10 Principles of Whole Love
A Humanistic Guide to Cultivating Growth and Wholeness in Your Relationships
When I wrote Transcend, I had so much I wanted to say about love— especially romantic love— from a humanistic psychology perspective. However, I ran out of space. In this post I have put together my extensive science-backed thoughts on the topic and am offering it to my paid subscribers as a token of my appreciation. I put a lot of work into this and hope it helps you all lead a more fulfilling love life!
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“We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.” – Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Being
In his article “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person“, the philosopher Alain de Botton noted that “choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for”. There is surely some truth here. Due to the narratives and unrealistic expectations our society holds about romantic love, we enter relationships with ideas that are destined to lead to disappointment and resentment. We believe there is one right person out there for us, and we expect that partner to be our everything— we expect them to satiate our insatiable sex drive, satisfy our need for belonging, and quell our deepest existential feelings of despair. de Botton is quite right that romantic love doesn’t have to be perfect. By forgiving our own foibles as well as accommodating those of our partner, we connect with our common humanity and foster growth in ourselves and our partner.
Even so, certainly we strive for more than choosing how we would most like to suffer in our loving relationships! We strive toward a richer, deeper, more meaningful, and more transcendent experience of love. In Motivation and Personality, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow has a chapter titled “Love in Self-Actualizing People”, in which he notes that “self-actualizing love shows many of the characteristics of self-actualization in general.” Using that chapter as a spring board, I will draw on the latest scientific findings on love and attachment to outline ten features of what I refer to as whole love. I define whole love as an enduring loving relationship that is continually in a state of growth, health, and development.
Note that this is the template of an ideal. I personally do not know anyone who shows all of these characteristics! Nevertheless, I think this template for whole love offers a realistic— yet still transcendent— north star in which to point the love compass. Also, while the focus here is on romantic relationships (as well as the integration of sex and love), many of these characteristics could apply equally to any loving relationship that one has in their lives. I fully acknowledge that some people have multiple intimate romantic relationships (polyamory), and that some people embrace the single life.
Therefore, I’d like to emphasize that it’s not the status of being in a romantic relationship that signifies whole love, it’s the quality of the connection that is the critical variable. I hope that the principles in this humanistic guide can help you in your journey to have more health, growth, and developing all of your loving relationships in your life.
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