Three Special Ways To Show Love

How do we communicate love? Is it through prepackaged thoughts from a card rack? Or through a stop at a candy store or flower shop? Is it through an evening out to celebrate and honor a relationship with a companion of a lifetime or to draw closer to one who could be?

Without the hoopla and commercialization of Valentine’s Day, how do you deliver the "I love you" message in ways that touch another’s heart?

Here are three ways of communicating your love, not just one day but all year round. These three ways I call listening with your eyes, embracing with your voice, and touching with your heart.

1. Listen with your eyes. Posture, head gestures, arm and hand gestures, body positioning, and facial expressions communicate emotion. There are over three thousand facial expressions that communicate specific feelings. There are seven basic universal facial expressions that communicate surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt.

We are adept at decoding facial expressions from birth on - it is the first language we learn. Some of these emotional expressions are fleeting, some are disguised through a "game face" or a forced smile. Facial expressions are combined with body language signals, tone of voice and hand gestures.

People are more adept at covering up with their face than with their tone of voice and body language. There are whole lexicons of meaning attached to different facial expressions, congruent and incongruent body language and tone of voice. Your eyes will tell you much more than what is being said.

In interviewing, I look for facial expressions, however fleeting that show emotion and follow up - not on what was said but on the emotion I just witnessed. By detecting emotion and accurately identifying it, or even by detecting incongruence, you can break through to your partner’s emotions and connect at a deeper level of understanding. Reading another’s emotions and responding empathically is a part of the connecting glue that brings you closer together.

To be this kind of listener - to listen with your eyes as well as your ears - takes a kind of selflessness and detachment from your own agenda that puts you wholly in the moment - to be there for a loved one. Good listening requires 70 percent eye contact and 30 percent for scanning for other relevant cues - and precious little time for thinking your own thoughts.

Listening with your eyes also means your own eyes are showing warmth, tenderness, compassion, interest, and receptivity. A listener’s facial expressions, tone of voice and body language are being scrutinized by the speaker for emotion during the communication.

Discovering your partner consists not in seeking something new but in seeing with new eyes.

2. Embrace with your voice. The seven universal emotions - sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust,

happiness and contempt - also have distinctive vocal patterns based on pitch, pace, fluency and volume. Forty percent of the meaning we extract from speech is derived from vocal signals apart from content.

Certain features of voice are difficult to control and, unlike clothing, gestures or facial expressions, are difficult to disguise. Laughs, sighs, grumbles, pauses, change in pitch or loudness can mean something quite apart from what is being said. Paying attention to vocal cues will help you detect emotion and explore meanings beyond the spoken word.

By varying vocal tone, pitch and loudness as a listener, you show your own emotional response. The speaker appreciates the feedback, especially when it indicates you are tracking emotion as well as the message.

By "embracing with your voice," the speaker uses more vocal variety to communicate emotions. You can caress and soothe with the way words are spoken. You can communicate resoluteness, sincerity, delight, authority and acceptance by how you say something.

3. Touch with your heart. The language of touch is very powerful and add depth to emotional communication. From birth on, we all crave and need touch. The intimate connection between a parent and child, friends, and between husband and wife blossom when touch is used to communicate meaning and emotion.

There is a cultural language of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate touch between parents and children, strangers, social friendships, business relationships, same and opposite sex relationships and intimate marital relationships. These touches help define the relationship.

There is also a language of touch in sexual interactions that must be learned and synchronized. In daily activities, non-sexual affectionate touches affirm the strong bond the couple has for each other.

In intimate conversation between marital partners, touch can also communicate deep empathy and emotions. The soothing hand caress, the intertwining of fingers, the gentle hand squeeze, the reaching out and stroking another’s arm or shoulder, a full embrace of comfort and holding - all of these touching gestures can signal emotional responsiveness and caring.

In the act of forgiveness or apology, touch can add meaning and sincerity. If touch is used mechanically, intrusively or as a manipulation, it will communicate the opposite message.

A great combination. A sensitive touch when coupled with listening eyes, and an embracing tone of voice gives a couple those special moments of oneness and binds them together every day of the year. It completes the communication.