How to Feel Loved (without Lying About Who You Are)

By Gayle Scroggs, PhD, PCC

People can care about you, and still not really know you. And when that happens, you don’t feel loved.

You may be partnered, friended, texted, relied upon, admired, included—and still move through each day without ever quite feeling deeply known or emotionally held.

Over time, you may stop expecting to feel deeply loved at all.

That is the heartache that How to Feel Loved takes seriously, a new book with a surprising take on a perennial theme.

The authors, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis, are two of the most influential researchers in positive psychology and relationship science. Their central claim is that feeling loved depends on relational mindsets and behaviors that go beyond simply providing care.

This book offers a practical path that makes feeling more loved possible.

At the center of that path are five relational mindsets—ways of sharing, listening, and responding—that make it more likely you will be deeply known and, in turn, more able to feel loved.

Without these mindsets, even caring relationships can leave you feeling unseen, misunderstood, or emotionally alone.

What are those five mindsets?

These are not empty abstractions. They are five ways of relating that change what love feels like from the inside: sharing, listening to learn, radical curiosity, open-heartedness, and multiplicity. And one of the clearest ways to see their importance is to ask what life feels like without them.

1. SHARING MINDSET

When you don’t share, people may care about you without ever really knowing you. Conversations can be pleasant, functional, even affectionate, but over time you suffer a kind of loneliness that comes when your truest self is not known by the people who matter most.

As the authors make clear, sharing does not mean oversharing. It is the willingness to let more of what is true of you be seen, rather than maintaining a mask. That allows others to respond to the full you, not just a managed impression. And that, in turn, means you can feel truly loved.

2. LISTENING TO LEARN MINDSET

When people are not listening to learn, conversations can leave you feeling managed rather than understood. You may be advised, reassured, corrected, or analyzed—but not truly heard. Over time, that creates its own kind of loneliness: the sense that your inner life is of no interest to others.

Listening to learn means quieting your agenda to really understand another person.

3. RADICAL CURIOSITY MINDSET

When others are not curious about who you are becoming, relationships can begin to feel flat and stale. People may care about you yet still keep relating to an outdated version of you. Over time, that creates its own quiet ache: the sense that your deeper life is evolving unwitnessed.

Radical curiosity means remaining open to another person’s ever-changing inner world, rather than assuming you already know who they are. And when someone stays curious about you, you feel seen as you are now rather than as you once were.

4. OPEN-HEARTEDNESS MINDSET

When open-heartedness is missing, even caring relationships can feel emotionally cool. Loyalty, reliability, and good intentions may abound—but without much warmth. Over time, that can create a palpable sense of deprivation: something vital is missing.

Open-heartedness means expressing warmth, delight, and affirmation in ways another person can feel. When that spirit is present, love becomes easier to feel.

5. MULTIPLICITY MINDSET

When multiplicity is missing, relationships can begin to feel cramped. You may sense that only certain parts of you are welcome—your strength, your charm, your competence, your usefulness—but not your insecurity, your fear, your perfectionism, your defensiveness, or your unpredictability. Over time, that creates a quiet pressure to curate yourself into someone easier for others to understand.

Multiplicity means making room for the many-sided reality of a person. It resists the urge to flatten someone into a role, a trait, or a familiar story. It allows a person to be admirable and difficult, reassuring and unpredictable, growing and unfinished.

Real love does not ask you to edit yourself in order to belong. You can be your fully, messy self and still be cherished.

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One of the great gifts of this book is that it reveals our agency. We can empower ourselves to create love.

Love is not chemistry or magic. It grows as we develop the mindsets and skills that help people feel loved.

This insight resonates with what Carl Rogers, one of my guiding lights, understood so deeply:  People become free to be fully themselves only in relationships where they are met with empathy, genuineness, and unconditional regard. So much of human pain comes from “conditions of worth” — the belief that love, welcome, or approval must be secured by getting everything right. But love becomes more real when we learn how to offer one another something better than that.

And as we grow in these mindsets and skills, as described by Lyubomirsky and Reis, we also learn to recognize them in others — not only in their fullness, but in small beginnings, imperfect efforts, and little glimmers.

We can cultivate and nurture the kind of love that helps us, and those around us, truly feel loved.

How to Feel Loved:  The Five Mindsets that Get You More of What Matters Most by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis, 2026.