"Love... Force it and it disappears. You cannot will love, nor even control it. You can only guide its expression. It comes or it goes according to those qualities in life that invite it or deny its presence"
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Love resists coercion. Treat it as a force to command and it recedes, because emotion thrives on freedom and safety, not pressure. David Seabury, a 20th-century American psychologist and popular lecturer, often framed mental life in pragmatic terms: we cannot dictate inner states, but we can cultivate the circumstances that make them more likely. His counsel about love follows that logic. You cannot will yourself into loving on schedule, nor can you decree another person’s devotion. What falls within reach is the way love gets expressed — the habits, boundaries, language, and rituals that give feeling a healthy channel.
The line about qualities that invite or deny love shifts attention from control to cultivation. Trustworthiness, curiosity, and steadiness invite it; manipulation, contempt, and chronic deceit drive it off. Modern attachment research echoes this: secure bonds grow from consistent attunement and room to breathe, while forced intimacy produces anxiety and withdrawal. Love is less a possession than a climate. You cannot order the weather, but you can prepare the soil, plant with care, and protect the tender growth.
Seabury’s era prized self-mastery, and he adds a paradoxical refinement: mastery often means relinquishing command over outcomes and taking responsibility for conditions. Guidance is not the same as control. Guidance sounds like listening well, telling the truth kindly, honoring limits, making time, repairing injuries promptly. It is the ordinary work that allows affection to find form without being smothered.
There is also a warning here about self-deception. The will can produce gestures that mimic love, but counterfeit warmth cannot sustain a life. When the conditions are wrong, love leaves, and clinging harder only hastens the exit. When the conditions are right, love appears as if by grace, though it is grace made possible by patient effort. The practical wisdom is simple and demanding: stop trying to possess the feeling, and build the world in which it likes to live.
The line about qualities that invite or deny love shifts attention from control to cultivation. Trustworthiness, curiosity, and steadiness invite it; manipulation, contempt, and chronic deceit drive it off. Modern attachment research echoes this: secure bonds grow from consistent attunement and room to breathe, while forced intimacy produces anxiety and withdrawal. Love is less a possession than a climate. You cannot order the weather, but you can prepare the soil, plant with care, and protect the tender growth.
Seabury’s era prized self-mastery, and he adds a paradoxical refinement: mastery often means relinquishing command over outcomes and taking responsibility for conditions. Guidance is not the same as control. Guidance sounds like listening well, telling the truth kindly, honoring limits, making time, repairing injuries promptly. It is the ordinary work that allows affection to find form without being smothered.
There is also a warning here about self-deception. The will can produce gestures that mimic love, but counterfeit warmth cannot sustain a life. When the conditions are wrong, love leaves, and clinging harder only hastens the exit. When the conditions are right, love appears as if by grace, though it is grace made possible by patient effort. The practical wisdom is simple and demanding: stop trying to possess the feeling, and build the world in which it likes to live.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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