What Is Love, Anyway?

You're probably not in love with your significant other right now

We love our spouses. We love our kids. We love our parents. We love our friends.

But what is love, anyway?

It’s a question that philosophers — and singers of Eurodance music — have pondered for millennia.

Most people would probably characterize love as a feeling. It’s the swelling of the heart. A sense of deep, warm affection. A starry-eyed swoon.

The problem with equating love with a feeling, of course, is that feelings are fickle and fleeting.

If a couple hits a dry spell in their relationship and no longer experiences the passion that marked the early days of their courtship, have they necessarily ceased to love each other?

If partners feel gaga for one another in the afternoon, but by evening are locked in a fight where all they feel is white-hot contempt, which situation represents whether or not they’re in love?

If a parent is going through a phase where they constantly feel exasperation rather than affection toward their kid — where they feel fit to say, “I love him, but I don’t like him” — are they merely fooling themselves, and in reality neither like nor love their child?

Sensing the limitations of equating love with emotion, there are those who argue that there is something greater to love that underlies the fluctuations of feelings and transcends pure emotion. They reject the idea that love is a matter of happenstance, like slipping on a banana peel, or something you unpredictably fall in and out of. Love, they insist, is a choice, a verb — something we actively do.

While such mantras are satisfying — easy to rally behind and print on a bumper sticker — they don’t entirely explain the nature of love, either.

If love is an action, what do we make of the widower who, decades after his wife’s passing, can no longer actively demonstrate his love, yet still proclaims his undying devotion? Or what about the small toddler who can’t yet do anything for her parents — is she incapable of truly loving them?

While there is truth to both of these popular definitions of love, neither alone fully describes its nature.

Love resists being captured by a single perspective. Instead, it’s best grasped through multiple paradigms. Today, I’ll suggest two that, when held together in tension, illuminate love’s true essence and can help us understand how to sustain life's richest and most meaningful dynamic.