What Is Love, Really? (And Why It Might Not Be What You Feel)

Think about the last time you said you loved something. A meal. A song. A person who was kind to you. Now look closely at what happened just before the word arrived. Something out there pleased you, and the word rose up in response.

Most of what we call love is a reaction. If someone is nice to us, we are nice back. If something is pleasing on the eye, we love it. If a story stirs us in a way we enjoy, we love it. We use the word to point at whatever gives us a warm, pleasurable jolt.

There is nothing wrong with the jolt. But notice what it makes us. It makes us the recipient, waiting for the world to feed us the feeling. And when the world stops, when the person leaves or the pleasure fades, we feel lost and frantic, and we rush to fill the gap with the next thing.

Love as a reaction is a kind of waiting. Like an infant waiting to be fed. And the more we wait, the more passively we sit inside our own lives, the more we start to love defensively. In the interest of self-protection, we hide the parts of us we think others might not like. We become fluent in the words of love, using them as tokens to charm people into liking us back. You show me yours first, and then maybe I will show you mine. The need to be loved feels urgent and enormous, and yet, strangely, we drift further and further from the honest connection that would actually meet it.

So here are some questions worth sitting with: What does love mean for you? What do you need love to get you?

I invite you to jot it all down before you read on. And when you have, look back at your list and count something for me. How many of the things you wrote are feelings? And how many are actions?

Love as a state of Being

Here is the shift I want to offer you. Love in itself is nothing. The word is only a label we hang our cultural definitions on. For love to be alive, it has to be a set of actions. A way of living. A state of Being rather than a reaction to something out there.

We are built for this. Nature gave us the pull to bond, to attach, to nurture our own, because it kept our ancestors alive. But we did something remarkable with that raw instinct. We evolved a verbal brain that 'languages', and in doing so we turned a drive to mate and attach into something transcendent, something that pleases the body and the mind at once.

Interestingly, the neuroscience is starting to say something similar. Research summarised by the American Psychological Association finds that longer-term love does not just light up the raw reward centres we associate with early infatuation. It also recruits the more cognitive parts of the brain, including the systems that let us anticipate and mirror the actions of the person we love.

However, to mirror what love looks like, we need to practice these acts of service for ourselves and know how it feels. That is Self-Love. In other words, mature love is not the brain sitting back and being fed. It is the brain leaning forward, predicting, attending, doing. Love is an act of service, both ways. Love looks less like a feeling that happens to us and more like something we actively make.

That same verbal brain has a dark side, of course. We do not only feel the pain of loss when it arrives. We can now dread the thoughts of loss before it comes and turn it over in our minds long after it has gone.

So let me ask. What are your fears about losing love?

Some of those fears were taught to you. Disappointments you lived through, hurts you carried, troubled relationships you watched up close. The fears are protective. They were trying to keep you safe. But if we keep obeying them, they harden into pull-away habits, and those habits quietly make our nightmares come true.

To be loving is to give

I did not learn this from theory. I learnt to love under the most difficult of conditions. It was in the trials of my own love life that I finally understood...

To love is to be loving. And to be loving is being in a position of sharing.

Which is exactly where the difficulty sits. To give, we need something to give from. And nature has arranged it so that when we feel deprived or under threat, we clamp shut. We hoard. We will not share unless we have to, and only if we are sure we will get it back, ideally with interest.

The trouble is that this only ever breeds more of the same. More deprivation, more defence, and a world that shrinks a little more each year. I have lived in that shrinking world. My head stuck on a loop of searching for more, boredom and resentment running the show, nothing ever enough. I did not much like other people, and least of all myself. It is a lonely, empty place to be.

The way out is not to try harder to get love. It is to free the part of you that already knows how to care. Care for ourselves freely fills the heart, then we share naturally. And that is where being loving begins. So before moving to the next chapter, one more question to carry with you... What restrictions do you place on yourself before you will let yourself love, or be loved?

Sit with that one. We will pick it up from there.

Tien Kuei, CEO, Power to Live

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Love, as we have just explored, grows by being given away. Here are a few ways to pass it forward...

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