Writing this, I find myself wanting to link offhandedly to a different post about “love is (multiple) skills and/or muscles”. Here is a rough pass on that:
I think part of loving people, especially if you particularly want to be good at loving people, is cultivating skills, like:
being able to model people well, understanding what they care about, what they would do, what their coherent-extrapolated-self would do, etc
communicating to people in ways that leave them (correctly) feeling understood and appreciated
being actually good at, like, generally accomplishing things on purpose (such that you can do things that help people in the ways they want to be helped)
generally having the slack to actually help people (and to have the resources to not overtax yourself and end up fucking up and making thing worse)
noticing and avoiding self-deception, to avoid weaving a web of stories where you’re priding yourself on loving people but actually just doing self-serving things with a vague plausible veneer layered over them.
Different people mean different things (or want different things) from love, and different people prioritize love (relative to other things) differently. But, these are things I personally aspire to being better at, in part, to increase my capacity for love in the way that is meaningful to me.
Writing this, I find myself wanting to link offhandedly to a different post about “love is (multiple) skills and/or muscles”. Here is a rough pass on that:
I think part of loving people, especially if you particularly want to be good at loving people, is cultivating skills, like:
being able to model people well, understanding what they care about, what they would do, what their coherent-extrapolated-self would do, etc
communicating to people in ways that leave them (correctly) feeling understood and appreciated
being actually good at, like, generally accomplishing things on purpose (such that you can do things that help people in the ways they want to be helped)
generally having the slack to actually help people (and to have the resources to not overtax yourself and end up fucking up and making thing worse)
noticing and avoiding self-deception, to avoid weaving a web of stories where you’re priding yourself on loving people but actually just doing self-serving things with a vague plausible veneer layered over them.
Different people mean different things (or want different things) from love, and different people prioritize love (relative to other things) differently. But, these are things I personally aspire to being better at, in part, to increase my capacity for love in the way that is meaningful to me.