Cut Your Losses

The Magic Ratio

Though many don’t realize it there is a difference between feeling love and conveying love. A person feels love inside of his or her heart; he or she conveys it to others through words and deeds.

As I’ve explained previously there is a magic ratio of good-feeling communications to not-so-good-feeling communications that successfully conveys love. When a parent wants to make her child feel loved she gives him 80 percent good-feeling communications (like offering praise acknowledging feelings and accomplishments showing affection and so on) and 20 percent not-so-good-feeling communications (such as giving instructions corrections negative consequences and the like). For teens the love-ratio requires 90 percent good-feeling communications and marriage requires 95 percent good-feeling communications! The further one is away from this ratio the less certain it is that love is being successfully conveyed.

Quality as Well as Quantity

If between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. a mother says or does four nice-feeling things for her eight-year-old daughter before she reminds the girl to please make her bed the mother has maintained the 80–20 ratio in that particular hour.

However it’s not only the actual number of communications that builds the feeling of being loved; it’s also their quality. And this quality issue is even more important when it comes to the not-so-good feeling communications. Just one not-so-good-feeling communication destroys the well-loved feeling that is accomplished by four good-feeling communications. However one truly-bad-feeling communication can destroy the feeling of love built up by hundreds or even thousands of previous good-feeling communications. For instance when a parent verbally assaults a youngster with raised voice harsh criticisms and painful insults the child’s entire sense of feeling loved can shatter. Depending on the intensity and frequency of verbal abuse it is possible that no number of good-feeling communications can compensate to maintain the child’s feeling of being loved.