I’m giving a talk this Sunday at church, and the topic is feeling loved by God – specifically, how we can know God loves us.
As part of the talk, I thought I’d contrast that with how folks feel loved by their spouse/significant others/families. So I’m asking the question in the title: What makes you feel loved?
I don’t want to debate the existence of God, or if one religion is better than another … just looking for earthly ways you feel loved by those close to you.
Having the people who matter the most to me show me love through their words and deeds.
For me, mainly, praise.
The kindness of those around me.
I recommend this researcher and his site
FYI, his information is based on real research, not “this is what I believe so it must be true”
Not to put down that guy’s ideas, but at first look they seem to be an elaboration of this guy’s ideas from 1992
Which ideas IMO are a decent taxonomy at the unscientific level, but which research (back then) pretty well failed to find to be any more useful than other arbitrary taxonomies.
As to the OP:
I’m not going to debate the idea of love between a human and a god. But I am going to suggest that it is a very different thing from the idea of love between two humans.
As such, information about how humans love one another is IMO mostly a red herring in a discussion about human/god love.
The way a person reacts when they first see me. Like if their face lights up
and they run over and give me a hug and ask how I’m doing, that makes me feel loved.
No, you’re right. I’m not trying to make this a comparison between the two (which is pointless, I think). I’m hoping to demonstrate how they’re different – what we view as human demonstrations of love can’t be applied to God.
My wife rubbing my leg with her foot while we’re lying next to each other. Sometimes she even does it while she’s sleeping. It’s one thing I miss while we’re sleeping separately (I probably have Periodic Limb Movement disorder, and whacked her pretty hard while sleeping).
You have it there.
I think I’m quoting Heinlein when characters said that love is the condition in which the happiness of the other person is essential to your own.
When someone sees what a fucked up mean-spirited stupid stubborn person I am and still thinks I’m wonderful.
But that’s not different than God.
That describes my dog. The only being in my home that does that.
My kids used to do that when they were young when I got home from work, too.
Random acts of kindness from friends and acquaintances. One example: I was talking to my apartment manager about the noisy mockingbird out my window one day, complaining how it was waking me up at 4:30 every morning. A couple of days later she gave me one of those fake swivel-head owls. “Here, maybe this will scare it off!” (It didn’t, but what a nice gesture!)
His work predates that by a good 15 years at least. And like I said. It’s based on actual research and not “what I think, with bible verses”.
The “love languages” guy missed an important truth and a couple of important types of love.
The important truth is that you shouldn’t just express love in just one way. You should be using all of them - not every day, but often.
The two forms of love are tolerational love and receptive love.
Showing tolerance is part of how you show love, and it’s tricky. Because there’s a difference between tolerating your SO’s making the same joke that you’ve heard a dozen times and tolerating emotional and physical abuse. When I see people talk about the “paradox of tolerance” I think about this - because love doesn’t require to allow others to hurt you (and, if we want a good society, we shouldn’t tolerate people who are willing to engage in destructive behavior)
Receptive love is embracing and internalizing the loving actions of others. This was a revelation to me. I just never thought about how I reacted to love was even important.
It’s easier to point out where this goes wrong. It’s common for people, especially women, to discount or reject compliments. A lot of people are taught that you should show humility instead, and a lot of depressed people won’t even believe it.
It’s even more of a problem when depressed people have a hard time beliving that they can be loved at all.
But I know that I have been in relationships where my love was rejected because “you can’t love me” or “you will end up leaving me” and it undermined my feelings for the other person.
That’s the advantage of research. You find things beyond the obvious