Listening as an Act of Love

This week, three different clients brought me the same ache: I don't feel heard outside of this space. Not ignored, exactly. Just quietly, persistently unheard, as though what they were saying was landing somewhere just short of the person in front of them.

It's tempting to treat that as a communication problem with better phrasing or the right script for the right moment. Those things help. But sitting with it this week, I found myself thinking less about technique and more about something older and larger: that listening, properly done, isn't really a skill we deploy. It's a form of love. Here's what I mean, in practice.

1. Be available before a word is spoken

Long before someone can feel heard, something has to already be true between two people: an availability. A willingness to be affected by what's coming, before it's even said.

It's not enough to announce "I'm hearing you" hearing is passive, sound simply arriving. Listening is active. It has to be demonstrated, felt, proven, in the moment, again and again, and it starts with whether we've made room for the other person before they've opened their mouth.

Try this: Ask each other, what time of day do we tend to have our best conversations? When are you available? What's a tell-tale sign that my attention is fading? Show me the face I make when I'm really listening to you.

2. Go back to the beginning

Most of us were taught to speak up but rarely taught to listen with the same discipline. Yet the adults who first took our stories seriously, who leaned in rather than glazed over, quietly shaped what we now expect, or don't expect, from being heard.

Try this: Ask each other, as a child, how could you tell an adult was taking you seriously? What were you taught, at home or in school, about listening?

3. Take your finger off the rebuttal button

According to Howard Markman, we have roughly ten seconds, about three sentences, before the rebuttal button gets pushed, before we start composing our defence instead of absorbing what's being said. Even when we don't interrupt, we're often quietly gathering ammunition for "our turn." Part of the trouble is that we talk about feelings as though they were facts, which turns a conversation into a debate.

Try this: Instead of listening for flaws or counterarguments, listen to understand. Instead of concentrating on being right, concentrate on what's actually being said.

4. Use a structure: speak from "I," listen in mirror

This is where a formal structure helps, because it takes the guesswork out of good intentions.

• The speaker talks from "I" and "me" — I feel... what's bothering me is... — rather than "you," which so easily lands as accusation.

• The listener mirrors, without adding or defending: "Let me see if I understand — you're saying X. Did I get that right?"

• The speaker confirms: "yes, you did" or "you got some of it."

• The listener asks, simply: "is there more?"

• Once the speaker feels fully heard, the listener validates: "what you've said makes sense."

• Then the listener empathises, sharing what they imagine the speaker might be feeling.

Try this: Practise it on something small and low-stakes first, before you need it for something that matters.

5. Remember why it matters

Erich Fromm, the thinker behind much of the structure above, believed real listening requires a capacity for empathy strong enough to feel another's experience as our own and that this capacity is inseparable from love: not the erotic kind, but the reaching-out kind, the kind that risks losing a little of yourself in order to understand someone else.

Irvin Yalom called what heals people in therapy his "professional rosary": it's the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals. Not the insight. The relationship, built, moment by moment, from a thousand small instances of being truly met.

The evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia closes his book The Intimate Animal on almost the same note: humans will always live and die for love and understanding why gives us the power to find, and nurture, a love worth living for.

Between these lines sits the same instruction, understanding isn't separate from love. It's how we practise it.