What Is Love?

Harville Hendrix PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD are partners in life who co-created Imago

For Harville and Helen, Love is a verb, and its practice can help us create a better world.

Love, in Imago, is a verb, not a noun.  It is created or destroyed minute by minute by our actions.  Love is an act that is accompanied by a feeling, but it is not a feeling itself.  Love is the behavioral commitment to another's physical, emotional, mental and spiritual potential and welfare that is equal to if not greater than the same commitment to oneself. Love is free from negative judgement; it is the full acceptance of another as they are, not as one wishes them to be.  Love accepts and honors difference. It is the hyphen between the I and the Thou.

Imago is all about helping couples create love in their relationship. Imago helps them create a place that is “between” the I and Thou. This third entity, the “between”, becomes the focal point for partners. To move to that sacred relational space, Imago helps couples transition from the bliss of romantic attachment, through the inevitable power struggle, to reliable real love. To ascend to real love, couples learn to cooperate with the unconscious purpose of their relationship, which is to help each other finish childhood. The Imago process helps them learn how to do that. Using Imago dialogue, couples discover that each partner has unmet childhood needs and they make a mutual commitment to use their relationship to meet those needs. This connection promotes healing and growth so that the relationship can reach its highest potential—a conscious, safe and passionate partnership.

Imago is also about social transformation. When couples help each other heal and grow, they become better citizens who want a better world. Conscious couples who are parents understand dialogue as a way to care for relationship. They rear children who retain their wholeness and relaxed joyfulness. These children and their parents will want a world in which everyone is free and equal—a world of universal peace. And they will work to make it happen. They will neither harm themselves nor others and will work for the good of the whole. Imago is about transforming couples who transform families and, ultimately, the world around them. Imago is all about love.