If you ask me, love’s recipe has four main ingredients. These ingredients are often hard to come by as our world substitutes these precious elements with synthetic, artificial imitations. The ingredients are acceptance, accountability, grace, and understanding. Without these pure ingredients, it is impossible to complete the recipe for love. If you use the synthetic version of these components, you will likely end up baking quite a disaster.

In this blog, I am going to discuss the fourth ingredient for love, understanding.

The recipe for love requires a great amount of understanding—it is like flour to a bread dough—the main ingredient that brings it all together. In its simplest definition, understanding is an awareness of otherness. However, sometimes that which is simple is not so easily digestible.

The dictionary defines understanding (noun) as the ability to comprehend something or obtain knowledge about something or someone. As an adjective, it is defined as being sympathetically aware of other people’s feelings, tolerant and forgiving. A more archaic definition defines understanding as having insight or good judgment.

The metaphorical definition of understanding means to “stand under the experience of the other and relate to it by way of comprehension or fathomability.” Understanding is the relation between the knower and an object of understanding.

Understanding is knowledge of something or someone in context and relation to me. That does not mean “to have knowledge of something or someone.” It’s more than knowledge or information. It’s how I can apply the knowledge to the context and in relation to the situation.

Often, and unfortunately, we confuse understanding with knowledge. There’s having knowledge and then there’s understanding how or why or when that knowledge can be accessed and utilized in context. To have knowledge is to say, “Hey! Look at all these tools I have in my garage, all lined up on my workbench. Aren’t these tools great? I have so many tools.” But the thing is, if you don’t know how to use all the tools, what good do they serve you? We can have a great deal of knowledge of something but very little understanding of it. Fortunately, however, we can understand something or someone even if we have no knowledge of it or them.  
German philosopher and writer, Carl Hempel, saw that understanding is highly subjective and psychological whereas explanation or evaluation asks and answers questions but in an objective manner. Understanding, according to Hempel emphasized a more subjective “sense” of comprehension, often tied to a sense of familiarity.

Understanding is related to the senses, a familiar sense—a relatable sense; it is a subjective comprehension that creates a connection between the knower and the other, in context. Context is the primary function of understanding.


“Understanding as not a captured stillness
or singularity but rather a momentary pause
in an ongoing movement of unfolding.”
Lisbeth Lipari


It is difficult to extend understanding in our modern social-media age, however. We have very little practice with understanding because it has become taboo. Many people believe to understand someone or something is to agree with it, endorse it, or vote for it. Understanding humanizes the other. That’s actually the greatest gift of this component of love. It’s subjective and human and relatable. In our society, however, we have allowed the idea of understanding something or someone to mean advocating for it. This, of course, is a myth.

It's more likely that the reason we avoid understanding or reject it is because it requires a bit more mental energy than we want to invest. Our response time in the communication world has been drastically reduced. To the point that pauses and silent spaces in conversations have come to be seen as generally awkward or even rude. As if every space of the moment must be filled with reactions or comments or opinions or judgments.

To understand someone is to take more than 3 seconds to process what they have said. Technological advancements have created an insta-world in which we want everything now, now, now. So, we find devices to shorten the wait time and offer regurgitated rhetoric intended to create reactivity and irritation. We call it like it is, label it and move on. Plop it into this category and move to the next piece of information to consume without comprehension. It’s almost as if we are celebrating our lack of understanding by the way we participate in misunderstanding everyone and everything.

One must choose to understand. We all have the capacity to understand, it’s just that we have to be consciously choosing understanding in the moment. Sure, it requires a few more mental movements than robotically reacting and dismissing something, but the energy investment is more than profitable. Understanding uses energy, but it also produces energy.

Understanding is placing you in my perspective. I immerse myself in you and look at it with your eyes. But that’s like putting on a pair of prescription lenses that were made for someone else. And sometimes, that can cause a headache. So too can seeking to understand the other, but not so much as it creates a headache per se, it does require critical thought which requires me to willingly turn off autopilot.

The intention to understand the other also requires my willingness to be curious rather than to think I already know all that I need to determine if you are good or bad, right or wrong, left or right. Judgment occurs when I choose to not understand. To understand someone or something is to step outside of black and white thinking.

Principle:
When I choose to understand, I reject the choice to judge or to box-in the other. I choose to know what is unknown.

Understanding is not about being on the same side; it’s about seeing the inside of the outside.
When I understand you, it doesn’t mean that I am adopting your beliefs, concerns, and positions; it's not about me, it's about how I see it. It means that I know where you are coming from, and I can see what your beliefs, concerns, and positions are, and accept them. The act of understanding someone or something else isn’t about me, it is merely filtered through me. Through a sense of “Oh, I get that.”