#12 - Don’t Say “I Love You”...Do THIS Instead

Why you should say “I love you” instead of “I love you” Evolution is not really interested in you being happy and fulfilled, it's only interested in you surviving. Survive long enough to make a baby, so the lineage persists. If human beings actually want to feel happy and fulfilled in their life, then we have to create a new skill. Speaker 2 Hey, this is Michael Katz. Speaker 1 And this is Annie Lala. Speaker 2 Welcome to matters of the heart. This is where you'll learn how to love at the next level. Speaker 1 In this Ninja School, we'll share our best maps and tools for creating relationships that thrive through conflict. Speaker 2 This is cutting edge emotional technology. Learn how to keep your heart open when every part of you wants to close. Speaker 1 True love is not for the faint hearted. Learn how to fight for love and win. Speaker 2 Hey, and welcome back to Matters of the Heart. What's up, Annie? Speaker 1 Yay, let's talk about love. Speaker 2 OK, today we're going to talk about the importance of and how to pay attention to the ways in which those that love you are trying to smuggle you love. So early on when we met, I when I whenever I would do something nice for you or affirm you in some way, you would say instead of oh, I love you, you would say, oh, you love me. And at first I was like, what the this narcissistic, this weirdo. And since I've grown to love that about you and and the principle that it stands for, can you talk about why you do that, Why you say that? Speaker 1 Well, you know, being a relationship coach, I'm working with couples all the time. And most of the time they're complaining about how their partner is failing to love them. And so from an outside viewpoint, all I'm seeing is like a million things their partners trying to do to make them feel loved, including showing up to the coaching session. But none of that is getting tracked at all. All they're remembering is that like that one thing they did in the morning or the thing they forgot yesterday, that is standing out a salient and a proof, an indicator that my partner does not love me. You know, if you know, people always say if you loved me, you'd dot, dot, dot. And I'm like, what? Remember, love is the full spectrum. So your partner's supposed to drive you a bit crazy, otherwise you're not doing their job. Based on that experience, I started realizing, oh, I've got to train my clients to scan through reality, scan through their partner's behavior, looking for where their partner is, showing open heartedness, connection, consideration, care, love, belief, all the things. Because we have a default mechanism in our human history to scan our environment for what's wrong, right? The animals on the plains of Africa, the, the humans that lived there when we were early tribal ancestors, they, the ones that scanned for a ruffle in the Bush or something that's wrong in the environment, they survived. So that skill of scanning for what's wrong is very important. So evolution built it in. We have it for free. Humans just scan in themselves and in the world for what's wrong. Evolution is not really interested in you being happy and fulfilled, it's only interested in you surviving. Survive long enough to make a baby, so the lineage persists. But if human beings actually want to feel happy and fulfilled in their life on their own, then we have to create a new skill. And that skill is counterpoint to scanning for what's wrong. It's scanning for what's right, and that takes energy. I think of it as affirmative action for underdeveloped skill. If you automatically scan for what's wrong, then you need to consciously, proactively, intentionally train yourself to scan for what's right in yourself, but in the world. And So what I want to train my clients in is being on a reconnaissance mission where you're hunting, looking for moments, and it's situations and behaviors where your partner is showing you love. And they happen so many times a day that you often don't even notice them. So I put them on a kind of research project where I want you to notice how many times your partner does something automatically, whether they open the door, they make a cup of coffee, they include you in a conversation. They let you know that you forgot your keys, your doctor's appointment. Like all of those are little packages of I love you that's being sent and you know, like a FedEx package. When you send a FedEx package, the reason why it's more coveted than regular mail is because you get sign off that the package got delivered. And so here you are as a lover in a relationship. And you know, most of the time we're trying to do things to make our partner happy. We do a million things a day and we're sending all these I love you packages to our partner, but we never get sign off. We never find out like, oh, it landed. In fact, we don't even know if they noticed. Speaker 2 We don't do it for the appreciation, but the appreciation is medicine to the relationship. Speaker 1 Absolutely. It also lets you know that the package got delivered because like, was it still floating around out there? Like who knows? Noticing the ways your partner's trying to love you and then verbally acknowledging, hey, I saw how you left the coffee on the pot for me so I didn't have to make it this morning. You love me. I felt the love. Hi, thanks for picking up the kids while I was doing that webinar. You knew that I needed a little help and you preemptively took care of that. I feel your love. I feel your care. I summarize that in a cheeky you love me. It's like I caught you. I caught you trying to love me because often times in couplehoods there's smuggling, secretly smuggling I love yous all through the relationship. They don't announce it, they don't brag about it, and they also don't get any acknowledgement for it. And so I want my clients to be in a reconnaissance mission, scanning for hidden, smuggled I love yous coming in from their partner in everything from making you breakfast to washing your clothes. Literally, when I wash, I do the washing in our hearts. Every time I fold my husband's underwear, he goes, I really appreciate it. I feel how much you love me. And I don't do it for that, but I love knowing. I love that he knows that when I do that it is and I love you. I could just throw them all messy in his drawer. I could not wash them. And if you actually look at why you do the things you do, there's, I love use behind them a lot of the time. And just to hear it reflected is really powerful. Once when I was living in London, I was an IT consultant in my older days, in my younger days, I should say my older life, I was walking down the street and there was this tall guy who had a survey board clipboard in his hand. And he wanted to like, I don't know, enroll me in some charity, you know, when people stop you on the street. But I was late trying to get to a class. I think I had a fencing class I was taking and I was late. I. Speaker 2 Love to see fence. Speaker 1 Oh my God, I was great because I'm left-handed and left-handed fencers always have an edge. Anyway, I'm going to my fencing class and I can't stop but I can. He's a sweet guy and I can see he's made eye contact and he wants to show me his like charity or petition. But I don't break step. I keep walking, but I look him in the eye and I go, I would love to talk to you. I'm too late. I've got to get to my class. But I'm proud of what you're doing. Keep on with your bad self, right? I said all that as I walked by so that he could feel loved and I could say, no, I can't do the thing. And he just looks back over his shoulder at me and he goes, I love you too. You know, it shows this point that I'm trying to say that I said I was smuggling and I love you. I love you more than I can't, you know, do this petition. And he felt it. And so he felt the I love you. And then he said it back, you know, I love you too. And I was just like, good, he got it. And not that you need the I love you too, but he decoded my smuggled I love you. And I think it's really important to start decoding the smuggled I love you as you get from your parents. I remember when my husband would go visit his dad in New York. And his dad, he knows a simple guy and he doesn't have all these fancy nutrition requirements that Evan does. And so his dad would like make a pie for Eben when he'd come over with sugar and Evan doesn't even sugar or his dad would offer him like a soda like Coke. And Evan like does not eat drink soda. And so Evan would get irritated and mad at his dad. And I would have to tell Evan like on the sly in the car home, like your dad is literally trying to smuggle like I love yous. Once Evan said he really felt like some kind of a sugar free drink. He mentioned to his dad And his dad got up from the table in his house and said, OK, I'm going to go get it. And like, went to walk out to the grocery store to go get the thing that Evan said. And Evan was busy bitching about the fact that his dad still tries to give him soda and didn't see the fact that his dad got up to go walk down the street and get the thing that his son wanted. As an I love you. So I'm constantly having to show my husband how his parents are smuggling. I love you's left, right and center. They're the wrong ones. They're not landing, but their parents don't have anyone coaching them on how to upgrade their game. So Evan's job is to decode the hidden I love yous, even if they weren't the ones you would prescribe. And so once I taught my husband to do that, he was able to see that an evening with his dad was filled with I love yous. Fumble, bumbled I love yous. But the effort was there nonetheless. And so then he can feel, ah, OK, I feel the love. So I think it's our job in relationship to be scanning for that. And So what I like to teach my clients is to share with their partner when they notice that they've gone out of their way for them and to interpret that as an I love you because sometimes you say thanks, thanks for picking up the kids, Thanks for picking up the almond milk, Thanks for organizing the garage. But we don't take it as an I love you. In this day and age, having someone say I love you has it's, you know, a certain quality. But I think we're in a new era where I want to start a revolution where instead of trying to look for opportunities to say, I love you, you look for opportunities to let people know that their love landed with you. If I say to you, Michael, I love you. I love that you're doing this podcast with me. It has a certain sweetness. And if I say, Michael, I really feel how much you love and admire me. For you to want to do this podcast, you must really love me. And I feel it that it has a different quality. And I think hearing your partner say, wow, I saw how you went out of your way, you really love me, has a deeply nourishing experience because we're sending love all the time and it never gets sign off. So you love me as a new revolution. What I want people to do is when you're in your relationships with your friends, your family, your children, your partner, to notice when they do something for you and to say in a non arrogant way, hey, I saw how you did XY and ZI felt your love. You love me. You love me, don't you? And then they always go, yeah, I do. And they're so happy to know that it was interpreted that way. Speaker 2 I don't know quite how to articulate this, but there seems to be another aspect of the sharing of it. Like it's one thing to just be scanning for it, but changing where we pay attention is quite hard and takes time. There seems to be something important about the expression in the changing of our where we're paying attention. It's like, it's one thing to read about how to swing a tennis racket, another to swing it a bunch of times. We're going to remember in a different way. There's a muscle memory. Speaker 1 That happens totally. I've developed a prayer for my clients and myself. The Power of Prayer It's the only prayer I've ever created. And it's when you're holding someone you love and you're lying silently with them and you breathe in. You love me and you imagine their love coming in through your pores and getting to the center of your heart and you breathe out I love you. And you imagine love going from your heart and infiltrating and getting to your, you know, your lover's body and then going to the center of their heart. So when my, when I encourage somebody to do this prayer, you love me, breathe in someone's love. I love you. Take put your love into their heart. There's usually one that's harder than the other, so it's really easy for me to go I love you and then imagine all my love and respect and admiration going into your heart. And when I breathe in you love me. The breath is a little more staccato and a little more stilted. And so I've had to practice that you love me because it's my underdeveloped skill. That's probably why I've come up with this new practice is because I've had to scan through my husband and my daughter and my friends behaviors to see all the proof that they love me. Because the default cynical part of my mind goes to, oh, they don't think I'm cool, they don't love me, they won't go out of their way for me. That's my default. And so to compensate for that default, I've built this practice of really feeling their love come in and noticing it and then sharing that with them. Also saying you love me takes a certain confidence. You can't feel like a loser, low self esteem, not worthy and then say you love me. So just the practice of noticing and then saying hey I see how you did that you love me. I really feel it. That actually is an esteem building exercise. OK, just saying the words you love me and you don't. Speaker 2 Say more about that. Why is that? Speaker 1 But my daughter, she's 10 years old. She'll do things like if I say I'm really thirsty, she'll go get me some water. And this is something that I've done for her for years, but she'll go out of her way to do something or if she's doing something that hurts my leg, she'll pull her weight off and then she'll say, I'll say to her, actually, thanks for doing that. Love you love me. I really feel it. And I've started practicing that because I never heard that from my parents ever. I mean, think about who who's ever heard from their parents. Wow, thanks for XYZ. You love me. I feel it. How would that feel? How would that feel to hear your parents say that to you? Because how much stuff do we do for our parents? We travel to see them, we do things, we go out of our way. But they don't often say you love me. They say I love you, son, you know I love you and I take care of yourself. But there's a really beautiful feeling you get from knowing that your parents got the memo. Speaker 2 Yeah, and that you're perceived to have made a contribution to. Speaker 1 This the gift of your love, is getting acknowledged. And I've started saying it to my daughter and she started saying it to me. She'll, I'll get her a glass of water. She'll be all cozy in bed reading her book. And she doesn't want to get up. She'll be, oh, can you give me a glass of water? And she knows I don't have to, but I'll bring it and she'll go. You love me. So it feels so great because that is why I got the water. Speaker 2 Right, got it. So it's it's an esteem builder for the receiver. I thought you were saying to say you love me is building a steam. Speaker 1 That too, Absolutely. Well, just think of you being in your most low esteem, depressed, unworthy, undeserving moment. A moment of deep shame. OK, imagine that version of you noticing someone do something affectionate and then finding a way. If you've already built the habit then you would not say oh I love you, thanks for the food. You'd go. You love me, thanks for making me some food in order to say you love me. It does something in the person's mind who's saying it. You're forcing yourself to feel the love and it's hard to stay unworthy, undeserving and depressed when you're seeing all the love. In fact, what keeps you depressed is not seeing the love is squinting at it. So this forces you to unswint and actually take account and take index of all the I love yous coming in. And it's not just from your romantic partner and your family and friends. Every time I turn on the light switch or open a faucet, I see it as an I love you from the Carpenter, from the builder, from the person who made this really beautiful faucet so I can be delighted. Every piece of art that I look at I see as an I love you from the artist. Speaker 2 What does that do for you when you expand it out to people you've never met like that? Speaker 1 I feel like I'm vindicating the artist because I'm an artist in my own way. You know, I write and I teach and I coach and, and if my client feels my love and says, man, Annie, you love me. I really felt it today. In today's session, I feel like I completed on my task well. Why else would an artist do a piece of art? They can have the vision in their head. They have the music in their head. Why do they go and make an artifact? It's because they want to share it. They want to create an opportunity for someone else to have an insight or an epiphany. It's a lot of work to go and take an idea and make it real. When James Cameron makes a movie, I take it as an I love you. When someone does a dance, you know, displayed for me, I take it as an I love you. Is it? I don't know. But does the world get better? Do I feel more proud when I see it as an I love you? Yes, if I go up to any artist and any musician and I say I felt the love in you writing that song and and you doing that art, do you think the artist goes well? That wasn't my message. I feel like something in the artist feels vindicated. Like yes, you got it. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's one thing to have like what what's typical is we have art if we're, if we're fortunate, we have art around us and beauty around us, and we start to take it for granted. It's it seems like what you're doing is a conscious practice of allowing it to impact you and acknowledging its impact. Speaker 1 On you totally. And there's a similar cousin practice called gratitude practice, right. We all know you're at your gratitude list. You look around your life, you're glad for your health, your gratitude for your partner, your gratitude for you, you know, the things that are working in your life. And it's similar to a gratitude list, but it's a little more compelling because you could be, you could say thank you for making me the coffee to your partner. And that has a certain impact. But I notice if I say you made me a cup of coffee because you were thinking about me, you know, I would really appreciate it. And I feel your love. You love me. That has a different impact than saying thank you. And I think people are just immune to thank yous. Now. It's an upgraded thank you and it's a thank you for being explicit with your love in the form of an action. And I just my, my esteem and my quality of relationships has changed ever since I started practicing saying you love me. And I just had a client, a friend I haven't heard from in about 7 years calls me up out of the blue. And she had a question about her relationship. So I left her voicemail and she left me a voicemail letting her letting me know how much that impacted her and changed her course of action. And she closed it off with you love me. And I and I haven't talked to her in seven years. So I taught her that long time ago, but it stayed and that's why I left the voicemail is because I care, I love her, and if she had said thank you for the voicemail it just wouldn't have resonated as much as you love me. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's beautiful. How to notice the things that delight you Are there any other things you want to share about how to notice these things? Because it's, as you said, it's deeply ingrained in us to scan for what's wrong. Speaker 1 Right. And to be just immune to the same old same old, take it for granted. I think it's about tracking what softens, relaxes, or delights you whenever you're interacting with reality. There's things that you're solving problems, things going wrong, and there's things that are working. And so becoming more mindful of things that delight you. Like I love the smell and the feeling of opening a new book. I love opening Amazon packages. I don't care whose packages, They're like presents and surprises. And so, you know, not many people stop to go, OK, I'm going to get the exacto knife and I'm going to slip the side and I'm going to open this like it's Christmas morning. And to notice the little Shard of delight that comes in when you see what it is, that takes concentration. But when you concentrate on the things that delight you, and the more microscopic, the better. So like, if you notice that you like the smell of your shampoo that you've used three days in a row and you picked it because it's mango smell and you like that smell, but you actually notice, oh, I like the smell of my shampoo. Oh, I like the feeling in my mouth after I just brushed my teeth. I mean, who doesn't like that feeling? It's like smooth and clean. And oh, I like the feeling of the bath mat under my feet when I exit the shower. I love the sound of my daughter's laugh. There's smells, there's sensory experiences. Literally when I walk out, when I walk into the house and from the summer heat into the AC, my whole body goes yay. So noticing that yay and just bringing just a little drop of attention to it. OK. And then so oh, yay, the ACS on. Oh, my husband made sure the ACS on. He loves me. I don't even have to go and tell him. But I might say during our walk in the evening, like I had a moment where I was just looking around our house, how everything works, the lights works, all the art is hung, everything's working because, you know, he does. He makes sure everything's working. And I just, I'm so grateful and I feel how loved I am. I feel how much you love me for making sure everything works for, you know, helping me create a home that we love. I, I, I think gratitude should be included and kept. We're not getting rid of gratitude, but adding that you love me to the gratitude, I think is more reinforcing for the intimacy of the relationship. I was once driving in London when I lived there in a cab and it was night time and there's all these sparkles of the city and the shimmer of the water. And I was just like, London, you love me. I felt like the whole scene was made just to delight me in that moment. And it can feel narcissistic. So I want to just speak to that, that people might feel like there's an arrogance or a narcissism and saying you love me, but it's all in how you say it, right? So you might start off saying, wow, I saw how you went and picked up the thing I needed before I even asked for it. And you going out of your way really shows me how much you care. And I felt your consideration and I felt your love for me. So thanks. That is a much more beautiful. Thank you then. Thanks man. It's more nourishing and it UPS the game of both people because the truth is every interaction is either an attempt to love or an attempt to get love right. And so if you're tracking the love dynamic, I feel like you're speaking to the fundamental inquiry that every human has. When you meet any new person you're scanning for, am I safe, Am I loved? Is there something for me here? Is there something I can give? And what else? Anytime someone does anything for you, it's actually and I love you in disguise. So we're just decoding the the disguise. Speaker 2 I want to just go back to the practice for just a moment because I think that's genius. So your practice of finding what delights you in all areas of life, it seems like scanning for it in the intimate relationship is like, if we use a rock climbing example, it's like a 513. Finding what delights you in all areas of life It's a very complex route, but scanning for it in all areas of life, that's like a, it's like scrambling. It's a much easier lift and to use a cliche phrase at this point, how you do anything is how you do everything. If we can learn to find delight and gratitude in the the weather and the way our clothes fit and the OR the. Speaker 1 Fact that you're. Speaker 2 Feeling of the. Speaker 1 AC Yeah, exactly. And you're just kicking a ball around and it goes off the lawn and someone punts it back to you. What is that? It's not a it's not an I don't care. It's, it's an I love you in a neighborly terms, right? And you don't, you might not want to say that to the neighbor. You love me. There's a political sophistication around how you use it. But what's more important is that you feel that that's an I love you. OK, so you're tracking that, this tracking for what delights you and what's beautiful in the world or what's poetic or what draws your attention. Like if I see a strange new little bug crawling on the sidewalk, I'm fascinated. I'm intrigued. I don't even know if I'm delighted. I might be half delighted, half horrified, but it's fascinating. So anything that fascinates, beguiles, draws your attention, is bringing novelty or interest into your life. You can be grateful for. You can be delighted for. It's to me, all of reality is like a bunch of I love yous and they're all in code and it's my job to decode them all. And so when I say I'm walking by a tree every day on my walk, when it finally blooms into fuchsia and I get to see the fuchsia, I'm like, that's an I love you from the tree, from nature. It's literally for the bees, right, to come and get the pollen. So it's I love yous too many animals on many levels. And I know I'm fudging the definition of love, but I actually feel like the only true feeling there is, is love, because inside of it is all the other feelings and even fear. People say there's love and there's fear. Well, what's fear? Fear is when love stops short of Infinity. And so if you have a tree blocking the sunlight, you get a shadow behind the tree. Love is the sunlight and fear is the shadow. So fear is wherever love is blocked. So that fear is not even a thing because a shadow is not even a thing. So really the substrate of our reality is love. And I know I'm biased because I'm a love coach, but it's just another way or model to look through, you know, a new lens. Speaker 2 And and it becomes quite spiritual. You maybe you'll know this quote Rilke. Rilke has this poem, or maybe it's just a line out of the poem that goes something like the highest spiritual calling is to find joy, delight out of the most mundane. And that's why children are geniuses, because they're fascinated by the little beetle or the leaf that they've never seen. Speaker 1 And when you start doing mindfulness practice or meditation, what is every Zen master trying to get you to do? Become present to all the things that are beautiful, poetic, delightful, interesting, compelling in your everyday experience that you take for granted. And you know, I did Vipassana retreat 10 days meditating 11 hours a day. No, no verbal contact. That was some crazy shit. And so somewhere in the middle of it, you know, they serve you food is very basic food. But I remember sitting down to a bowl of brown rice and I thought about this one grain of rice and all the people it took to get that to me. And the plant that produced this little baby, it's grain of brown rice. And I was, I literally wept in gratitude for nature, reality, the universe, and every human that brought it to me. I mean, of course after four days of meditation you can get that present, but that's actually available at all times and we're not attuned. If you're looking for 5 bucks and you don't have it in your wallet, you can go and try and earn it or you can kind of ransack all the closet jackets and the pants in your closet to see in the pockets if there's any loose change. You can look in the sofa. You can go and probably collect a whole bunch of money in your house that was already there but you weren't tracking. So we are richer and we have more love and magic in our life than what we're tracking. And so this practice is about going and looking in the closet in the already existing places in your life where there is beauty and delight and possibility and just becoming attuned to it. So I think everybody's trying to look for more things to feel proud of in their life. If you just take stock of what's actually already happening, there's we live like kings. We literally live like, better than any pharaoh that ever lived. And we're, you know, bitching because there's a red light. You know, when you're in a plane and you're like, my Wi-Fi is not working. Like, literally, I can't get a message to a satellite in space and back to my friend while I'm sitting in a limo in the sky. Like, yeah, it's an old, it's an old idea. But becoming attentive to the love that's current in your life is how you build yourself esteem. Speaker 2 I love where this episode went. So yeah, just to wrap it up, say to your partner, to the people in your life, you love me. When you notice how they are smuggling you love. And in doing so, you will train your mind to be more aware of the ways that they already are. And another way that you can practice this is just look for moments throughout your day that delight you. Stay tuned for next week as we talk about creating emotional safety in your relationship and in groups. Speaker 1 You love me, you love me, we love you.