)

The storybook feeling of falling in love rarely lasts unchanged. Rather, the daily actions that provide love and support sustain a relationship. Valentine’s Day can be helpful to remember and kindle the sentiments of love, expressed symbolically with chocolate or flowers.

Lewis explained:

“Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing... You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling… the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last… If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever could be true and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?” (from Mere Christianity, p. 85-86)

The takeaway: What is most important is not what happens on Valentine’s Day or in any other celebration. Focus on the other 364 days of the year. Our daily expressions and actions of care and concern are what create lasting love. How does your everyday behavior communicate your love and affection for your loved ones?

C.S. Lewis gets the last word:

“'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.” (from Mere Christianity, p.86)