Below, co-authors Harry Reis and Sonja Lyubomirsky share five key insights from their new book, How to Feel Loved: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most.
Harry Reis is Dean’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester, which honored him with the Georgen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Teaching in 2009. His work has been featured on NPR’s Hidden Brain, as well as in Scientific American, Psychology Today, and the New York Times.
Sonja Lyubomirsky is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She has received numerous awards for her work and has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and on the Today show, NPR, and CNN.
What’s the big idea?
Feeling loved isn’t about proving your worth or polishing your image. It comes from creating mutual understanding. Making it possible to be truly known is what allows love to be felt.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Harry—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. It’s not what you think.
Perhaps you know someone who believes that the surest path to feeling loved is making others see and appreciate their positive qualities and achievements. Many of us share this belief—after all, Western culture constantly teaches us that the secret to happiness is having more, be that more money, more beauty, higher status, or more success. Society celebrates charismatic high achievers, and social media encourages us to showcase curated versions of our lives.
These beliefs are so common that it’s easy to assume that your triumphs will lead to deeper emotional bonds. While your accomplishments might bring admiration and temporary happiness, they don’t drive true, lasting happiness—feeling loved does. Research shows that accumulating accomplishments and receiving praise does not translate into feeling loved.
Maybe you also believe that if only you could guarantee that others knew your positive qualities and achievements, you would be happier. Or maybe you suspect that if you could hide your shortcomings, others would love you more. These ideas may sound like they make sense, but research—and our real-life experience—suggest that trying to mold yourself into someone you’re not pushes people away.
The pathway to feeling loved does not come from managing your public image toward perfection or from broadcasting your strengths, but rather from genuine, mutual relationships that allow people to be seen as their full, imperfect selves.
You can only feel loved if you feel truly known, and being noticed is not the same as being known. A carefully managed highlight reel may impress others, but it does not foster the mutual understanding and authentic intimacy required for feeling truly loved.
2. It takes two to tango.
To feel loved, you have to first help your partner feel loved. Imagine two people sitting on opposite ends of an underwater seesaw. Only the parts of themselves they are comfortable revealing are visible above the surface—the parts of themselves they easily share. But beneath the waterline lie their real, complex selves: the hopes, fears, memories, and private thoughts that most people keep hidden.
“If you want to feel more loved, the best place to begin is by helping the other person feel more loved.”
When you show attentive, warm curiosity and interest in a friend, it encourages them to open up—you essentially lift their private self above the waterline. When they feel authentically heard and understood by you, they are likely to reciprocate. Being valued and connected makes people want to lift the other person in return. This back-and-forth cycle of lifting and being lifted creates a natural rhythm of loving and being loved, strengthening the connection with each cycle. When this happens, people often describe a sense of “chemistry”—not magic, but a sensation of being emotionally in sync, co-creating a rhythm of mutual engagement and attunement.
If you want to feel more loved, the best place to begin is by helping the other person feel more loved. When they feel understood and appreciated by you, they are more likely to want to understand and appreciate you. By contrast, if you don’t help them feel loved, they will probably lack the willingness, motivation, or enthusiasm to try to connect. Helping each other feel loved sets off a cycle of trust, closeness, and mutual understanding.
3. Why am I afraid to tell you who I am?
One of the most common themes in human psychology is the desire to be understood. We want others to understand us for who we genuinely are. Ironically, most of us often hesitate to open up. We may wear a mask to protect our public image or to avoid discomfort. We hide our true feelings or shortcomings so that we will appear competent, confident, or put-together. Perhaps we fear embarrassment, being judged or rejected, or seen as weak or inadequate. Or perhaps we just assume that others simply won’t be interested.
People sometimes call this tendency “having boundaries”—an excuse we use for walling off parts of ourselves that feel deeply vulnerable. Nearly all of us keep secrets from loved ones, even though keeping those secrets can be so effortful and uncomfortable that it becomes a preoccupation, paradoxically making them more likely to slip out at inopportune moments.
Hiding yourself has a cost. You can’t feel understood if your friends and family members don’t know who you are. They can’t respond lovingly to a version of you they can’t see, and you can’t feel genuinely valued if their affection is directed at an image that isn’t the real you. Sharing your hopes and fears, your strengths and uncertainties, and even the things you suck at creates opportunities for reassurance, understanding, trust, and authentic connection.
“Hiding yourself has a cost.”
In fact, other people often react to these admissions more positively than you expect, allowing you to feel loved for the person you actually are. By contrast, when your masks and boundaries preclude openness and trust, they undermine the possibility of being understood and loved. Sharing your true self is an essential step toward feeling genuinely loved.
4. Listen like there’ll be a quiz tomorrow.
Mark Twain once said, “If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two tongues and one ear.”
We often think of listening as something simple—as natural as breathing. But the research, and our own experience when we attended a listening workshop, tells a different story. High-quality listening isn’t instinctive. It requires focus, skill, and, most of all, a genuine desire to understand another human being. When people experience being well-listened to—even by a stranger—it forges a connection.
Most of us believe we’re good listeners. The vast majority of people rate themselves above average. But when you flip the perspective and ask speakers what they experience, the picture changes, because most people say their listeners rarely listen well. Too often, listeners are thinking about their reply, defending their point of view, changing the focus to themselves, or finding a moment to jump in. In the words of Steven Covey, most people listen to respond, not to learn. Helping your partner feel loved requires listening with intense, even radical, curiosity, as if you are about to learn something incredibly important.
Good listening isn’t passive hearing—it involves actively engaging with the speaker by doing three things:
- Paying close attention.
- Conveying comprehension of their meaning and intent.
- Showing a supportive, caring wish toward the speaker.
When you listen well, you send a powerful three-part message: I’m paying attention, I understand you, and I care about what you’re saying. When this happens, speakers feel truly heard. That sets the stage for feeling loved.
5. Open hearts open doors.
Approach social interactions with an open-hearted mindset: a deliberate choice to act with kindness and to nurture your partners’ well-being. Perhaps you think kindness is overrated, will make you vulnerable, or is difficult to carry out. Our research suggests that these beliefs are misguided. Kindness is far more common than you might expect. It may be expressed in small, everyday acts like holding a door open for a stranger or in larger, more consequential actions, like helping a friend move or donating blood for an ailing relative. Even so, most people wish that they and others were kinder. One of the things that holds us back is that we underestimate how much our expressions of kindness will be appreciated, while at the same time we overestimate how awkward they will feel. Kindness is almost always appreciated.
“When you freely open your heart to others, you begin to release the knots that prevent you from feeling loved.”
Research shows that acts of kindness are gratifying not just for the recipient of your kindness, but even more so for you, the giver. When you open your heart to another person, it increases your happiness, provides meaning in your life, and deepens your feeling of being valued and loved. These benefits are strongest when your kindness is voluntary, sincere, and altruistic—that is, focused on the other person’s needs. Perhaps this is why contemplative traditions from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity incorporate ideals and practices that focus on compassion and generosity. When you freely open your heart to others, you begin to release the knots that prevent you from feeling loved.
An open-hearted mindset also applies to yourself. When you treat yourself with the same generosity of spirit and kind intentions that you would apply to a beloved friend, you open the door to allowing others to see your true self and then feel appreciated by them. The more you apply an open-hearted mindset to yourself, the more other people’s attention and loving acts will feel authentic and credible—and the more likely their love will sink in.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
