3 Simple Ways to Get the Love You Want

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Mel's most controversial line is 'I love you'

  She ends every episode, newsletter and YouTube video with 'in case no one else tells you, I love you and I believe in you and your ability to create a better life.' Listeners write that they stay to the end just to hear it, and one woman said Mel is the only person in her adult life who has said it to her. Others loathe it. This solo episode explains why she says it and why she means it.

• 02

  The line comes from a principal's daily sign-off

  In 2013, at one of Mel's first unpaid speaking events, she heard Linda Cliatt-Wayman address about 12,000 women at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. A former special education teacher, Wayman volunteered to lead Strawberry Mansion, a Philadelphia school considered among the most dangerous and failing in the state, after four principals in four years. She ended each day over the PA system: 'If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will,' adding that she expected them back, in uniform, ready to learn.

• 03

  Love, in this sense, is believing in someone's potential

  Wayman said her real secret was loving her students and believing in their possibilities unconditionally: 'When I look at them, I can only see what they can become.' Mel says that struck her 'like lightning' and became her definition: seeing somebody's struggles and still seeing the greatness in them.

• 04

  Mel defines love as showing people they matter

  The dictionary calls love a feeling of affection; Mel calls it demonstrating that someone matters to you, echoing the Dalai Lama's definition as a wish that others be happy. Under that definition, it has nothing to do with sex or chemistry and can extend well beyond family, partners and pets.

• 05

  You can love people you don't like

  Mel says she sometimes thinks families exist to teach us how to love people we don't like at the moment. You can show someone matters, by calling or hugging them, even when they're frustrating you.

• 06

  One committed adult changes outcomes

  Mel cites Harvard's National Scientific Council on the Developing Child: every child who does well has had at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult. She extends it to work, saying research shows the single biggest predictor of someone failing at or leaving a job is believing no one in power there believes in them.

• 07

  Hostility to being loved often traces to conditional love

  Mel reads a newsletter reply from Trish, who said Mel doesn't know her and to stop 'spouting this crap,' then unsubscribed. Mel's response: love isn't transactional, so she still loves her. Her theory is that people who grew up getting attention only when a caregiver was in a good mood or they earned good grades learn that mattering must be earned and comes in limited supply.

• 08

  You don't need to know someone to believe in them

  To a listener named John who said Mel doesn't even know he exists, Mel replies that everyone wants the same three things: to be seen, to be heard and to matter. Believing there's more to a person than their job, relationship status, bank account or weight doesn't require meeting them.

• 09

  To feel more love, give more of it

  Mel's formula for anything you want more of is to be generous with it. She invokes the law of reciprocity: when someone holds the first set of double doors for you, you trip over yourself to hold the second. Being the first domino with 'I love that you did that' sets it in motion.

• 10

  Don't assume people know how you feel

  Mel calls holding back appreciation 'stingy.' Her friend in his late 50s told his father he loved him for decades and first heard it back two weeks earlier, from a hospital bed. Now his dad says it constantly. If your family never says it, she suggests you may be the one meant to break the cycle.