Major Feelings of Love That Make Up the Love Code

1. We all know the first major feeling of love: the in-love feeling. But few of us understand how it works. That is because being in love has two different stages: It starts with crazy love and then moves into reward love.

Crazy love is where you think about someone obsessively night and day. You might think about your sweetheart so much that it seems like he or she is “the one.” That’s great. But scientists recently discovered that crazy love always passes. That’s why you don’t think obsessively about your lover day and night forever unless you have a dysfunctional love style.

Instead, when the relationship matures, what holds you together is reward love. That is where you feel a sense of reward just to be with your partner. And that is the second stage of an in-love relationship. When a person in a serious relationship doesn’t feel reward love, that individual ends up where Ashley was at: feeling that she was not in love with Sam anymore.

2. We all know the second feeling of love: the sexual feeling. But few of us understand how to explain what we’re really feeling. The Love Code clarifies the two major aspects of sexual feelings: a) physical arousal and b) emotional arousal.

Vigorous exercise raises men’s and women’s physical appetite for sex. So does cuddling, too. Exploring the world and discovering new things increases men’s and women’s emotional appetite for sex. Physical and emotional arousal, combined with partner personality and compatibility, creates all the different ways people experience sexual intercourse.

When Ashley no longer felt rewarded to be around Sam, she lost her ability to get emotionally aroused about having sex with him. So the question for her wasn’t between love or lust, but rather, it was loss of interest. Or put another way, their relationship had changed.
3. We have an expression for that captures the third major feeling of love: being friends and lovers, too. When partners feel like friends , they don’t hold grudges or keep score. They don’t attack each other’s character.

That’s because friendship changes the tone of a romantic relationship. Partners feel like equals, and that changes how they handle relationship conflict. This eliminates the competition and the winner-take-all arguments that are so common in dysfunctional relationships. It also sets the stage for your relationship to evolve as the two of you change with the changing times. With Ashley and Sam, they were getting pretty close to losing their friendship connection.

4. Most people have an unconscious desire to find fulfillment through the fourth feeling of love:
feeling like family . But so often they are too confused to make it work OK for them. When they get together with their partners, it doesn’t provide them with a feeling of security. Rather, being close often generates an intense feeling of anxiety.

That is unfortunate because a positive family feeling is what creates the ties that bind people together. It gives people emotional support when their hopes and dreams run up against a roadblock. That’s when partners come together to soothe each other’s anxieties. But when there is a lack of emotional support, relationships fall apart. When Ashley felt that Jack no longer gave her any emotional support, she set up an appointment for them to see me, the couples therapist.

5. Most people understand the fifth feeling of love: the feeling of wanting to help your partner.
Unfortunately, too many individuals help their partners in order to attempt to get control over their relationships. When their partners sense this, they do less and expect more. As a result, the helper will slave away until he or she ends up resenting his or her partner. Despite this, the individual will keep slaving away because he or she has a codependent personality.
On the other hand, partners with functional love styles try to help each other to achieve their life goals. They don’t feel like martyrs because they have a mutual helping relationship. That is why they can accomplish twice as much as couples who don’t have one.
In our example, above, Ashley still cared about Sam’s future and wanted to help him, but her in-love feeling of reward had died, and she was thinking about leaving the relationship.
Do you feel like Ashley and Sam and can’t explain what you’re really feeling about your partner? Well, don’t worry. You can navigate through any relationship roadblock by becoming aware of how each of your five feelings of love respond to your partner. You can do that by noticing when and if you:
Feel rewarded when you spend time with your partner (the in-love feeling)
Find that you get physically and emotionally aroused during sex (the sexual feelings)
Feel like you want to be good friends with your partner (feeling like friends)
Feel like your partner is a member of your family (feeling like family)
Feel that you want to help your partner (feeling like helping)
When you see these types of responses in yourself and in others, you will understand your options in every relationship. Then you will feel more secure about the choices you make, and that will put you on the path that leads to a low-stress relationship.