Cultivating Real Love

What builds a great love affair? It's more than romance. Cultivating affection takes devotion, friendship and commitment.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on February 02, 2004 - last reviewed on July 23, 2008

I've received a great many letters about love. I wish I could answer them all. Rather, this article addresses the general subject of most of them—finding and keeping love in our lives, in the form of intimate relationships.

I want to refer you immediately to a most extraordinary book: A Marriage Made in Heaven: A Love Story in Letters, by Vatsala and Ehud Sperling. It's a documentation of the building of love between a 35-year-old single woman living with her Hindu Brahmin family in India and a 40-year divorced American Jewish man living in Vermont.

They found each other through a personals advertisement Ehud placed in an Indian newspaper. Their love developed through letters, and in them they arranged and defined the marriage they wanted—all without having met each other.

Through the magic of the writing process, the Sperlings told me, "we were forced to think about things, clarifying ourselves. It was exhilarating."

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For the Sperlings, who live in Vermont with their son, a good marriage requires matching based on values. This is a significant shift from the romantic idea that is so dominant in our culture but unsustainable in real life. To rely exclusively on romance does not fulfill all one's needs, says Vatsala. "It leads you to fall into unconsciousness." There are other aspects of affection worth cultivating—devotion, friendship, commitment.

In our narcissistic culture of surfaces, the Sperlings were searching for and found deeper connectedness. Based on their experience, Vatsala Sperling offers her list of Do's that go into a good relationship:

Be straightforward in your approach.
Speak the truth.
Be soft, gentle, polite.
Try to forget and forgive.
See good in a person.
If possible, try to acknowledge the good.
Tell clearly what you do not like.
Talk sensibly.
Listen with compassion and sensitivity.
Reach out, touch.
Accept your faults. Admit when you've made a mistake.
Tell clearly what you want. Wait for your turn.
Say "sorry."
Say "thank you."
Be grateful.
Learn to respect and reciprocate small gestures of concern, kindness, compassion and humanity.
Children are God's best gift to mankind. Love them without spoiling them with too much or too little attention.
Learn to understand quietness.
Do your best to help.
In being good, don't forget, like everyone else, you too are a human being and are likely to falter.