About 2 years ago, I was having dinner with my 20-year-old daughter Beth. I had separated from her mother a year before and was in a relationship with my current partner. Beth’s reaction to our divorce had been surprisingly supportive. Apparently, she’d seen problems in our relationship for a long time. We’d discussed both my new relationship and the divorce, but mostly, we discussed finding love.

Beth had been dating a young man for about a year and wasn’t sure if he was ‘the one’. Since he seemed to believe that she was, she decided that it would be unfair to stay with him. Knowing from painful experience how important the decisions that lead to long-term commitments with the right (or wrong) people are, I felt that a face-to-face chat was important. I was there to listen, support and advise where I could. The most important and final part of this long and emotional conversation was when I asked her if she loved him to which she answered, ‘I don’t know, what is love?’

This simple question hit me hard and I couldn’t answer immediately.

I knew that in my current relationship, I felt loved like I never had before, and had never felt love for another adult the way I did for Niamh. Before this, it had been suggested that I had never loved a romantic partner because I was incapable of it, but now that was proven entirely wrong. I loved her and felt loved in return, it warmed my bones when I was with her and changed my entire world view. I felt safer (even though I was about to lose half my wealth and go back to a frightening level of financial insecurity).

I knew one thing with certainty: I would never make any choice that would lead to the woman I loved leaving my life. No matter what the personal or financial cost, I would always want her to be in my life, not just because she made everything better for me, but because I made her world better too.

I later realised that this is an essential bar for choosing a partner in a loving relationship. It may seem unrealistic, but surely our life partner should be someone that we believe is one of the best people in the world? Furthermore, over the course of a relationship with that person, we should feel more and more confident that we deserve them (another way of putting this is that we feel better about ourselves, but more than this, we increasingly believe that we are deserving of such a brilliant person). This may seem over-idealised, but what’s the alternative? That we are in a relationship with someone that we don’t think that highly of, yet the relationship makes us feel unworthy of them? You may feel this is a false dichotomy, you may be right, but consider how many people you know who fit into one of these camps. With the help of this guide, I believe that this bar of romantic relationships will be far more achievable.

Outside of the romantic arena, it isn’t true to say that I had never felt love. I’d felt it with my children, they loved me and always wanted me around. They lit up my life and I’ve always taken great pleasure in prioritising their needs. I’m a source of safety and they’ve always sought my love and counsel. They knew I was ‘on their side’ and never wished to cause any harm– they knew I loved them. In observing that I had benevolent motives, seeing me as a good man who wanted to do my best for them and others, they loved me. Similarly, my father loved me and always had faith in me, but I couldn’t see this love at the time, I didn’t recognise it as such. I had perhaps incorrectly believed that love meant being prioritised; failing to recognise and acknowledge the respect and dignity with which he treated me. My major problem wasn’t a lack of love in my life, it was learning to recognise its presence. To give and receive more love, I had to recognise the many forms that love can take. What I needed was a new set of spectacles with which to view the world, rather than an entirely new world. With these new spectacles, I could take an inventory of what was good, replicate it, and discard whatever wasn’t.

The answer I came to is that more than just an affectionate sentiment; it’s a design for life.

Love is a benign view of others’ motives.

A force that fosters connection, empathy, and compassion. Reaching this definition prompted me to consider the other side of the equation. This book is primarily an exploration of the ways we can improve all our relationships and interactions by taking a benign and fundamentally loving view. In the current divided world, where the word ‘hate’ is thrown around like confetti, and so many people use it to label and dismiss others, we can see that conversely:

Hate is a malevolent view of others’ motives.

The malign view breeds resentment, prejudice, and animosity, furthering our divisions and deepening our collective pain. These definitions may seem overly specific, but in using the word ‘benign’ to describe the loving view, every position that isn’t malign is covered, stretching from the belief that someone is acting entirely selflessly for the benefit of others, to simply giving someone the benefit of the doubt and essentially staying neutral about their motives. Any benign view is a loving position.

I hope to plant the seed of an idea, one that could grow into something that offers a pathway to some healing. I’m not, and do not claim to be a clinical psychologist, I am simply presenting these thoughts in an attempt to be helpful, nothing more. In exploring these two states and learning to assign more benign motives, perhaps we can wash away some lazy rhetoric, and encourage those using it to re-examine their relationships with the individuals and ideas that they seek to dismiss.