Feeling Loved Depends More on Being Known Than Being Admired

Sonja Lyubomirsky began testing happiness interventions in her lab in 1998: gratitude letters, acts of kindness, social behavior, and other practices meant to be studied like clinical trials, with a happiness strategy in place of a vaccine. Over time, she says, the interventions that worked appeared to share a mechanism. They made people feel more connected to, and loved by, others.

A gratitude letter to her mother made her feel more loved by her mother. An act of kindness for a colleague or friend made her feel closer to that person. Lyubomirsky allows that not every happiness practice works this way — running on the beach or meditating may not primarily be about connection — but “almost all” of the effective practices she has studied, in her account, involve feeling connected and loved.

The evolutionary explanation is direct. Humans would not have survived without connection. To feel lonely or unloved is not just unpleasant; it is a signal that something is wrong and that reconnection is needed. Lyubomirsky treats loneliness and feeling unloved as nearly identical in the moment: both indicate that a person’s social bond system is registering danger or absence.

That does not mean people respond to the signal cleanly. Chris Williamson points out that unhappiness can make people behave in ways that make them harder to love. Lyubomirsky’s distinction is that the relevant signal is not generic unhappiness but not feeling loved. Even then, many people respond by trying to become more lovable rather than by becoming more knowable.

There is a healthy version of self-improvement: becoming a better person, building capacities, behaving more generously. But Lyubomirsky argues that when someone concludes, “I don’t feel loved, so I need to make myself more lovable,” they often move in the wrong direction. They try to become richer, more beautiful, more impressive, more famous, or more visibly wonderful. That can produce admiration, but admiration is not the same as connection.

Admiration, in her example, resembles the attention an influencer receives from followers. The audience may admire the person, but they do not know them. For Lyubomirsky and her co-author Harry Reis, the key to feeling loved is being known. If another person only sees the polished version — strengths displayed, weaknesses hidden — the admired person can still wonder whether love would survive real knowledge: if he knew me, maybe he would not love me.

Her definition of feeling loved is therefore less sentimental than relational. To feel loved is to believe that one matters in another person’s life and makes a difference to them. Love includes affection, care, and intertwined goals, but the core is mutual mattering: I matter to you, and you matter to me.

That applies well beyond romantic partnerships. Feeling loved can come through family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and work relationships. Williamson cites figures that 40% of people say they do not feel as loved as they want to be by their partner, and nearly two-thirds of young men feel nobody truly knows them. Lyubomirsky says those numbers are “terrible” and may be understatements, because people can feel embarrassed admitting such things. A survey conducted for her book, she says, found that 70% of respondents did not feel as loved as they wanted to be in at least one significant relationship.

The central problem is not necessarily a shortage of love. Many people are loved and connected, yet the love does not register. Lyubomirsky uses the image of a “cup of love”: love is being poured in, but the cup may have a leak in the bottom, or a lid that prevents much from entering.

Sonja Lyubomirsky names attachment patterns as one reason love fails to land. An anxiously attached person may scan for signs of rejection and interpret ambiguous evidence as proof that love is unreliable. An avoidantly attached person may not notice signs of love at all. In both cases, the relational signal is distorted before it can be received.

She also treats “love languages” as useful but overstated. Lyubomirsky says the matching theory has been debunked by other researchers: evidence, as she summarizes it, does not show that matching a partner’s love language predicts relationship strength, stability, or quality. Nor, in her account, are there only five possible languages. But the idea remains a practical heuristic because love can be expressed in a form the receiver does not naturally recognize.

Her example is a man she dated who sent gifts with handwritten notes. She found the gesture “really cute,” but it was not what she most wanted; she names words of affirmation and physical touch as the forms that mattered more to her. She was not fully reading the gifts as expressions of love, even though they were. The useful lesson is not to classify everyone into fixed types, but to notice that a bid for closeness may arrive in an unfamiliar format.

Still, she argues that some forms are broadly important. In Lyubomirsky’s summary of the evidence, everyone cares about two love languages: words of affirmation and quality time. She also says the more ways a partner shows love, the better. The goal is not perfect matching but wider perception and wider expression.

Self-esteem is another filter. Lyubomirsky rejects the simple claim that if someone does not love themselves, they cannot love others. She credits Esther Perel as someone she heard challenge that idea: people also learn to love themselves inside relationships. The direction runs both ways. But low self-esteem can still keep love from getting in. A person who sees themselves poorly may not believe another person’s affection is genuine, may not notice it, or may treat it with suspicion.

There is a harder feedback loop too. Lyubomirsky says not loving oneself can make a person “less lovable” in practical terms because poor self-image “leaks out.” Other people may become less likely to offer love, which then confirms the original insecurity.

When Williamson asks what evidence-based interventions exist for building self-esteem, Lyubomirsky answers bluntly: she does not know of good lab-tested interventions that reliably increase it. She is careful about what that means. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Something could work. But as an experimental social psychologist and intervention researcher, she does not know a proven self-esteem intervention comparable to the happiness interventions she has studied.

Williamson proposes that self-esteem may be a lagging measure of local social feedback: if a person’s social world repeatedly signals that they contribute, belong, and matter, self-esteem rises; if the world repeatedly signals rejection or maladaptive behavior, it would be strange, even maladaptive, to ignore that. Lyubomirsky says he has independently reproduced a serious psychological theory: self-esteem as a “sociometer,” a meter of social standing and acceptance.

On that basis, if she were designing a self-esteem intervention, she says she would tell people to help others and contribute to community. That overlaps with her three broad buckets for happiness: connection with other people, contribution to society or community, and personal growth. Personal growth can mean learning to garden, learning a language, traveling, or pursuing experiences that enrich one’s life and become shareable with others. Sitting alone in a garage all day, she says, is unlikely to build esteem.

Receiving love, then, is not passive. Williamson gives the everyday example of a person who deflects a genuine compliment. The giver has tried to offer something good; the receiver bats it away; now neither person feels good. Lyubomirsky says people can get better at receiving compliments and generosity through practice. As people age, she has noticed friends becoming more able simply to receive.

Sonja Lyubomirsky does not treat romantic love as the only, or necessarily the best, source of feeling loved. Many people in Western society would name their romantic relationship as their most important source of love, and she notes that many people eventually marry. But her personal view is that “friends are what makes life worth living.”

She also says men derive more happiness from romantic relationships than women do, a pattern Williamson connects to men concentrating more of their social belonging in a partner and suffering more after divorce. Women, in their exchange, are described as more likely to distribute social support across close friendships and support networks.

Williamson brings in the idea that a partner may occupy multiple close-friend “slots,” and worries that people without partners may not compensate with additional close friendships while people with partners may overload the relationship. Lyubomirsky connects this to Eli Finkel’s argument in The All-Or-Nothing Marriage: modern partners are often expected to satisfy sexual, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and social needs.

People may know one person cannot meet every need, yet still behave as if they should. Delegating needs to friends and family is therefore not a failure of intimacy; it is a more realistic architecture for being loved.

That is why Lyubomirsky thinks “I feel loved by you” may be as important as, or more important than, “I love you.” “I love you” reports the speaker’s feeling. “I feel loved by you” tells the other person that their love has landed. If someone is loved but does not feel loved, the psychological problem remains — like being beautiful but not feeling beautiful, or smart but not feeling smart.

Sonja Lyubomirsky argues that if being known is central to feeling loved, people need a sharing mindset. But she distinguishes sharing from oversharing. The point is not trauma-dumping, revealing everything immediately, or ignoring social context. It is allowing another person to see more than the highlight reel.

Her practical model is gradual and responsive. If someone asks how she is, she might move beyond “fine” and say she had a rough morning. Then she watches the response. Does the other person have interest and room? That first disclosure is a “toe in the water.” If the response supports it, sharing can deepen.

What gets shared need not be painful. It can be a real opinion, an uncertainty, a value, or a dislike of a movie everyone else likes. The point is to show something genuine about the person inside.

Williamson describes a cultural obstacle from the UK: teasing, “piss-taking,” and banter can punish unusual opinions or vulnerable disclosures. If a person offers something slightly outside the expected line and receives ridicule rather than interest, they learn to offer less. Lyubomirsky calls this a vicious cycle. The less sharing is encouraged, the less someone shares; the less they share, the less they are known; the less they are known, the less they can feel loved.

One bad experience can dominate the record. Lyubomirsky says someone may be vulnerable once, get judged or have it used against them, and then decide never to reveal anything again. “Bad is stronger than good,” she says: negative events are remembered and overgeneralized.

The antidote begins with the receiver. Lyubomirsky says feeling loved “starts with curiosity.” If someone asks a question they genuinely want answered, the other person feels safer and more inspired to share. Genuine curiosity is rare. People do not often ask with real interest about what is happening in another person’s inner life.

She describes this as part of “radical curiosity.” It includes enthusiasm — the sense that the listener is excited to hear what the other person has to say. Charismatic people, she says, are often good at this; others are drawn to them because they make people feel interesting and worth hearing.

Question-asking matters because, in Lyubomirsky’s account, people underestimate how welcome deeper questions can be. She says research shows people fear that asking a deep question will seem nosy or intrusive. Sometimes it will. But on average, she says, people crave being seen and known. She gives the example of her daughter’s roommate, who appeared to be having serious family problems. The daughter hesitated to ask what was going on because she feared prying. Lyubomirsky’s instinct was that the roommate might instead feel supported and loved.

Vulnerability itself carries a paradox. Lyubomirsky says people fear vulnerability will make others like them less. On average, she says, it makes others like them more. A flaw that feels humiliating from the inside may read as human from the outside. She gives a recent example of blanking during a talk, standing onstage mortified and saying she did not know what came next. Afterward, people told her it made her more human.

Williamson connects this to the Pratfall Effect: the likable imperfection of a competent person who makes a small mistake. Lyubomirsky quotes a screenwriter’s line: if you want to write a character no one connects with, make them perfect. Perfection is not human, interesting, or complex.

A father-daughter gymnastics clip becomes Lyubomirsky’s clearest example of love that is powerful but imperfectly sequenced. The vertical video, displayed from the Instagram account @j_miss_leg_sauce, shows a young girl on a gym mat telling her father she is scared and not brave. The father, identified in the transcript as Anthony, kneels at her level and answers with reassurance, challenge, and unconditional belonging.

The father tells her she is brave, that she is doing skills “insane to even adults,” and that she has “more courage” in her body than a thousand people. He also makes the love explicit: “You are mine and I am yours,” “Nothing you can do will ever make me stop loving you,” and “Nothing you will do will ever cause me to give up on you.” He tells her she can quit cheer if she truly does not love it, but not because something scares her. He also tells her that if he has made her feel not good enough or unloved, he has not done his job as a father.

Sonja Lyubomirsky sees something important in the father’s response. He gets underneath the surface fear. The daughter may not only be afraid of the physical skill; she may be afraid that failure will threaten her father’s love. Lyubomirsky calls that beautiful.

Her critique is about sequencing. The girl repeatedly says she is scared, and the father responds by insisting she is brave. Lyubomirsky says therapists would generally recommend first validating the stated emotion: “I understand you feel scared right now.” Only after that would they move into encouragement, reassurance, or challenge. She is not a therapist, she notes, but she thinks the emotional validation matters.

That point leads to a broader claim about listening. Most people, Lyubomirsky says, are not very good listeners. She cites one study finding that when people are listening, their minds wander 25% of the time; she suspects the true figure is higher. People are distracted, rehearsing what they want to say next, or preparing to fix the problem.

The desire to fix is not always wrong. Lyubomirsky discusses the well-known “nail in the head” video, where a woman complains of pain and shredded sweaters while a nail is visibly lodged in her forehead. The man keeps pointing out the obvious solution; she wants to be heard. Lyubomirsky accepts the point that validation should come first, but says the pendulum may have swung too far toward validating and away from advice. Sometimes people do need advice. They need to be told to take the nail out.

Her preferred order is simple: validate first, advise later.

Williamson distinguishes between performative therapy-speak and actually staying present with someone in discomfort. Phrases such as “holding space” have become clichés, he says, but the underlying act — sitting in the emotion with another person — remains valuable. Lyubomirsky says she dislikes the phrase, but names one form of therapeutic language she strongly supports: nonviolent communication.

The core, for her, is using I-statements rather than you-statements. Instead of “Why do you always do this?” or “What’s wrong with you?”, a person might say, “I feel hurt when this happens.” The process includes naming one’s experience, describing the observation, seeking understanding, and making a request. In a household conflict, that could mean saying, “I feel overburdened when you don’t wash the dishes,” then asking to talk about how chores are split.

The request is the vulnerable part. Criticism announces displeasure while putting the ball in the other person’s court. A request exposes a need and gives the other person an opportunity to reject it. Lyubomirsky agrees: asking is hard because it risks rejection.

When someone reaches the edge of vulnerability — fear, tightness in the chest, reluctance to reveal more — Lyubomirsky’s advice is both bold and cautious. Take the leap, because many good things in life require risk. But go slowly. Reveal something smaller first. Take baby steps.

Sonja Lyubomirsky lays out several mindsets that help people feel loved: curiosity, sharing, listening with acceptance, open heart, and multiplicity. Open heart is the most obvious: warmth, kindness, believing in the other person, wanting them to be happy, and wanting their dreams to come true. Most stable relationships, she hopes, already have it.

But early readers of her book used the mindsets diagnostically rather than merely prescriptively. Two male friends told her they broke up with their girlfriends after reading it. One realized neither partner was sharing much. Another realized his girlfriend was no longer curious about his work and never asked about it. Warmth may have remained, but crucial channels of knowing and being known had closed.

Multiplicity is Lyubomirsky’s favorite mindset. She says the term comes from trauma research: a trauma may be part of a person, but it does not define them. People are quilts of many traits, histories, behaviors, and contradictions. Someone can be kind sometimes and selfish at other times; loyal sometimes and narcissistic at other times. To use a multiplicity lens is to see another person in that complexity, especially when they reveal something uncomfortable or morally unattractive.

People accept this abstractly, she says. They nod along. But in concrete cases, they struggle. They quickly reduce someone to “jerk” or “asshole.” Multiplicity asks the listener not to condone bad behavior, but also not to collapse the person into the behavior.

Williamson notes that people often try to escape discomfort by fixing, minimizing, or making the emotion go away. If someone says a colleague makes them feel small and unwelcome, a friend may respond by calling the colleague a “bitch” and telling them not to care. That may be intended as loyalty, but it fails to stay with the person’s actual experience. The more useful response would ask what it has been like, what they fear it means, or what emotion follows the incident.

Lyubomirsky gives an example from coaching. She was upset by something a friend had done and began rationalizing and minimizing it. The coach stopped her and told her to skip rumination, justification, and rationalization, and go “right into sadness.” Before explaining the friend’s behavior away, she had to feel the sadness that the friend had done it.

She distinguishes compassion from excusing. In another case, someone sent a terrible text and a group initially judged him harshly. Then one friend said that when she read it, she saw the little boy inside him, or the teenage boy rejected by girls. That did not justify the text, Lyubomirsky says, but it allowed a more complex view. Compassion may help one understand without obligating one to stay close.

The practical reason multiplicity matters is that people feel loved when they are not reduced to their worst moment, their most awkward disclosure, or the trait that frustrates another person. But the same mindset has limits. Seeing complexity does not mean accepting every relationship at any cost.

When asked what makes people feel unloved in relationships, Sonja Lyubomirsky points first to invisibility. People feel unloved when the other person stops noticing them, stops asking questions, and stops being curious. This often happens in long relationships because familiarity creates the illusion of complete knowledge. People assume they already know the person they have known longest.

Lyubomirsky rejects that assumption. Every day, people have new fears, dreams, self-doubts, and regrets. Curiosity cannot be retired because the relationship is old.

The signs of being loved are often small. When people are asked what makes them feel loved, she says, many examples involve little acts of noticing: a friend bringing water, fruit, or a blanket before she realized she needed one. The power of those gestures is not the object itself. It is the evidence that someone is paying attention closely enough to anticipate a need.

That attention also matters in response to good news. Lyubomirsky says she cannot summarize the strongest predictors of long-term relationship satisfaction broadly because she is a happiness scientist and partnered with a love scientist for the book. But she highlights one finding she finds especially interesting: in the research she describes, how partners respond to good news predicts relationship duration better than how they respond to bad news.

Bad news has a clearer script. If someone comes home and says they were laid off or the car broke down, most people know they should comfort, support, and help. Good news can be more threatening. A new job offer in New York may imply a move, less time at home, changed childcare demands, or career envy. Because of those mixed implications, genuine celebration can be harder than support during difficulty.

The strongest response, in her account, is enthusiastic “capitalizing”: celebrating the good thing with the partner, asking what happened, showing excitement, and dealing with any insecurities later. Williamson notes that caring for someone who is struggling can be easier than celebrating someone who is winning. Lyubomirsky agrees and adds that many people have a short list of people with whom they feel safe sharing wins. People are trained not to boast, even though they need spaces where good news can be celebrated.

If one person is sharing, listening, asking questions, practicing curiosity, seeing the other with multiplicity, and receiving them with warmth — and the other person does not reciprocate — Sonja Lyubomirsky says it may be necessary to walk away. She notes that she is not a therapist, and family relationships may not be escapable in the same way. With a family member, one may have to accept that this person will not provide the love one wants. But in relationships where a choice is possible, persistent nonreciprocity may mean the choice was poor.

Chris Williamson describes the pain as the flexing of a bridge: one side moves, the other does not, and the tension comes from trying to force an incompatibility to become something else. Lyubomirsky agrees, while preserving the counterpoint. Some people end relationships too quickly, especially in an individualistic culture and on dating apps. Others stay forever in relationships that are plainly wrong and unhappy. Both can be true.

Williamson calls this “advice hyper-responders”: people who already lean in a direction often absorb the advice that pushes them further that way. The person who already feels emotionally inadequate overcorrects toward endless opening up. The person who already cannot stop working absorbs “work harder” advice. The person who already stays too long hears “don’t let good relationships fall away” and burdens themselves further.

Lyubomirsky offers a unifying concept: dosage. She invokes Aristotle’s golden mean and says almost everything has an optimal amount. Acts of kindness can be overdone; one can be too kind and neglect oneself. One can also do too little. The challenge is not to absolutize a virtue, but to find its right dose.

Sonja Lyubomirsky says the habits most likely to improve feeling loved are curiosity and listening, with sharing close behind. The more she thinks about these mindsets, the more she sees them applying beyond intimate relationships. In her summary of the research, curiosity and listening can reduce polarization when people genuinely engage those on the other side of a political spectrum. She also says research on leaders, managers, and supervisors shows that when they are curious and truly listen to employees, employees become more productive, more engaged, and less likely to quit.

Sharing can also reduce prejudice, in Lyubomirsky’s account. She describes a study in which people visibly marked as politically different — “wearing different hats,” as she puts it — shared ordinary human struggles, such as difficulty with a son. Hearing a similar struggle from someone on the other side reduced prejudice and polarization. The mechanism, in her telling, is not debate; it is shared humanity.

If someone wanted to do one thing tomorrow to feel more loved, Lyubomirsky recommends having a conversation with the person they want to feel loved by — at least 15 minutes. Her broader happiness tip is the same: have a 15-minute conversation with someone. But the quality of the conversation matters. Show up with more sharing, better listening, curiosity, warmth, and acceptance.

The move is deliberately smaller than “fix my relationship” or “become lovable.” Relationships, she says, are a series of conversations, including nonverbal ones. If feeling loved seems overwhelming, change the next conversation or the next few conversations.

Williamson describes one structure from his own life that serves the same principle: a standing Friday 6 p.m. dinner reservation as an open invitation for six to eight people. Whoever is in town comes. Sometimes it is a group; sometimes it is just him and one other person. The point is that the social decision has already been made. Even on a more introverted day, he goes and later feels it was worth it.

Lyubomirsky endorses the structure and adds a related habit from a friend: when someone says, “Let’s get together,” do not leave the interaction without making a firm plan — a specific date, time, and place. Otherwise, the intention dissolves into vague texts and scheduling drift.

The shared point is that relationships need logistics, not just sentiment. A desire for closeness does not reliably become closeness unless it is converted into repeated contact.

Across her studies, Sonja Lyubomirsky names one as her favorite: asking people to act more extroverted for a week. The researchers did not use the term “extroverted,” because it carries cultural connotations. Instead, they asked people to act more sociable, energetic, and talkative. In another week, they asked participants to act more introverted, using words such as deliberate and quiet.

She says the results surprised them. The week in which people acted more extroverted produced some of the biggest effects she had seen in any intervention: people were much happier, and “everything improved.” During the introversion week, people sometimes became less happy or showed no change. The effect, she says, was the same for introverts and extroverts.

For Lyubomirsky, the surprising part was that introverts benefited too. She praises Susan Cain’s Quiet and says she values introversion, but she questions the popular definition that introverts get energy from being alone and are depleted by social interaction. She says the evidence is not really holding up. With one exception, she says, studies show that introverts asked to act more social do not feel depleted or exhausted. She adds that more research may be needed.

The instruction to act more social does not mean telling an introvert to become the life of a party. Lyubomirsky emphasizes choice of expression. An introvert might call a friend, chat a little more at lunch, or say one thing in a class section. She gives her own example: she was very shy when young, and in college forced herself to say one thing in each section. It was terrifying, but repetition made it easier.

Williamson suggests that many introverts may be finding a comfortable home base rather than protecting a fixed energetic essence. Social capacity can be trained or detrained. Lyubomirsky’s study supports at least the practical claim that more social behavior, chosen at a manageable dose, can improve happiness even for those who identify as introverted.

Sonja Lyubomirsky says one common misconception about happiness is the “I’ll be happy when…” belief: when I have a baby, move to New York, get the job, enter the relationship, or reach the next milestone. People often are happy when those things happen, but then hedonic adaptation sets in. The new circumstance becomes normal.

She gives adaptation an evolutionary defense. Humans might never progress without it; if achievement produced permanent satisfaction, people might stop striving. But psychologically, it means people overinvest in changed circumstances as the path to lasting happiness. They bring the same self to the new relationship, city, or job.

There are caveats. If someone lives in a war zone, is poor, or is in an abusive relationship, changing circumstances can make them happier in a much more durable and necessary way. Her claim applies to people in broadly normal, comfortable conditions. For them, many circumstance changes produce temporary lifts.

Williamson asks whether hedonic adaptation can be hacked. Lyubomirsky gives four tools: variety, novelty, surprise, and gratitude.

People adapt to constant stimuli. A new car is exciting at first, then becomes unnoticed. Variety and novelty interrupt sameness. In relationships, that can mean doing new activities together, learning new things, seeing new friends, and remembering that people are dynamic rather than fixed stimuli. Surprise also interrupts adaptation, provided it is positive rather than harmful.

Gratitude, she says, is the antidote to hedonic adaptation because adaptation is a form of taking for granted. To feel grateful for health is to stop taking health for granted. To feel grateful for a spouse, car, or view is to re-notice what familiarity has hidden. She acknowledges that this is not easy; repeatedly generating genuine gratitude for the same thing is difficult.

One thing she says people may not adapt to in the same way is a view. She has a beautiful view and thinks it is worth paying for. She speculates that part of its durability may be variety — weather and seasons keep changing what is seen — and part may be evolutionary: humans may be hardwired to value vistas, water, and mountains because they once helped with survival and orientation.

When Williamson asks what a 20-year-old should prioritize for the highest probability of being happy at 50, Lyubomirsky’s answer is immediate: relationships. More specifically: effortful maintenance of relationships, learning social skills, practicing conversation, spending time with people face to face, listening, curiosity, and sharing. She wishes schools and colleges taught social skills more explicitly. People should not spend life alone in a garage on a screen, because that does not train the capacities relationships require.