Real Love

The truth about finding unconditional love and fulfilling relationships. – By Greg Baer, M.D.

Book Review

Being a person who has been striving for real love my whole life, my interest was piqued by the title of this book. As I began to read it my concepts were challenged, and as I continued I found deep insight into the nature of love and relationships.

Baer makes some pretty strong statements about what love is and what it is not in the first few chapters of the book. Then he outlines some simple but profound steps for creating real love in our lives, which he elaborates on through many anecdotal stories. The genius of this book though is how it gradually takes the reader through realms of self-reflection and discovery.

I grew up in a home with loving parents who I remained close to until they passed away. They gave me a great deal of support and encouragement throughout my life. Even still, I can remember when I was 12 years old praying to God to understand why I didn’t feel loved.

There are a lot of reasons besides abuse and neglect that can cause a person to feel unloved. Some of those reasons are related to personality and love languages. But this book doesn’t venture into that area; its focus is on exposing our false concepts about love, and teaching how unconditional love can develop.

Throughout our lives we have learned to imitate behaviors of conditional love while we internally seek unconditional love from others. Without meaning to we often sabotage our own relationships through our expectations and disappointment. Even the best relationships can sink into trouble, or be improved, through subtle shifts in attitude and motivation.

Baer helps us understand the practical process of growth that is at the core of all spirituality – the development of a heart of unconditional love. Although the book only mentions God in one paragraph toward the end, it never even alludes to being a spiritual book. Instead it describes in non-religious terminology what every great spiritual teacher has tried to teach the world – how to love.

There is no judgment expressed toward any type of relationship or past mistakes. But to my surprise in chapter 8 he puts forth some really great arguments in favor of a lifelong marriage commitment as being the best way to truly learn to love unconditionally. He also speaks to the benefit of saving sex for marriage. This is from a man who has been through divorce, and has raised 7 children between the 2 marriages. He is very open about his own learning process.

There were a few concepts throughout the book that I had some disagreement with. Interestingly though, the author addresses some of those points toward the end, so it was well worth struggling through any minor irritation to discover that he was being simplistic just to make a point.

I might express a few things differently than the author does because personally I believe all emotions were created with some valuable purpose or can be directed in a productive way, but I understand why he emphasizes the destructiveness of some types of emotions. If I were going to add anything to the book it would be to suggest that there is a place for humor in the process of being truthful about our imperfections, otherwise we might all take ourselves much too seriously.

Anyone who is interested in improving their relationships, or understanding unconditional love, would benefit from reading Real Love; but you can’t give up, you’ve got to finish the book, and maybe even keep rereading it.