Love is something we experience with our emotions

This sounds very obvious – what is less understood is that many people impact their ability to love by using logic and other defenses to guard themselves from the suffering that love can bring. As a couples therapist I can suggest that when you guard yourself from being emotionally impacted from your partner, you often unintentionally make your partner less important to you… it seems that it is virtually impossible to love someone if you have successfully protected yourself from being emotionally responsive to your partner… in making your emotions concerning an your partner ‘unimportant’ you in turn make your partner ‘unimportant’. There are many different ways to interact with our environment… in different time periods and in different cultures we find that one interaction or organizational tool is used with greater frequency and value than another tool (hearing, vision, logic, being mindful, and using emotion etc are examples of ‘interaction or organizational tools’). Currently logic seems to be in favor though I am both excited and hopeful that other tools seem to be gaining popularity. The point of all this is simple – with the tendency for our culture to favor the use of logic many people are finding themselves falling out of love with their partners. Often this is do to an individual’s conscious or unconscious intention to protect themselves from the vulnerabilities which are inherent in being emotionally available… though such a method is useful in certain professional functions and though it is indeed a safeguard against certain types of suffering, the method creates a problem itself… using logic to trump emotions seems to disable some of your ability to love… an inability to love often creates a suffering which can neither be fully understood nor resolved by logic… perhaps the explanation for this is simple… you don’t hear with your eyes, you don’t see with your mouth, and you don’t experience love with your logic…so again… Love is something we experience with our emotions.