Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.— DIANE ACKERMAN

Love and belonging are essential to the human experience. As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this: If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. Our sense of worthiness—that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging—lives inside of our story.

The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute. Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. So many of us have knowingly created/unknowingly allowed/been handed down a long list of worthiness prerequisites:

I’ll be worthy when I lose twenty pounds.I’ll be worthy if I can get pregnant.I’ll be worthy if I get/stay sober.I’ll be worthy if everyone thinks I’m a good parent.I’ll be worthy when I can make a living selling my art.I’ll be worthy if I can hold my marriage together.I’ll be worthy when I make partner.I’ll be worthy when my parents finally approve.I’ll be worthy if he calls back and asks me out.I’ll be worthy when I can do it all and look like I’m not even trying.

Here’s what is truly at the heart of Wholeheartedness: Worthy now. Not if. Not when. We are worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.

In addition to letting go of the ifs and whens, another critical piece of owning our story and claiming our worthiness is cultivating a better understanding of love and belonging. Oddly enough, we desperately need both but rarely talk about what they really are and how they work. Let’s take a look.

Defining Love and Belonging

For years I avoided using the word love in my research because I didn’t know how to define it, and I wasn’t sure that “C’mon, you know, love” as a definition would fly. I also couldn’t rely on quotes or song lyrics, however much they might inspire me and speak truth to me. It’s not my training as a researcher.

As much as we need and want love, we don’t spend much time talking about what it means. Think about it. You might say “I love you” every day, but when’s the last time you had a serious conversation with someone about the meaning of love? In this way, love is the mirror image of shame. We desperately don’t want to experience shame, and we’re not willing to talk about it. Yet the only way to resolve shame is to talk about it. Maybe we’re afraid of topics like love and shame. Most of us like safety, certainty, and clarity. Shame and love are grounded in vulnerability and tenderness.

Belonging is another topic that is essential to the human experience but rarely discussed.

Most of us use the terms fitting in and belonging interchangeably, and like many of you, I’m really good at fitting in. We know exactly how to hustle for approval and acceptance. We know what to wear, what to talk about, how to make people happy, what not to mention—we know how to chameleon our way through the day.

One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, and, in fact, fitting in gets in the way of belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.

Before I share my definitions with you, I want to point out three issues that I’m willing to call truths.

Love and belonging will always be uncertain. Even though connection and relationship are the most critical components of life, we simply cannot accurately measure them. Relational concepts don’t translate into bubbled answer sheets. Relationship and connection happen in an indefinable space between people, a space that will never be fully known or understood by us. Everyone who risks explaining love and belonging is hopefully doing the best they can to answer an unanswerable question. Myself included.

Love belongs with belonging. One of the most surprising things that unfolded in my research is the pairing of certain terms. I can’t separate the concepts of love and belonging because when people spoke of one, they always talked about the other. The same holds true for the concepts of joy and gratitude, which I’ll talk about it in a later chapter. When emotions or experiences are so tightly woven together in people’s stories that they don’t speak of one without the other, it’s not an accidental entanglement; it’s an intentional knot. Love belongs with belonging.

Of this, I am actually certain. After collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick. There are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

It took me three years to whittle these definitions and concepts from a decade of interviews. Let’s take a look.

Love:We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare. Belonging:Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

One reason that it takes me so long to develop these concepts is that I often don’t want them to be true. It would be different if I studied the effect of bird poop on potting soil, but this stuff is personal and often painful. Sometimes, as I turned to the data to craft definitions like the ones above, I would cry. I didn’t want my level of self-love to limit how much I can love my children or my husband. Why? Because loving them and accepting their imperfections is much easier than turning that light of loving-kindness on myself.

If you look at the definition of love and think about what it means in terms of self-love, it’s very specific. Practicing self-love means learning how to trust ourselves, to treat ourselves with respect, and to be kind and affectionate toward ourselves. This is a tall order given how hard most of us are on ourselves. I know I can talk to myself in ways that I would never consider talking to another person. How many of us are quick to think, God, I’m so stupid and Man, I’m such an idiot? Just like calling someone we love stupid or an idiot would be incongruent with practicing love, talking like that to ourselves takes a serious toll on our self-love.

It’s worth noting that I use the words innate and primal in the definition of belonging. I’m convinced that belonging is in our DNA, most likely connected to our most primitive survival instinct. Given how difficult it is to cultivate self-acceptance in our perfectionist society and how our need for belonging is hardwired, it’s no wonder that we spend our lives trying to fit in and gain approval.

It’s so much easier to say, “I’ll be whoever or whatever you need me to be, as long as I feel like I’m part of this.” From gangs to gossiping, we’ll do what it takes to fit in if we believe it will meet our need for belonging. But it doesn’t. We can only belong when we offer our most authentic selves and when we’re embraced for who we are.

Practicing Love and Belonging

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.— BELL HOOKS1

While I have personally and professionally agonized over the definitions of love and belonging, I have to admit that they have fundamentally changed the way I live and parent. When I’m tired or stressed, I can be mean and blaming—especially toward my husband, Steve. If I truly love Steve (and, oh man, I do), then how I behave every day is as important, if not more important, than saying “I love you” every day. When we don’t practice love with the people we claim to love, it takes a lot out of us. Incongruent living is exhausting.

It’s also pushed me to think about the important differences between professing love and practicing love. During a recent radio interview about the rash of celebrity infidelities, the host asked me, “Can you love someone and cheat on them or treat them poorly?”

I thought about it for a long time, then gave the best answer I could based on my work: “I don’t know if you can love someone and betray them or be cruel to them, but I do know that when you betray someone or behave in an unkind way toward them, you are not practicing love. And, for me, I don’t just want someone who says they love me; I want someone who practices that love for me every day.”

In addition to helping me understand what love looks like between people, these definitions also forced me to acknowledge that cultivating self-love and self-acceptance is not optional. They aren’t endeavors that I can look into if and when I have some spare time. They are priorities.

Can We Love Others More Than We Love Ourselves?

The idea of self-love and self-acceptance was, and still is, revolutionary thinking for me. So in early 2009, I asked my blog readers what they thought about the importance of self-love and the idea that we can’t love others more than we love ourselves. Well, there was quite the emotional debate in the comments section.

Several folks passionately disagreed with the notion of self-love being a requirement for loving others. Others argued that we can actually learn how to love ourselves more by loving others. Some folks just left comments like, “Thanks for ruining my day—I don’t want to think about this.”

There were two comments that addressed the complexity of these ideas in very straightforward terms. I’d like to share these with you: Justin Valentin, a mental health professional, writer, and photographer, wrote:

Through my children I have learned to really love unconditionally, to be compassionate at times when I am feeling horrible, and to be so much more giving. When I look at my one daughter who looks so much like me, I can see myself as a little girl. This reminds me to be kinder to the little girl that lives inside me and to love and accept her as my own. It is the love for my girls that makes me want to be a better person and to work on loving and accepting myself. However, with that being said, it is still so much easier to love my daughters….Perhaps thinking about it this way makes more sense: Many of my patients are mothers who struggle with drug addiction. They love their children more than themselves. They destroy their lives, hate themselves, and often damage their bodies beyond repair. They say they hate themselves, but they love their children. They believe their children are lovable, but they believe they are unlovable. On the surface, one might say, yes, some of them love their children more than themselves. However, does loving your children mean that you are not intentionally poisoning them the way you poison yourself? Perhaps our issues are like secondhand smoke. At first, it was thought to be not so dangerous and by smoking we were only hurting ourselves. Yet [we have] come to find out, years later, secondhand smoke can be very deadly.2

Renae Cobb, a therapist-in-training by day and an undercover writer and occasional blog contributor by night, wrote:

Certainly, the people we love inspire us to heights of love and compassion that we might have never achieved otherwise, but to really scale those heights, we often have to go to the depths of who we are, light/shadow, good/evil, loving/destructive, and figure out our own stuff in order to love them better. So I’m not sure it’s an either/or but a both/and. We love others fiercely, maybe more than we think we love ourselves, but that fierce love should drive us to the depths of our selves so that we can learn to be compassionate with ourselves.3

I agree with Justin and Renae. Loving and accepting ourselves are the ultimate acts of courage. In a society that says, “Put yourself last,” self-love and self-acceptance are almost revolutionary.

If we want to take part in this revolution, we have to understand the anatomy of love and belonging; we need to understand when and why we hustle for worthiness rather than claim it; and we have to understand the things that get in the way. We encounter obstacles on every journey we make; the Wholehearted journey is no different. In the next chapter we’ll explore what I’ve found to be the greatest barriers to living and loving with our whole hearts.