The difference between love and empathy

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks.

Today seems like the perfect day to ask: What’s the difference between love and empathy? It’s a question that comes up a lot, and for me the answer is kind of like the answer to “what’s the difference between a square and a rectangle?” Love typically involves some level of empathy, but empathy doesn’t always equal love. (Although I do sometimes see the words used interchangeably, along with “kindness,” “compassion” and “caring,” that kind of equivalence is controversial!) So, let’s ask the experts how empathy applies to love:

Psychologist Paul Ekman separates empathy into three different types, which might be useful when thinking about love: cognitive empathy (perspective taking, or imagining someone’s feelings but not actually feeling them yourself), emotional empathy (actually feeling others’ feelings) and compassionate empathy (a balance of the two that usually leads to some action). The first two types are the ones people like Paul Bloom (author of Against Empathy) are worried about, because they can be used to manipulate people or make the person feeling them so overwhelmed that they get burned out before they can act on those feelings. This Psych Central blog post provides a list of expert-recommended suggestions for employing more compassionate empathy in your relationships.

Over at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good project, empathy expert Roman Krznaric explains the “empathy circuit” we all have in our brains, allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes. Research has shown that this circuit begins to develop shortly after we’re born, and is influenced heavily by the way our parents or caregivers show us love and nurturing. But, as Krznaric points out, our capacity to empathize keeps growing and changing as we age, just like other parts of our brain. He shares the habits of highly empathic people, and I think habits 1, 3 and 4 can be particularly helpful when it comes to partner and family love.

And finally, a note about turning to empathy – instead of sympathy – when things aren’t going quite so well in the love department. At Psychology Today, psychologist Jeffrey Bernstein writes about why it’s more important to try to understand your partner than to feel sad or sorry for them. He also points out that loving someone doesn’t mean empathy will necessarily come easily:

When it comes to intimate relationships, no matter how much love there is between you and your partner, there’s no guarantee that you both will be able to automatically empathize with each other – even if you think you’re “soul mates.”

That may sound kind of depressing, but those of us who are fans of Valentine’s Day might choose to see it as a worthwhile challenge. For the rest? I empathize. So this one’s for you.

On Being a Wife

I don’t know anything about being a wife yet, so hopefully that headline didn’t fool you into thinking you’d find advice here. Instead, I wanted to share this essay: The Emotional Weight of Being a Wife. With a week left to go before my wedding, it resonated with me, and I think it will resonate with many women who have been in a heterosexual relationship.

I have spent some time over the past 15 months thinking about what it means to be a wife, and more specifically, what it will mean for me. Ultimately, I don’t think much will change about my identity. This will still be kaitlinugolik.com. My bylines won’t change either. I’ll still let dishes pile up in the sink a little too long and go some days without makeup and talk baby talk to my cat until my husband rolls his eyes (and then joins in). I’ll still be a writer and a perfectionist (although I’m working on that one) and an appreciator of all kinds of birds and cheese and books. The main difference, I predict, will be that I will be all of those things, and also part of a new family. That’s how I see what we’re doing, he and I. We’re creating a new family. It may or may not ever include children, and it will certainly include various types and numbers of animals over the years, but it will be a family, a unit of love and support.

Love and support take work, and while my almost-husband is kind and gracious and pulls his weight in many ways, it didn’t come naturally to him to do emotional family work. I don’t think it comes naturally for a lot of men, for various reasons that I won’t get into now but that essentially boil down to conditioning, in my opinion. So when I read the above piece, it was easy to empathize. So many women see the work that needs to be done and try to point it out to their partners, but something gets lost. And it gets tiring to always be the one to point it out. In one conversation I saw about this piece on Facebook, a woman said she told her partner she wanted to set aside time each week to do relationship work – talk about things that are going well and not so well, ask about each other’s needs and whether they’re being met – and he asked her which of his other relationship-related tasks – cooking, doing dishes, etc. – she would like him to skip in order to have time for this talk.

In a way, this may be an issue of mismatched “love languages.” Some people express and best receive love through acts, some through words, some through physical touch, etc. But there does seem to be a major commonality between many relationships in which women feel like they’re the only ones acknowledging the relationship – the family – as its own living, breathing thing that needs attention. Whatever the reason for that, I’m glad it’s being written about, and I hope it inspires a lot of important conversations and self-advocacy from both wives and husbands. And I’m looking forward to continuing to navigate this whole family thing in an official marriage very soon!