Love is always a type of fondness, affection, or connection. We usually say “love” as an affectionate connection between people, but it can often be free of any affection or be toward an object or idea.
The greatest psychological motivator is fear, but that fear always comes through loving something else we don’t want to lose. However, we’re frequently unaware of what we love when we’re more afraid of losing it.
Love is typically habitual in day-to-day life, and we begin loving when we make decisions that give ultimate priority to something.
The cultural concept of love is far more constrained than love as a broad concept. Typically, the cultural standard is about a strong emotional desire for something (i.e., “limerence”), either romantic or religious, and tends to have some type of selfish aspect to it.
True love is to be concerned with the best interests of the recipient of the love, which usually involves preserving it. This shows itself most clearly when people engage in heated conflicts with one another. It may be directed to preserving a person, object, belief, mode of thought, or feeling, but it always expresses as some type of action when the situation calls for it.
Everyone wants to be important, which means that everyone wants others to find value in them. In other words, each person wants others to love something associated with them, whether it’s doing or being.
Love is not only the pinnacle of human existence. It is the foundation of all human purpose and meaning:
- Survival is loving oneself at the present moment.
- Safety is loving one’s foreseeable future self.
- Love/Affection is to love others to gain friendship.
- Self-esteem is to love one’s essence.
- Self-actualization is to love others to influence their ability to love all of the above.
We can’t directly control what we love. We can only make decisions to serve the interests of something until that thing is at the pinnacle of our desires. Even then, we’re often too conflicted over values to sincerely love without hesitation.
The opposite of love is apathy, not hate. Hate is just as impassioned as love, but is a love for something opposed to the hated thing. Apathy, however, has no sentiment because it’s the entire lack of emotional association.
Classification
The complexity of our essence means we can specify very particular objects of our love.
Self
Since we’re most aware of ourselves, we feel things about us more than anything or anyone else:
- Ourselves in the present moment (i.e., “survival”)
- Ourselves in the foreseeable future (i.e., “safety“)
- Who we really are (philautia in Greek)
We can love others like ourselves, but we’re incapable of loving others more than ourselves because we don’t know about others’ needs as easily as our own. While we may understand others’ needs somewhat, we only extend our love as far as we can adapt our universal human understanding out from ourselves toward others.
If we sacrifice more for others than ourselves, we are frequently doing it from religious habit or our upbringing. That motivation, whatever it is now, started as a desire for a form of power.
Other People
There are many components for how we can love other people, and it’s indefinitely divisible.
We can love what a person possesses.
- Their things
- Their body (eros in Greek)
- Their status (e.g., family, spouse, child, storge in Greek)
- Their shared humanity (xenia in Greek)
We can love what a person does.
- Their labor and results
- Their natural abilities and understanding
- Future abilities or results
We can love who a person is (agape/philia in Greek, depending on whether we have more power or the same).
We can love someone who doesn’t exist yet, such as what they may or will become.
Any attempt to overwork our sacrifice for others will fail because our constant changing will make our expectations constantly fail.
Others
We can love a deity, idea, feeling, or possession as if it were a physical, present, living thing. Frequently, we’ll love specifically what a god possesses, does, etc. as if they were another person.
We can even love the idea of someone or something. In this case, we’re stripping the values we like from the person and creating an image that reality can’t touch, often harming the actual being that was the source of inspiration.
Further, we can subdivide or combine various loves as our desires and affections change. Language itself doesn’t have enough words to capture the mix-and-match varieties of how we love.
Expression
Loving is always sharing, and it includes various sacrifices:
- Power, in one of its forms.
- Affection and intimacy.
- Understanding, and the time it takes to deliver it.
- Risking absolutely any sort of adverse self-interest for another’s benefit.
We can’t see love directly from the soul, but we can see it through what we spend much of our effort doing. And, since we’re spending so much effort on it, our results from loving will only loosely connect to whether we actually do love.
Small variations in portions of what we love creates profound differences in how we demonstrate it:
- Loving someone’s safety more than their happiness will mean protecting them against their will.
- Loving something’s use over its appearance will mean we will damage its exterior over time.
- Loving an idea’s application more than its inherent qualities means we will change our minds about it later.
- Loving our present self over our future self provokes us to avoid planning for the future.
We often can’t tell if others love us, or in what capacity of preservation, and it creates a communication barrier because we must take their love on faith.
The most effective way to love someone, however, is in a way they weren’t expecting.
Ideal
Many forms of love, taken to excess, risk committing evil to other things that aren’t loved:
- If we ever love a non-living or barely sentient thing more than another aware being, we will wrongly harm a being to protect a thing.
- If we love one person over another (rather than merely preferring) we are risking unfair treatment.
- If we ever desire power at another’s expense, we’re plotting a roundabout form of evil.
- If we desire someone’s body, time, energy, or anything else they possess, we only love conditional things about that person. The easiest way to tell is how easily we’d be able to transfer that love to someone else.
The only form of love with no limit requires a person to act in the interests of another living being’s soul and their good life without mixing in self-interest. That action can go as far as sacrificing one’s life for that cause.
Barring a legitimate transformation of one’s soul, there is no chance that we will naturally love. We will grow to love, however, if we adapt the values of religions that endorse love.
This often breaks down when we talk about how others respond to that love. Many people will abuse it, misunderstand it, or receive it and not act any differently.
Post-modern discussion argues on the “purity” of a loving action that’s only determined toward a positive consequence for oneself (i.e., Kantian ethics). However, we love because we wish to see positive results in the recipient of our love, and we still choose to love ourselves by even considering ourselves as part of the experience. In that sense, just because the object of our love isn’t there does not mean we don’t love something, and it can frequently be ourselves.
Society needs love large-scale to prevent perpetual conflicts among people from quickly turning into evil. Most unrequited love comes from cultural barriers and misunderstanding intent to be worse than it was (often from the recipient’s past trauma).
Loving people requires vulnerability, which is a social risk that could lead to lost power, so most people are too afraid to love. Instead, most people try to find a middle ground between self-interest and love (“selfish love”).
Application
People want to be important, so they look for power to find love somehow. Once they’ve made habits about it and haven’t been loved, they frequently lose their decision-making capacity for others’ interests and slowly drift toward choosing evil.
Many people who talk about “undying affection” or “oneness with the universe” are associated with limerent feelings, which are not any legitimate form of love. True love is far less sensational, and preoccupies itself with the well-being of others.
All human purpose is driven by love of something, so all people are merely prioritizing one thing over another:
- Self-preservation is simply self-love.
- Corruption is only a desire for power.
- Greed and materialism are the love of things.
- Group identity is the love of the values the group stands for.
- Rebellion is the love against something.
- Self-destructive desires are frequently the love of nonexistence or a misplaced sense of justice.
The most significant meaning we can ever find is through loving other people. Every other form of love is inferior by comparison, including loving an ideal or loving what a person could be.
If we love others, we must frequently set aside the ideals we have for them. Otherwise, we end up loving our imagination of them more than those around us.
Even when people pursue the same thing, they typically don’t love the same thing behind the pursuit, and this will eventually create a conflict later.
Loving someone’s physical state is easy, but isn’t as important as loving someone’s soul. To love a person’s soul, they sometimes must reap adverse consequences, and other times must receive undue grace.
Since meaning comes best through love, and love is most directly adopted through religions that endorse it, we must learn love through a religion. This will either express through self-determination to build it (e.g., Buddhism) or through it being instilled from another source (i.e., Christianity).
If something harms us, we can’t always be sure the person who caused it is evil or incompetent, and loving means to always presuming incompetence until proven wrong. Going forward, we may not be able to trust them as much either way, but we don’t risk unjustly harming them from assuming them to be evil when they weren’t.
Most of what we do is prioritizing what we love in some form. A faithful marriage is emotionally and sexually loving a spouse more than anyone else. This often requires courage.
We don’t always see the results of love immediately, so the groundwork to successfully loving is patience.
If you wish to love someone wholeheartedly, do something they don’t expect, or in a way they weren’t expecting.