I Love the Way You Wrinkle Your Nose When You Laugh

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 22:20
Posted in category Anyone Fall in Love

This final ego-massage technique concerns long-term love. It helps keep you in love with your Quarry because it keeps your Quarry doing the things you love. Love is a two-way street, and it’s hard to keep someone high on you if your affection for them sags.
Dr. Benjamin Spock is the famous baby doctor who in the 1950s taught American parents how to cope with their offspring. Today, controversy swirls around his doctrine of permissiveness, but the well-intended doctor leaves the world with at least one good axiom. He said, in essence, “Tell the little tyke that he is great, and it will encourage his greatness.”
I call this technique Spocking after this baby philosophy. Spocking, on an adult level, is doing the same with your significant other. Divulge what you love, appreciate, or admire in your Quarry so he or she will keep doing those things you love, appreciate, or admire.
People start to fall in love for a myriad of different reasons. The logic, flowing from your Lovemap, can seem as arbitrary as loving the way she wrinkles her nose when she laughs or adoring the way he caresses your cheek. You might have fallen in love with him when, the first time you invited him to dinner, he washed the dishes. You might admire her strength in the face of crisis or respect his sense of honesty.
To stay in love (and therefore keep your Quarry in love with you), encourage that which you adore. Say “I love the way you wrinkle your nose when you laugh.” Say, “It’s so exciting when you caress my cheek.” Say, “Believe it or not, one of the things that I really love about you is the way you offer to do the dishes.” Say, “I admire your strength in the face of crisis.” Say, ”I respect your deep sense of honesty.”
I remember a lovely New Yorker cartoon, so poignant I cried. The drawing was of an obviously poor, overweight, and exhausted couple sitting at their kitchen table. The husband, in his T-shirt, hadn’t shaved. The wife had curlers in her hair. Dirty dishes and diapers hung on a makeshift clothesline strung from a pipe to the fridge. They were drinking coffee out of chipped old mugs.
The caption was the man smiling at his wife, saying, “I just love the way you wrinkle your nose when you laugh.” The couple looked genuinely happy, in spite of the mess, in spite of their poverty, in spite of their exhaustion. If Spocking was part of their daily life, they probably were.