I used to be embarrassed to walk into the “Psychology” section of the local bookstore. Most of the titles on offer there were variations of “pop psychology” that met the criterion for “pop” but not for “psychology.” Psychology is, after all, the discipline that uses scientific methods to analyze human thoughts, feelings, and behavior. But a shockingly large portion of pop-psych books have little or no scientific evidence underlying their confidently stated nuggets of advice about how to improve your relationships, your moods, or bad habits. Many could as easily have been featured in the bookstore section on religion, perhaps in a subsection titled “Untested but Pleasant-Sounding Ideas Related to Pastoral Counseling.”
The recently released book How to Feel Loved by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis is a shining example of an advice book that really does belong in the psychology section. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has conducted many years of rigorous research on the causes of happiness and psychological well-being. I have given her book The How of Happiness to several friends and relatives, and recommended it to many others as a great example of useful science-based advice (see my post “7 Proven Steps to Happiness”). Harry Reis is a Dean’s professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who has conducted rigorous research on relationships for several decades. I have assigned his papers in my graduate seminars as good examples of thorough and clear scientific writing. Both authors have won awards for their research, based on published findings in the field’s most prestigious journals. I was delighted to learn about their collaboration, and even more delighted after reading the book.
Their collaboration started with a casual conversation about why relationship researchers and happiness researchers don’t talk to one another more. After all, good relationships are a central part of what makes for a happy and fulfilling life.
The book’s title suggests a focus on tactics for you to boost your own feelings of being loved. But in reality, it is mostly about ways you can behave toward others so that they feel loved. The argument is that if you make those other people feel loved, they will, in turn, make you feel loved. As the Beatles put it: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
Of course, it’s easy to say you should make the other people around you feel loved, but it’s not so easy to pull that off. Some of our default conversational styles, such as talking about ourselves and trying to look cool, get in the way. So does the tendency to fear that our attentions and affectionate feelings will not be reciprocated.
The book is quite nuanced in spelling out various suggestions that stem from their own research, and that of their colleagues, and I was impressed that whenever I had a reservation about a particular suggestion (such as the encouragement to self-disclose intimate details to others), the authors acknowledged that very reservation in the next page or two, pointing out, in this example, that self-disclosure has to be done in small-steps with the right person at the right time. You should read the book to get those nuanced and devilishly important details, but I’ll summarize the central points:
To make yourself feel more loved (by being more loving towards others), you should:
Be willing to share intimate details about yourself. Go first in taking a chance that the other person will respond favorably. As just noted, they observe that self-disclosure has to be selective, incremental, and thoughtful, and to be done in the right way with the right partner. They detail suggestions for how to make those judgments in a chapter called the “sharing mindset.”
Listen carefully when your partner reciprocates with details about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The authors call this the “listening to learn mindset,” and one simple tactic for exercising this capacity is to give yourself the assignment to just listen to your conversational partner the next time, and assume you’ll later be quizzed on the details.
Be truly curious and enthusiastic about what your friend, lover, coworker, or even the person sitting next to you on a train ride, is like. Dig deep and try to understand what the other person is actually like, as part of the “radical curiosity mindset.”
Let yourself feel genuine care and concern for the other person. And let them see it, in what Lyubormirsky and Reis call the “open-heart mindset.” They talk about an idea developed by Caryl Rusbult and Stephen Drigotas called the “Michelangelo phenomenon,” in which close partners bring out the best in one another, in the way that Michelangelo “released” the beautiful sculpture of David from what was originally a big chunk of marble.
Finally, accept that, when you hear about another person’s inner thoughts and feelings, and they confess their past misdeeds or failings, you might not approve of everything they say, feel, and do. But just as you do better in life if you accept that you yourself will always have strengths and weaknesses (what they call having self-compassion), you will have better relationships if you develop what they call a “multiplicity mindset,” compassionately accepting the fact that those close to you are always complex individuals, who will never, and should not be expected to, reach your criterion for perfect.
As mentioned earlier, the authors describe research relevant to each suggestion and include very thoughtful qualifications. They point to the danger of using the list above to judge your current partners’ failings when you have not yourself shown sufficient openness, curiosity, caring, and acceptance to get the ball rolling. And they note repeatedly that none of these strategies is guaranteed to work with everyone you might hope will feel love for you, so when others close to you don’t reciprocate your openness, curiosity, attention, and caring, it might make sense to invest your efforts in another relationship.