Good Feelings: The Family as Our First School of Love

Since there are not, and in my mind, it is hard to fathom that there ever will be, a multitude of schools that exist primarily for the purpose of cultivating the skills necessary for loving and fostering healthy relationships, one must be resigned to the fact that the family, by default functions as the primary school of love. This being the case, there are as many schools as there are families, most with some overlap in terms of the similarities and differences and very few that can be counted as being the same.  It is within the confines of the family that love is defined. The family is where the meaning of love is given a structure and a shape.

This meaning-making is carried out in both verbal and non-verbal ways. The memory of childhood is imperfect and prone to alteration as time passes, but certain moments are indelible and leave lifetime impressions on the mind and the heart, and oftentimes these moments deal with the particular topic of love. What it is and what it isn’t. Looking back, I surely thought love was the feeling I got when my mother took care of me when I was sick, or on days when I wasn’t sick, the feeling I got when my father let me play hooky and stay home from school. Those moments are easy to recollect because of the positive association I have with them. Naturally my world was defined by emotion, and all my value judgments were subject to the approval of my feelings. It takes a long time to realize that love is more like the nights your mother worked overtime at the hospital, the club, the restaurant, the office, wherever, to make sure you had school clothes that fit, and possibly a new pair of shoes to go with them.

Most families are too busy trying to survive and advance, and ironically, trying to love, both individually and collectively, to pay much attention to the actual business of modeling what love is and what it isn’t. When one is accosted on all sides by the trivial and serious, the personal and the political, it is difficult to mind what is happening within the four walls of one’s home, and yet this is the task that is always important, until it becomes urgent. 

This difficulty leads to confusion about love and acceptance of some faulty assumptions. The most common of these is the assumption that love is only ever about feeling good. This assumption is understandable on the part of a child who is more than anything else concerned about holding onto whatever good feeling they can find. For some children, the unbearable conditions they are forced to endure, in which they still manage to conjure up some amount of pleasure testifies to that fact. 

But at some point, you have to realize that love is not always about feeling good and may in fact have very little to do with happiness, at least not the way we usually think of that word. Love produces a happiness that comes from giving rather than receiving. A fulfillment that comes from nurturing someone or something else rather than satisfying one’s own desires. This kind of love is difficult to understand and difficult to practice, and one comes into it gradually. 

It is the responsibility of the family to help its members grow into this understanding. To gently disabuse its members of the faulty belief that love is synonymous with feeling good. What you find is that unhealthy families are ones where the adults themselves are just as preoccupied with feeling good as everyone else. This wish makes them incapable of guiding other family members towards a healthy definition of love. No one is able to receive the kind of nurturance that leads to growth and maturity and instead everyone within the family becomes locked in a battle to preserve their own pleasure. This is in essence a form of neglect that ensures long-term dysfunction due to the fact that everyone is stuck at the level of a child when it comes to understanding love, viewing it only through the prism of reward and punishment.