What did I learn from an excellent book, Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection by Barbara Fredrickson? Let me tell you.

 

What is Love?

What love Is first and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. Here are some things she says:

• For now, suffice it to say that although you may subscribe to a whole host of definitions of love, your body subscribes to just one: Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being. I want to emphasize, though, that love isn’t simply one of the many positive emotions that sweep through you from time to time. It’s bigger than joy, amusement, gratitude, or hope. It has special status. I call it our supreme emotion. First, that’s because any of the other positive emotions— joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and so on— can be transformed into an instance of love when felt in close connection with another. Yet casting love as shared positive emotion doesn’t go nearly far enough. Second, whereas all positive emotions provide benefits— each, after all, broadens your mind-set and builds your resourcefulness— the benefits of love run far deeper, perhaps exponentially so. Love is our supreme emotion that makes us come most fully alive and feel most fully human. It is perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health (p. 10).  

• Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people— within interpersonal transactions— and thereby belongs to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily.  

Love is in the body

Love is the essential nutrient that your cells crave: true positivity-charged connection with other living beings.  

• The new science that illuminates for the first time how love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped. They, in turn, can alter the very ways your DNA gets expressed within your cells. The love you do or do not experience today may quite literally change key aspects of your cellular architecture next season and next year— cells that affect your physical health, your vitality, and your overall well-being. 

• The problem is that all too often, you simply don’t take the time that’s needed to truly connect with others. To the contrary, contemporary society, with its fast-changing technology and oppressive workloads, baits you to speed through your day at a pace that’s completely antithetical to connection. Feeling pressured to accomplish more each day, you multitask just to stay afloat. Any given moment finds you plotting your next move. What’s next on your never-ending to-do list? What do you need and from whom? Increasingly, you converse with others through e-mails, texts, tweets, and other ways that don’t require speaking, let alone seeing one another. Yet these can’t fulfill your body’s craving for connection. Love requires you to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that you slow down (p. 25).

 

Love makes a better you

Science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself.

• Put simply, your body was designed for love, and to benefit from loving. Human bodies become healthier when repeatedly nourished by positivity resonance with others, with the result that human communities become more harmonious and loving. This clear win-win arrangement is written into our DNA (p. 60).  

• True positivity springs from your full embodiment of positive emotions. It comes from a deeply felt sense of safety. By nature’s design, it expands you. Your body relaxes into it. Your torso literally stretches outward. Muscle tension melts away. With your torso expanded and your head held high, you see more of what surrounds you. Your peripheral vision expands, allowing you to take in more detail than you typically do (p. 129). 

Love is Fleeting

• I need to ask you to disengage from some of your most cherished beliefs about love as well: the notions that love is exclusive, lasting, and unconditional. These deeply held beliefs are often more wish than reality in people’s lives. They capture people’s daydreams about the love-of-their-life whom they’ve yet to meet. Love, as your body defines it, is not exclusive, not something to be reserved for your soul mate, your inner circle, your kin, or your so-called loved ones. Love’s reach turns out to be far wider than we’re typically coaxed to imagine. Even so, love’s timescale is far shorter than we typically think. Love, as you’ll see, is not lasting. It’s actually far more fleeting than most of us would care to acknowledge (p. 6).

•  No emotion is built to last, not even the ones that feel so good. True, you can learn to coax your fleeting micro-moments of love to linger with you a bit longer, and you can revive them later through conversation. But their duration is best measured in seconds or minutes, not months or years. Love is the ephemeral and precious openness you feel well up in your chest, not a rock-solid ring made of precious metal on your left hand (p. 16).  

 

Love is hard

Love is hard when you do not feel safe.

• The first precondition is a perception of safety. If you assess your current circumstances as threatening or dangerous in any way, love is not at that moment a possibility for you. Feeling unsafe then, is the first obstacle to love (p. 20).

•  Your intimates offer you history, safety, trust, and openness in addition to the frequent opportunity to connect. The more trusting and open you are with someone else— and the more trusting and open that person is with you— the more points of connection each of you may find over which to share a laugh, or a common source of intrigue, serenity, or delight (p. 32).

• Moreover, love, as you’ve seen, obeys conditions. If you feel unsafe, or fail to find the time or contexts to truly connect with others, the delicate pas de deux of positivity resonance won’t commence (p. 36).

 

Love is hard when you are separated  

• Love’s second precondition is connection, true sensory and temporal connection with another living being. You no doubt try to “stay connected” when physical distance keeps you and your loved ones apart. You use the phone, e-mail, and increasingly texts or Facebook, and it’s important to do so. Yet your body, sculpted by the forces of natural selection over millennia, was not designed for the abstractions of long-distance love, the XOXs and LOLs. Your body hungers for more. It hungers for moments of oneness. Feelings of oneness surface when two or more people “sync up” and literally come to act as one, moving to the same hidden beat (p. 20).

It is hard when you are saturated with technology  

Love grows best when you are attuned to the present moment, your bodily sensations, as well as to the actions and reactions of others. Sadly, when you are more attuned to technology, to-do lists, and mass media than to the unique and wondrous individuals in your day, you miss out (p. 27).

 

Love is in the eyes

• Nevertheless, eye contact may well be the most potent trigger for connection and oneness  (p. 21). 

• Eye contact is the key that unlocks the wisdom of your intuitions because when you meet your smiling coworker’s gaze, her smile triggers activity within your own brain circuitry that allows you to simulate— within your own brain, face, and body— the emotions you see emanating from hers (p. 21).  

 

Love is on the mind (and in the brain)

• Simply put, love changes your mind (p. 67).

  The hallmark feature of intimacy is mutual responsiveness, that reassuring sense that you and your soul mate— or you and your best friend— really “get” each other (p. 31). 

• When you and another truly connect, love reverberates between you. In the very moment that you experience positivity resonance, your brain syncs up with the other person’s brain. Within each moment of love, you and the other are on the same wavelength. As your respective brain waves mirror one another, each of you— moment by moment— changes the other’s mind (p. 41).

• Excellent communication, it thus seems, doesn’t simply involve following along very closely. It also involves forecasting. Once you were in sync and on the same page with your new friend, enjoying her and her story, you could even anticipate what she’d say next, or how she’d say it. Your brain could anticipate her brain’s next move. Brain coupling, Hasson argues, is the means by which we understand each other. He goes even further to claim that communication— a true meeting of the minds— is a single act, performed by two brains (p. 45).  

Love grows

It grows when a couple do new and exciting things together. 

Any moment of positivity resonance that ripples through the brains and bodies of you and another can be health- and life-giving, regardless of whether you share history together. Studies of successful marriages also bear this out. Couples who regularly make time to do new and exciting things together— like hiking, skiing, dancing, or attending concerts and plays— have better- quality marriages. These activities provide a steady stream of shared micro-moments of positivity resonance (p. 35).

It grows when it is recultivated   Love springs up anytime any two or more people connect over a shared positive emotion.

This isn’t all about you, though. Love, as we’ve seen, is not a solo act. The benefits that unfold from love for you, then, also unfold for all those who are party to positivity resonance. Seen from this vantage point, emotional and physical health are contagious. Indeed, studies of actual social networks show that, over time, happiness spreads through whole communities. Your friend’s coworker’s sister’s happiness actually stands to elevate your own happiness (p.61).

 

Love is needed

Did you know that love is needed for good physical health?

This is how, over time, chronic feelings of loneliness can weaken people’s immune systems and open the door to inflammation-based chronic illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and arthritis. The data go further to suggest that feeling isolated or unconnected to others does more bodily damage than actual isolation, suggesting that painful emotions drive the bodily systems that in turn steer you toward dire health outcomes. By tracking how your emotions— and the biochemical changes they trigger— alter gene expression within your immune system, the tools of molecular biology now show how a lack of love compromises your immunity and your health (p. 59).  

 

Love is needed for social health

• Some, even as their other physical needs are met— for shelter, food, clothing, and such— have far too little experience sharing positive emotions with others. Love’s absence, research shows, can compromise nearly all aspects of children’s development— their cognitive and social abilities, their health (p. 33).  

• The damages done to the developing child have been duly cataloged by developmental scientists. The list includes long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond, first, in their use of symbols and other early forms of cognitive reasoning that undergird successful academic performance, and next, in their abilities to take other people’s perspectives and empathize, skills vital to developing supportive social relationships. More generally, behavioral synchrony between infant and caregiver sets the stage for children’s development of self-regulation, which gives them tools for controlling and channeling their emotions, attention, and behaviors, tools vital to success in all domains of life (p. 34).  

• As positive emotions open your doors of perception, you become better equipped to connect with others. Your mind’s typical modus operandi, after all, is to be rather self-centered. Your thoughts tend to revolve around what you yourself need and want, and your own concerns. Self-absorption can become ever more extreme when you feel threatened in some manner. By contrast, my collaborators and I have conducted experiments that show how when you feel good, you see beyond your cocoon of self-interest to become more aware of others, more likely to focus on their needs, wants, and concerns, and to see things from their perspective (p. 67).  

Love shows

Love, this new evidence shows, is characterized by four distinct nonverbal cues. The first cue, not surprisingly, is how often you and the other person each smile at each other, in the genuine, eye-crinkling manner. A second cue is the frequency with which you each use open and friendly hand gestures to refer to each other, like your outstretched palm. (Hostile hand gestures, like pointing or finger-wagging, are by definition excluded from this category of gestures.) A third cue is how often you each lean in toward each other, literally bringing your hearts closer together. The fourth cue is how often you each nod your head, a sign that you affirm and accept each other. Taken together, these four nonverbal cues— smiles, gestures, leans, and nods— both emanate from a person’s inner experiences of love and are read by others as love. Love, displayed in this way, also matters. It has force. It forecasts not only the social support people feel in their relationships but also how they deliver direct criticism, which (as I describe in a later section) has been found to predict the long-term stability of loving relationships. These four nonverbal gestures are thus a dependable and consequential sign of love (p. 69).  

 

Of course, this is not all that I learned but these are the key points that stood out to me. What are your thoughts?