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What is wrong here? What are people missing in their lives that causes them to act out in all these unhealthy ways? Regrettably, we have tended to see all these behaviors as separate problems, and because of our near-sightedness, we have been quite unsuccessful in resolving them. Understanding the problems people experience begins with an understanding of what all human beings need most, and intuitively we all know what that need is. In order to be happy, what we all want more than anything else is to feel loved. We prove that every day with the songs we sing, the movies we watch, the books we read, and the conversations we have. Love is the strongest theme uniting all those activities, but it’s not just any kind of love we’re looking for.
What we all want most is unconditional love, or Real Love. Real Love is caring about the happiness of another person without any thought for what we might get for ourselves. It’s not Real Love when you do what I want and I like you. That’s relatively worthless; that’s earning or buying love. It’s Real Love when you make mistakes and inconvenience me, but I’m not disappointed or angry. Sadly, few of us have sufficiently received or given that kind of love—not just during our marriages but for our entire lives. From the time we were small children, we observed that when we didn’t fight with our sisters, didn’t make too much noise in the car, got good grades, and were otherwise obedient and cooperative, our parents and others smiled at us, patted our heads, and spoke kindly. With their words and behavior, they told us what good boys and girls we were.
This conditional love can give us brief moments of satisfaction, but we’re still left with a huge hole in our souls, because only Real Love can make us genuinely happy. Without sufficient Real Love, we can only feel empty and alone, which is the greatest ongoing pain in our lives. In any given negative interaction with another person, it is the longstanding lack of Real Love in your life that determines how you feel and respond, not the behavior of the other person in that moment. In any given moment, you react to the amount of love you feel from everyone, past and present, not just from the person you’re interacting with.
Once we understand the critical role of Real Love in our lives, we can begin to do something to find it and make genuine changes in ourselves and in our relationships, instead of just playing games with self-help and relationship techniques, which never make much difference in the long term.
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Everywhere we look, there are so many signs that something is seriously
amiss in our society: Nearly 60% of our marriages end in divorce; as
many as 20% of us are addicted to alcohol or drugs of some kind; one
of nine men will spend some time of his life in prison; 41% of ninth-grade
students reported drinking alcohol in the past month; one-quarter
of all adolescents contract a sexually transmitted disease before they
graduate from high school; and four out of every ten girls in the U.S.
will become pregnant at least once while in their teens, with 80% of
these pregnancies being unintended. 
But what happened when we did fight with our sisters, made too much
noise, got bad grades, and dragged mud across the clean living room carpet?
Did people smile at us or speak gentle, loving words? No—they frowned,
sighed with disappointment, and often spoke in harsh tones. Just as the
positive behaviors of other people communicated to us that we were loved,
the withdrawal of those behaviors could only mean that we were not being
loved. Although it was unintentional, our parents and others taught us
this terrible message: “When you’re good, I love you, but
when you’re not, I don’t—or certainly I love you a
great deal less.”
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