Love is a Way of Life
By Gary Chapman
Doubleday
The Satisfaction
of a Loving Life
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life, that no man
can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
—ralph waldo emerson
You are a person with multiple relationships. Those relationships may
include neighbors, coworkers, children, a spouse, parents, siblings, and
friends. They undoubtedly include the clerk at the grocery store, the
guy who just came to fix your plumbing, and even the woman who
called you during dinner last night to ask you to take a “quick survey”
although she wasn’t “selling anything.” In fact you have some kind of
relationship with every person you interact with every day.
If you are like most people, you want to have the best possible relationships.
However, it’s likely that you’ve discovered how difficult relationships
can be. We have misunderstandings over who gets the car,
who washes the dishes, and even why someone left the coffeemaker on
overnight in the break room.
When your close relationships are strained, you wonder if you’re
missing something, maybe something that other people have found. If
love is so important, and you know that you love someone, why is the
relationship still painful?
True Success
In my counseling office I have listened to hundreds of people share
their stories of broken relationships and shattered dreams. Just last
week a man told me, “I never thought this is where I would be at the
age of forty-two. I have two broken marriages, seldom see my children,
and have no purpose for living.”
Most of us begin our adult journey with high aspirations. We expect
to work hard, make money, accumulate things, have loving families,
and enjoy life. For many people, these dreams turn to nightmares
before the midpoint of life. The message of hope that I have sought to
share in my office through the years is that life is not over until it is
over. Today is the day to turn your life in a positive direction.
I believe the key to success is discovering the power of loving others.
What does true success look like? Everyone seems to have a different
answer: money, promotion, fame, tenure, winning the game. All
these are legitimate pursuits, but what is the one thing that gives a true
sense of accomplishment? My own definition of success is “leaving your
corner of the world better than you found it.” Your “corner” may be focused
on a single town or a neighborhood within a city, or it may carry
you to dozens of countries. Whatever your sphere of influence, when
you are seeking to enrich the lives of others through relationships, you
will find the most satisfying form of success.
The truth is, you are made for relationships. To experience the
richness of loving relationships is better than anything money, fame, or
professional acclaim could bring. If the word love sounds nebulous right
now, my hope is that this book will help you see what love looks like
in daily life. When we love others because we value them as individuals,
we experience a joy unlike any other.
When you seek to enrich the lives of others,
you find the most satisfying form of success.
Why Another Book on Love?
The key to finding joy in loving others is to focus on giving love, not
on getting it. That reality is my primary motivation for adding another
book on love to the thousands of articles and hundreds of books that
have been written on this topic in the last fifty years. Most of what has
been written focuses on “getting the love you want.” Receiving love is
a beautiful result of loving others, but the pure joy of love comes first
from having a loving attitude, no matter what we get in return.
AN ATTITUDE OF LOVE
More than a decade ago I wrote a book on how to express love effectively
in our relationships. The Five Love Languages has now sold more
than four million copies in the United States and has been translated
into thirty-five languages around the world. In The Five Love Languages,
I looked at five primary ways we give and receive love:
- Words of affirmation
- Quality time
- Gifts
- Acts of service
- Physical touch
Each of us speaks some languages more naturally than others. If we
speak the love language of someone else, she will feel loved. If we fail
to speak her language, she will feel unloved even though we are speaking
some of the other love languages.
The feedback from readers has been extremely encouraging. Thousands
have written to say in effect, “Thank you for helping me do what
I have always wanted to do: love others well.”
What has been disturbing is the number of people who have indicated
that they understand the concept of the five love languages but
are not willing to learn to speak the love language of family members.
One husband told me with great defiance, “If it is going to take washing
dishes, vacuuming floors, and doing the laundry for my wife to feel
loved, you can forget it.” He had the knowledge of love but not the attitude
of love.
I had made the assumption that if people knew how to express love
effectively, they would be eager to do it. I now realize that assumption
was wrong. Love languages are important ways to communicate love,
but without a basis for the love languages, our words and actions are
empty.
The seven traits of a loving person are not an add-on to the five
love languages; they are the foundation for every language of love. In
order to love effectively in any relationship, we need to use these seven
habits to cultivate an attitude of love in the most ordinary of interactions.
THE ROAD TO GREATNESS
I am convinced that most of us have a desire to be better lovers. We
want not only to care for others but also to love authentically in all our
interactions. We feel good about ourselves when we expend energy to
help others; it seems right and noble. We feel bad when we reflect upon
our selfish actions.
When all is said and done, the most satisfied older adults are those
who have invested their lives in giving love away. They may be people
who have accumulated great wealth or they may live on meager incomes.
They may hold positions of renown or they may be unknown
to the larger world. But if they have invested in making the world a
better place in which to live, a smile of contentment can be found on
their faces. I don’t know the details of your life, but I know that when
the seven characteristics of a loving person become a natural part of
the way you relate to others, you will find that kind of joy.
My desire is that Love as a Way of Life will help the husband who
said “Forget it” to loving his wife realize that love is the road to greatness.
I hope it will help you make the same discovery. As someone
once said, everyone loves a lover. Self-centered living leaves us alone
and empty. Love as a way of life leads to the deepest satisfaction possible.
The Meaning of Authentic Love
The meaning of the word love is often confusing because the word is
used in so many different ways. Every day we hear people say things
like, “I love the beach. I love the mountains. I love New York. I love
my dog. I love my new car. I love my mother.” On a romantic evening,
they will say, “I love you.” People even talk about “falling in love.”
Imagine that! I sometimes want to ask, “How far do you fall, and what
does it feel like when you hit the ground?”
Love is not an emotion that comes over us or an elusive goal dependent
on the actions of others. Authentic love is something within
our capabilities, originating in our attitudes and culminating in our actions.
If we think of love as a feeling, we shall be frustrated when we
can’t always work up that feeling. When we realize love is primarily an
action, we are ready to use the tools we have to love better.
Authentic love brings out our authentic selves,
the people we want to become.
THE BEAUTY OF AUTHENTIC LOVE
Authentic love is as simple and real as the kind of love it takes to listen
to an employee who is having a difficult day, to take your kids out
for a back-to-school dinner in August, to donate money to the local
fire department, to compliment a friend, to give your spouse a back rub
before bed, or to clean the kitchen for your roommate when you are already
tired from a long day of work.
Authentic love might be as bold as the kind of love that motivates
people like Ruby Jones of New Orleans. This sixty-seven-year-old
nurse chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina with her eight dying patients
in the hospice unit at the Lindy Boggs Medical Center when the storm
hit the shores of her city. “Don’t try to be Superwoman,” her children
told her. Ruby was just trying to do her duty. She reported to work on
Sunday and did not leave until Thursday, when her patients were evacuated.
As the storm broke windows and blew open doors, she told her
patients, “We are here with you, and we aren’t going to leave.” When
the medical center lost power and drinking water and began flooding,
Jones continued to bathe and feed her charges and dress their wounds.
When she left on Thursday after her patients had been evacuated, she
was hungry and thirsty, but she had kept her promise to stay with her
patients until the end. During the most harrowing moments, love for
her patients sustained her.
Recently, I visited a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who was dying
of cancer. I had observed her life for a number of years and found
her to be one of the most loving people I had ever met. She faced
death with realism yet with a positive spirit. I won’t forget what she
told me: “I have taught my children how to live. Now I want to teach
them how to die.” Authentic love sees even death as an opportunity to
love others.
CHOOSING TO LOVE
It’s true that those who live lives of love are not exempt from the difficulties
of life. If you have been told that love will alleviate all your
problems, you were misinformed. History shows us that many people,
even the most loving, not only have suffered earthquakes, floods, tornadoes,
hurricanes, automobile accidents, sickness, and other afflictions
but have even been persecuted for advocating a life of love.
How can a person endure such pain and still desire to pursue a
love-filled life? Sometimes it is in the midst of difficulty that we find
our greatest opportunities to experience and share love. One of the
beautiful things about living a love-filled life is that we are not dependent
on circumstances for our satisfaction. We find joy in our choice to
love others, whether or not they love us in return and whether or not
circumstances go the way we want them to.
Love might be accompanied by feelings of compassion for those we
are helping. But first, love is an attitude that says “I choose to focus my
life on helping others.”
RADICAL LOVE
When we love authentically, we realize how radical true love can be.
Love is enough to change a superpower. For example, by taking care
of the poor and loving even their enemies, Christians in the first few
centuries overcame a decaying, self-centered culture. They began by
loving one another in small ways, sharing possessions and food and
showing compassion to women, children, and other marginalized people
of the time. The power-hungry, decadent culture of the Roman
Empire accepted the new sect largely because observers said, “See how
they love one another.”
Serving others goes against the cultural norm of giving so we can
get. We might not fit into the world around us when we set out to love
others, but authentic love gives us the opportunity to discover a deeper
joy than ordinary ways of the world can give.
A Matter of Survival
All this may sound good, but in a world of constant conflict, does love
stand a chance? Our newspapers and television screens are filled daily
with reports of our inhumanity toward one another, much of it perpetrated
in the name of religion or out of personal greed. Watch any talk
show and you will see that we have lost the art of meaningful dialogue.
Any news program will remind us that we have little respect for those
who disagree with us. Politicians and religious leaders seem to be in attack
mode most of the time and rarely are willing to listen to one another.
I believe that not only does love stand a chance in this world, but
in fact it is our only chance. If we can come to respect one another as
fellow humans who need one another and choose to look out for one
another’s well-being, the potential for good is unlimited. If we fail to
do so, we shall lose our dignity and we shall use the technological advances
of the last fifty years to destroy one another. If we are going to
solve the problems in our global society, we need the respect and
meaningful dialogue that flow from love.
Is buying a homeless woman a bowl of soup or taking your daughter
to the park or driving a coworker to the mechanic when his car
breaks down really going to make a difference in the world? The answer
is an overwhelming yes. We might have loftier ideas of what it
means to love, such as making a grand sacrifice of time or money or
even giving our lives, but why should we be willing to die for someone
when we won’t fill up the gas tank for her? Every trait of authentic love
begins with small things.
If all of us become authentic lovers, we can make a difference in a
world of turmoil. Love is not only realistic but our only hope of survival.
If you truly want to love someone,
begin in small ways.
How Can I Grow in Love?
No matter what our backgrounds are, being a loving person does not
come without work. Something in our makeup as humans fights
against our desire to love authentically.
The part of our nature that puts our own well-being above that of
others could be considered our false self. The ego-centered pull of this
false self is so pervasive that it has become a way of life for many. That
is why when great lovers, such as some of the people we will meet in
this book, appear on the stage, we are drawn to them. These authentic
lovers are acting out the part of our nature that pushes us to love others.
This true self serves others because only in serving do we find satisfaction
in relationships. Whether we are conscious of it or not, when
we act without love, we are not being true to our core identities. Because
we are made for relationships, when we offer authentic love to
someone, we are being who we really are.
Cultivating the seven characteristics of love helps us build the
strongest possible relationships through our attitudes, lifestyles, and actions.
When we fail to value relationships through these seven characteristics,
we are negative toward others, restless, and ready to attack or
defend.
When we make a decision to love authentically, our desire to grow
in love and show our true selves begins to flow more naturally from our
transformed hearts. Our role is to open our hearts and minds daily to
receive love and to look for opportunities to share it with others. The
more we do this, the more easily we love others.
THE POWER OF AUTHENTIC LOVE
The politician Lee Atwater is an example of a person who learned to
live out of his true self. In the 1980s he was a successful consultant for
the national Republican Party. His approach was to ruin the reputations
of his political enemies by planting demeaning stories in the media.
In the middle of his political career he was diagnosed with a
life-threatening disease. Before his death he made telephone calls and
wrote letters to those whom he had attacked, asking for forgiveness
and expressing his sorrow over what he had done.
One of the recipients of these letters was a Democratic politician
whose political life had been nearly destroyed when Atwater revealed
an episode in the man’s past. In Atwater’s letter to this man he said, “It
is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that
has happened in my career, one of the low points remains [that]
episode.”
The Democratic politician was deeply moved by Atwater’s apology.
He later attended Atwater’s funeral and said, “I hope those young
political consultants who would emulate Atwater’s tactics of driving up
the negatives of their opponents with the politics of fear will realize
that Lee Atwater, confronting death, became . . . an advocate of the
politics of love and reconciliation.” Atwater reminds us of the joy and
rich relationships that come when we choose to act out of our true
selves and express authentic love.
My hope is that as you go farther on the path of true love, you will
enjoy seeing your attitudes and behaviors change. The journey toward
a new level of loving will not end at the final page of this book, but
reading stories about the seven traits of a loving person will allow you
to taste the fruit of love and never again be satisfied with the dullness
of a self-centered lifestyle. If you are successful, building genuine relationships
will become such a habit of your days that the greatest joy
you know will be in making love a way of life.
Making It Personal
Are you ready for the journey? If so, then perhaps you would like to
sign the following commitment:
“I commit myself to reading and discovering the seven characteristics
of love discussed in this book. I will seek to cultivate my heart
with love for others. I want to love others as I in turn deserve to be
loved.”
Name __________________________________ Date ___________
1. How would you define success? How does your life today reflect
the fact that you view success in that way?
2. How much of your life right now would you say is spent in expressing
love to others?
3. Can you recall a specific act of love you have performed in the
past week? How do you feel about what you did?
4. Of the seven characteristics of a loving person—kindness, patience,
forgiveness, courtesy, humility, generosity, and honesty—which one comes most naturally to you right now? Which one is
the most challenging?
Excerpt from Love is a Way of LIfe. Used with permission. Copyright 2008.
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