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How to know you’re loved in a pandemic
People think that they know the answer, “Oh, I know it when I see it; I know it when I feel it; I know it when I hear it.” But how do you know that your partner is experiencing being loved?
Covid has tested our relationships, and while reports of divorce are up, so are reports from people saying they’ve grown closer than ever before, even among couples who’ve been together for decades.
What accounts for the relationships that last through severe stresses like Covid, versus those that fall apart in the face of such a challenge?
Much of it boils down to a simple question that couples almost never think to ask each other: “How do you know that I truly love you?”
Most people think they know the answer to that question — and most are wrong.
Therefore, “How do we each get the experience of being loved?” is perhaps the core, the kernel of the question.
The problem is twofold.
First, we can never really know what another person is thinking or feeling: we can only observe their behavior and draw inferences and conclusions from that.
The only opportunity we have to vicariously experience what it’s like inside another person’s mind is well-written fiction, which is one of the reasons novels have such an appeal: they give the reader a vicarious sense of being inside the mind of another person. But beyond that, we don’t have that available to us, because we don’t know how to read minds. It’s not a human competency or capability.
The second is that we judge others by our own standards. If I’m a person who feels loved when somebody hugs me me, I’m most likely going to try to show love to another person by hugging them. But what if they experience the feeling of being loved when somebody brings them an unexpected gift, or are served a special meal, and hugs are relatively meaningless to them?
This isn’t an abstraction: it’s a very real problem of communication, in relationships ranging from those with our spouses to those with our friends or children.
