Love _______

By Lavern Nissley

If you had to build 3 very simple sentences, a subject and a verb, starting with the word "love", what would you come up with? Here are several examples: Love hurts. Love heals. Love trusts. Love tries. Love listens.

All good and pretty accurate. But not what we're emphasizing in this post. Want to know the verb we're highlighting in a new social media campaign?

Love learns. This assumes that love is primarily an action, not necessarily an emotion.

Even after 40 years of being married to Ronda I observe that in order to keep loving each other well, we have to keep learning. About each other. About ourselves. About new tools for healthy relationships. 

​Human beings are too complex and dynamic to ever reach the conclusion: "OK, dude, I have learned everything I need to about you. No more learning for me. Got ya all figured out."

There still remains an unfortunate stigma among married folks that reaching out for help is a sign of failure, of being losers. Nothing could be further from the truth!

We are so proud of the hundreds who reach out to us every year here at Encompass. Want to know a secret? Those who actually use language like "we want to learn better ways of communicating" or "help us learn more effective conflict resolution" have tremendous traction to experience remarkable transformation and growth.

Learning = growth.

So our encouragement is to keep learning how to love better and better.

Love learns.