Why don't we spend more time learning about love? Why do we spend so much time learning about things that don't really matter, and so little time learning about love, which is critical to having a happy and fulfilled life? From loving your family and your friends to your partner, your spouse, your children, your animals, whatever you have to love, learning about love is something most of us just dive into like a pool, hoping we get some knowledge about love on us. Or we are raised, and we parrot what we saw and heard from our parents. Then we go on to blame our parents for the rest of our love life. And then our children learn from us, and they blame us for their own love problems. When in fact, why can't we all just learn how to love on our own and live a happy life filled with love?
It doesn't matter where you've come from or what you've been through. It only matters what you can do in the future. And if you choose to learn about love, you can get good at love. You can even get great at love. The benefit of being great at love is having a life filled with love, and I have known no greater happiness than having a life filled with love. That's why I feel a duty to help and to spread the idea that I learned how to love. I took what I saw from my parents, but I intentionally, and haphazardly, learned more and more about love. What I want to share is the idea that you can intentionally learn about love, instead of just throwing yourself at life and hoping you get some love slapped back on you.
I think if I had known when I was younger, when I first was interested in trying to find new romantic love, and when I was old enough to intentionally make good decisions about loving the people around me, that I could intentionally learn about love the same way I could learn about math or science or biology, if I had known I could learn about it on purpose and get good at it, I think it would have been a lot less frustrating. And that's what I hope for you: that you can know you can intentionally learn how to love. Instead of life being filled with frustrations when it comes to family and a partner, it should be more of a journey and an intentional growth.
Where I'm starting from
To get started, my thought is to ask some questions to begin, to get me and to get you thinking about love. From there I'll share stories and expand on those stories. And of course, I'll start with my own. My own is quite colorful. I'm 29 years old, and I've been blessed to find the most wonderful girl in the world for me. We are a team now. We are one. And it was so hard. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my whole life to get to the point of meeting and keeping our love together. I would have been motivated to know, when I was younger, that it was possible. And I just want you to know it's possible. It's going to take effort, and learning, and time, and error. I hope I can make that process a little easier, and give you a little bit more, if not a lot more, potential for how much love you can have in your life.
As a caveat, I'm no love expert. I haven't studied all kinds of books and research about love. I'm a guy that grew up with a very loving family and struggled to find love in my own life, and struggled to love the other people in my life. And I finally got it right. I want to keep it right. And I work harder than I've ever worked before to keep it right. What I'm doing right now is an extension of keeping it right, and that is sharing love.
Ten questions to begin
To begin with the questions, I have 10 to ask to start, to get you thinking. The first is the very first thing I began with: why don't we spend more time learning about love? Why do we spend so much time learning about such pointless and useless subjects in our lives, and so little on the ones that really matter, like love? You can even expand this onto things like how to keep a house, or buy a house, how to maintain your car, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to be happy at a job. All of these things that are critically important, we spend very little time intentionally learning. My question is, why don't we make a choice and change that? Why don't we decide, hey, I'm going to intentionally learn the things that are important to me being happy? Love is one of those things. I'm going to take the time and intentionally learn about love.
The second question: why is learning love the easiest way to live a happy life? My thought, at least, is that love is something that will get you through anything else, especially when you combine love with faith. If you look at your faith as a love for God, or a love for whatever kind of spirituality you have, you can look at love as the all-positive, forward-driving force in life. I don't intend to answer all of these questions right now. I'm just getting started with these two, and then I'm going to throw out some more questions for you to think about, and we'll come back to them.
The third question: if we spent as much time learning about love as we spent learning about biology in school, how much happier would you be? How much happier would I be? How much happier would all of us be if we spent as much time learning about love as we do all of these other subjects that most of us never use again?
The fourth question: how can I find the right person to love in my life? This is, of course, a question I will spend a lot of time on, especially in later episodes. Because if you're single, or even if you know you're not with the right person, this is the key question that was on my mind. How do I find the right person to love in my life? I will try to help you answer this. Of course, you can only truly answer it yourself, but I hope to point you in the right direction.
The fifth question: how can I keep the right person to love in my life? After you've found the right person, that's only step one of love. Once you have found the ideal person for you to love, keeping and making that ideal love, that's the whole rest of the journey. When you meet the person, that's day one. If you like to think of it in sobriety terms or whatever, the first day you don't use is day one. It's the same thing with love. It's an adventure, and it just begins when you meet the right person. And I'm sure you probably already know this.
The sixth question: how can I love the people already in my life? This applies mostly to family members and friends. While I especially focused on finding a girl to love in my adult life, I put very little attention on trying to find and enhance the love I already had in my life. A couple of times, I did manage to make great steps in the right direction. But it usually took the thought of losing, or the act of losing, some love in my life to realize, hey, there's a lot more love in my life that I'm just wasting. I'm not taking advantage of it, in terms of I'm not giving anything to the people I love, I'm not thinking about the people I love, I'm not doing anything for the people I love. How to keep the people you love in your life, and how to love the people already in your life, are two key questions. Perhaps you could say they're one and the same, but I somewhat separated family from romantic here.
The seventh question, and especially if there are singles out there: what can I do to find love faster? There are nearly two billion single people on this planet. There's someone out there for you. I promise you there's someone out there for you. No matter who you are or where you're at, the only thing you need to do is answer the question to begin: what can I do to find love faster? There's not a lot of time in this life. If you look at how many days you have to live, optimistically, there aren't that many when you look at every time you go to bed and one of those days ticks off and you don't get any more. You want to find love as fast as you can. And I will give some of my thoughts on how to make that happen.
What to avoid when you're looking for love
Question eight: what should I avoid doing to find love? This is something I love, because, for example, I saw a video yesterday. I do online advertising for my day job, and I look at other ads the way a guy that loves cars looks at other cars. So I saw an ad on YouTube. The ad said something like, use this weird trick to get women. It had some terribly done, cartoony video of the big jock guy in the bar and the regular guy sitting over there crying while the big jock guy is talking to all the girls. And it says, using our system will guarantee that you, and then it swaps the jock over to sitting at the bar crying and puts the regular guy in with all the girls. You will be the one getting all the ladies.
I clicked on the guy's YouTube channel. He had 3.2 million views. So I'm like, that's a lot of views, let's see what else you've posted. One of his other videos was something like stripper success method. Guaranteed steps to walk into the club and pick up a stripper. You'll be taking her home by the fourth time you go to that club. I'm like, this is such trash. This is just trash. And this is a lot of what was aimed at me, and the things I found, when I was a teenage guy. It's not so much that I wanted to find those things, as that's what the guys were putting out. For example, I went to askmen.com a lot when I was in high school, and there was, and still is, Doc Love there with his system. I just feel like those are the exact kinds of things you should avoid in finding love. Because when you're treating other people like an object, you're acting selfishly, you're just trying to get one thing, those aren't things you should be doing to find love. Those are only things that will serve to hurt you, hurt other people, and hold you back from really learning about love. And there's a lot more I can say about that, so I'll give you a little preview of that.
And that brings us to question nine, out of ten: how do I know if I have found love?
How do I know if I've found love?
To me, that is one of the hardest, most difficult questions both to answer and even to help you with. Love is a feeling. Anytime you've read poems, or read quotes and books, or watched a movie, sometimes you can get a hold of what that feeling is. The problem is, love is a feeling, and feeling is only about half of who many of us are. Many of us are also rational, reasonable, thinking, communicating people, and love is very often not any of those things. It's really hard, because when I see two people together, I can very often just get a feeling of how they feel about each other very quickly. Whether they love each other.
For example, in college there was a guy I'm friends with on Facebook. Him and his wife — he was an RA, and before they were married, maybe when they were engaged — even though I had no idea of how to find love for myself, when I saw the two of them together, I knew they really loved each other. I could feel it. And I knew that's what I wanted to feel like when I found the right person. I knew that's how it should feel.
The problem is, what we want and what we know is possible is often not what we get. Especially on the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the hundredth, the three hundredth try. When your rational mind is telling you this is good — say you're with your girlfriend or boyfriend, she's nice, he's got a good job, she's really hot, I like his ass, whatever — when your rational mind is telling you these things, that's often not speaking to the feeling of love. And that's why it's critical to explore the question of how do I know if I've found love.
In my experience, most people will be somewhat successful in finding love. I'm confident you will have love in your life. What I want is for you to have the most love possible in your life. If you're with someone, or even if you're part of a family — though mostly this is for the romantic side, so let's stick to that — if you are dating someone, and you like them, but you don't love them enough, in the sense that there's no one else in the world you'd rather be with, then you're not doing either of you a favor.
I've been in a relationship that was good but not great. Nearly everyone has. It was acceptable, but it wasn't wonderful. None of the relationships I had before compare at all to the one I have with my wife now. The reason I'm compelled to share and communicate what little I know about love with you is that it scares the hell out of me to imagine what kind of life I would have had if I had stopped trying and settled for what was good before I met my wife. It scares the hell out of me to think about how I could have lived a whole life of good and never got to great. How I could have never found a real, wonderful love.
No matter what happens in the future — because nothing is guaranteed in this life — you have to have faith that things are going to work out when you've really put your heart in. The thing is, I always wanted to have found love. I didn't know I had found it for sure until I had. But I always wanted to have found it. And my wanting, my desire to have found love, put me in all kinds of situations that weren't good for me or for who I was with. And there's a complete fairness about it: it's the two of you combined, that one entity, that's the something. If you're not good together, then it doesn't matter anything about the individual details.
So I will try as much as I can, on how do I know if I've found love, to really help and show at least one person the light. The light being to show them what they already know inside. And to allow you to listen to what your heart's already telling you. If your heart's telling you it's not right, then it's right. Your heart is correct.
Why is learning and finding love so hard?
That last question seems to sum up all the others. Why is learning and finding love so hard? I've never done anything, in terms of difficulty, that compares to finding and learning about love. It's hurt more than anything. And I've had a nice, blessed, wonderful life. But I've still put myself in hard situations. I was a juvenile correctional officer, which is about as close to a war zone, in my thoughts, as you will find on U.S. soil — at least in terms of a job. I'm sure there are many situations you can put yourself into that aren't a job and that are a war zone, and I'm sure if you were in an organization that works like that, you'd certainly say it is a job. But still, being a correctional officer is brutal. And I was a police officer also, which was not easy. None of those challenges are anything compared to how hard it was to find love in my life.
The amount of pain and suffering I took over and over again trying to find love, the amount of times I failed at love, is staggering. It is simply maddening, or one would think irrational, to continue failing at something so many times. Love is hard.
When you get thrown into a family — and I am blessed, I feel like my family is pretty normal, although they like to quote their issues. We have various problems between members of the family. We're not all physically located near each other. Members haven't spoken to each other in a while. Still, I feel like I have a pretty normal and healthy family. But no matter who you are, you are liable to get thrown into a family where there's lots of challenges and inhibitions and things that stop love from being focused on.
The card you've been dealt
I was playing with a kid on Xbox. I say kid — he's 13. I think his 14th birthday is today, actually. He was yelling and screaming at his brother, and that's certainly something I would have done at his age, and I remember doing. I told him, "Do you realize this is more than likely the only brother you're ever going to get? He may be a scumbag, or he might be — insert your favorite cuss word here — he might be whatever you want to call him, but that's your brother, and that's what you get. That's what you've been dealt. If you're into poker, that's the card you've got in your hand, and you can waste it. You can be a jerk to him, but being a jerk to him is not going to get you anything good in return."
Yes, I realize he's stealing the pizza you just ordered and paid for right now. I'd be pissed off too if I was you. But it's not going to help to continually treat him bad about it. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It's only going to hurt you, you being mean to him. It's going to come back and hurt you again, and you're just repeating the cycle. The only thing you can do, the only power you do have, is to love your brother, even if you don't like him. At least be understanding if you can.
You presented a temptation in front of him. He's got the munchies. He just got this delicious double meat pizza that the kid called for while he was on the headset — I practically ordered it. I said, "Get a double meat pizza," and he got a double meat pizza from Papa John's. So you've got this delicious double meat pizza in front of you, and what do you think he's going to do when he smells that? You've presented a temptation. Instead of telling him he can't have any, what if you just told him, "Sure, have a couple of slices"? Maybe he'd let you have some of his pizza next time.
I know that love's not perfect. Pink likes to mention that in The Truth About Love. But love's as good as you make it. If you want to have love in your life, it helps to learn about love, and to find love, and to keep the love you have. These ten questions I've started off with are, I feel, a good way for you and me to get to thinking about love.
I want to help you learn to love. My motivation for this — why do I want you to learn about love? Because I have such wonderful love in my life. And I struggled so much with love growing up, mostly my own doing, my own bad choices. I want to help you learn to love. I want to give you the chance to do better. I want to give you the chance to find more love than you might have otherwise. I want to give you the chance to find that perfect person to be with, and to not screw it up when you are with them. I want to give you the chance to be a great family member — a family member that is loved.
Begin with the end in mind
Here's the framework I put this in. And to my honest credit, this was not created by me. This was in another book I read — I should look that up — Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I believe, by Stephen Covey. Here's the framework it's in.
If you're driving or something, please don't close your eyes. But visualize, if you are in a safe place to close your eyes. Take a moment and wipe the slate clean. Now this scenario loads in your head. You're sitting in a funeral. You're sitting inside. The casket is up at the front of the room. Your friends and your family are all there with you. Everyone's crying. And you stand up, because it's your turn to go look. You take a stroll over there. And you look down. And you see you — your own face staring back at you. You're at your funeral. And you turn around, and you look out at the people that are there. The people that love you and care about you. You look out at them and see them crying. And you see who's there, and who's not there.
That end is certain. There's no doubt. We all get to do this someday. But there's also a beginning that's certain. Start again. You're in the hospital delivery room. You're there, your friends and your family. The doctor holds the baby up. That baby — you might not recognize the face much, but that face is yours. That's you, with all the people around you that love you and care about you.
And I'm going to bet there are a lot fewer people at your birth than there were at your funeral. And how many is up to you. How many people go to your funeral and miss you and love you, and how many people you choose to love — that's up to you. And you've got time.
You Have Time Right Now
You have time right now. You don't know how much time you have. I don't know how much time I have. But I'm doing this, because I care about it. This is my passion. I have emails sitting there waiting to be answered right now, and I don't know how much time I have left to give back and to help other people find love. So I'm doing it, right now.
I've got my wife's birthday cake stuff sitting on the counter. I'm in the breakfast nook of my house as I record this. I try to love my wife every single day, and I try to love my family as often as I can. You have that same option. You know how this story of yours starts, and the choice you have is how to end that story.
Choosing a Happy Ending
If you want that story to have a happy ending, learning about love is the best thing you can do. In my experience, that is the single best thing you can do to have a happy ending: to learn about love. If this is a journey you want to keep taking with me, you can watch more of it in my Dating playlist, where I share more of what has worked for me.
The best thing you can do to have a happy ending is to learn about love. You have the time right now, and the ending of your story is yours to write.