Learning About Love from Pets and Children
I’ve been pondering lately why I find it so easy to immediately feel love for every animal and child I meet. With human adults, on the other hand, love is something that grows over time, and only happens with a certain percentage.
Logically, it seems like human adults would be easier to love. After all, children and animals are not capable of being fully socialized, because they don’t have the capacity to follow all the social rules. They do annoying things like bite, pull hair, make unreasonable demands, make messes without cleaning them up, and they need to be taken care of. Human adults, on the other hand, have the intellectual and physical capacity to be equals. So what is it that kids and animals have that human adults don’t have that makes up for their limited capacities in other areas?
The first thing that comes to mind is their genuine presence. A child’s laugh, or a dog’s tail wagging, or a cat’s purr all feel like money in the bank to me. I receive palpable pleasure when seeing their joy, and it makes me want to create more of it by playing with them or petting them. Adult humans don’t seem to express the same kind of simple joy so easily…it makes me think of the phrase ‘unadulterated joy.’ ‘Adulterated’ means impure. Perhaps something about becoming an adult takes away the purity of our expression. Our social masks are there to lubricate our interactions, yet they also apparently serve to dampen them, to take away whatever it is that helps me feel immediately connected to an animal or to a child.
I also wonder about the role of responsibility or blame. If a dog gets hair on the couch, I blame myself for not training the dog or protecting the couch. I might find it a little annoying, yet my love for the dog is essentially unchanged. If I have a roommate that shaves, however, and I find little hairs all over the sink and bathtub every day, I feel a surge of anger and blame the roommate. If I ask them to stop, and they don’t, I get angrier and angrier. I might not want to live with them anymore. I suspect that my internal reaction is greater with the adult human than with the dog because notions of fairness and justice come into play; it’s not fair that I should have to clean up my roommate’s hair, so it makes me angry compared to cleaning up my dog’s hair, where ideas of fairness don’t come into play.
I am curious whether it would be possible to distill the essence of the easy love connection I feel with animals and children and apply it to adult humans. Can I cultivate genuine presence, dropping my social mask enough to share myself without dissembling, while still holding on to courtesy and consideration? Can I accept people for who they are, annoying flaws and all, and deal with those flaws as lovingly and patiently as I deal with the flaws of animals and kids? Can I let go of my ideas of fairness, so that I don’t feel resentment build if I am washing someone else’s dishes, or listening more than speaking, or otherwise being more often the ‘adult’ in the relationship? Which is more important, fairness or love?
It seems to me that the natural love that wells up in me around human kids and other animals can teach me a lot about the essence of love. They beam love and affection out, which encourages my body to generate some love feelings. It occurs to me that abused animals and mistreated children aren’t as easy to love, because they aren’t generating love easily inside themselves (my experience with them is that I feel compassion and empathy, a reaching out, which is a different feeling than the warmth and joy happy animals and children inspire in me).
One thing I’ve noticed in myself is that, when I feel loved, I act way more lovable, and when I don’t feel loved, I can act unlovable in ways that range from neutral and withdrawn to toxic and unpleasant. It doesn’t matter whether I am actually loved or not; what matters is my perception of whether I’m loved. This suggests to me that part of the block between adult humans loving each other immediately upon meeting each other is that we don’t expect to be loved by strangers, so we act more unlovably than a dog who has been loved by every stranger it’s ever met.
This makes me think of Burning Man, where there is a large percentage of people who expect to be loved by every stranger they meet. Sure enough, these people are friendly, and smiling, and their joy is infectious. I have felt the same kind of natural spontaneous love for adult humans that I’ve felt for animals and kids in certain situations — at ecstatic dance, in the Puna district of Hawai’i, or at certain festivals once they ‘gel’. Perhaps these sub-cultures have created an expectation of loving and lovability, which creates different norms for interactions.
There seems to be a kind of snowball effect, or upward spiral/downward spiral, where a cycle is created that reinforces itself. If I feel loved, I act lovable, and I inspire love in other people, which makes me feel loved; if I feel unloved, I act unlovable, which makes people avoid me or react to me negatively, so I feel unloved. There are ways to switch from one cycle to the other. If I’m feeling unloved, I can break the cycle by spending time alone until I feel loved again (spending time alone is what always works for me; for other people, something else might work better). If I’m around someone acting unlovable, I can attempt to break their cycle by acting loving towards them, in the hope that that will make them feel loved, and therefore help them act more loveable. Just because I’m being loving towards someone doesn’t mean they will feel loved, though, so if they stay in their unloved/unlovable behavior cycle it’s not my fault and I don’t need to take it personally.
I’m sure there is more to learn from animals and children on how to generate more love in myself and in others; these were just the first thoughts that occurred to me. I’d be grateful to hear what other people think or have experienced as well.
