The least understood and the most claimed.
Let’s just spend some time and think about this question for real. Like some random person is paying you to come up with a definition so take it seriously. What the hell is love? Probably you already have some ideas, it’s a feeling or it’s the strongest force in the universe or just chemical imbalance and whatever. As a neuroscientist, I was in the third category, answering that “love is nothing more than some chemical imbalance that changes some neuronal activity in the brain and so on” then I was giving that look of “thug life” and well, of course, most of the time people were happy with the answer because they learned something about dopamine and oxytocin and prefrontal cortex.
Well a few weeks ago finally someone slapped me in the face, I asked this question from myself and myself wasn’t impressed. I could see myself sitting in front of me looking at me like a CEO in the interview and it wasn’t fun at all. I couldn’t reach the “thug life” look and myself was not happy at all. He expected more and I couldn’t deliver shit and I realized how much I really don’t know even though I already knew some biology and that’s luxury by itself.
I received the slap I needed and that was enough for me to get obsessed with the concept of love and relationships and why they are the way they are. The short answer is that “I have no idea and seems like nobody else does” and yet, we are talking about it, making movies, songs, writing poems, even establishing policies, and we have no idea what we really are talking about. It’s a mega-subjective issue so everyone is their own boss but here’s where shit hits the fan. What if I say “for me, love comes with sadomasochistic tendencies towards a group of at least 5 and I need to wear diapers btw. There, when I’m in my diapers, one of my lovers is giving me electric shocks on my nipples and the others are watching, is when I feel the love. That moment is love.” Am I still the same for you? have I degraded to a sick pervert already or just a sexually disturbed man? now, I say “for me love is a holy feeling that I share with my adorable girlfriend. Love for me is when I gently kiss her smile and ask about her day.” Am I still the same for you? do you consider me as a family man who is reliable and, in a sense, acceptable? okay then let’s mix them up. Is it possible for you to consider both of those people the same? was that man a disturbed teenager that is now settled? what if it’s happening at the same time?
Here, I realized that for me the second one sounds like love but the first one not. Then I asked myself how do I even know the first one is not love if it’s that subjective? what if in reality, the disturbed weirdo is actually experiencing more “love” whatever the hell it is? So let’s get into it. I still don’t have an answer and probably I won’t be having one anytime soon but let’s see how far we can deconstruct love.
I remember there were lot’s of theories and structures for love when I was studying psychology. From Freud himself to Melanie Kleine and other psychoanalysis-based ones to Sternberg’s triangle and more biological ones advocated by Helen Fischer. Science aside (because it ruins everything fun) and let’s get to society and art. What I remember from the lyrics and movies is the cliche of the heterosexual monogamous relationship. Yeah, sometimes homosexuality jumps in but just search romantic movies/songs and see it for yourself. Woop, did I just assume love = romance? I didn’t but Google showed me the same for both so apparently for most of the people it is the case. When I look back to some of the poems we had to study from Iranian poets in 1000 years ago, this romantic love is one of the first subjects that comes into my mind but not all. I know there might be divine love, family love, friendly love, and even lust, which are thought to be different in many ways so let’s stick to the good old “love” that we feel it but can’t describe it.
Ok then, why do we feel love? when do we feel it? is the pain of love also part of the package or it’s just the good feelings? can animals also feel it or is it just us? Here, here lays a pretty important clue. If it’s only us then what are the evolutionary benefits and if not, from where it starts and again, and even more important now, what are the evolutionary benefits? We actually might be able to figure some stuff out by going the other way around and asking “what love makes us doing that is different from what a cat does?” let’s count few, it makes us feel happy together and kinda crappy without each other so it makes a pretty strong bond. What else, it also makes us be more tolerant and sometimes even willing to sacrifice for the loved one.
Well, how the hell should we know if animals feel the same? we can’t. But by looking at what we are showing when we’re in love and what they show when they’re mating we sometimes see similarities. They stick together and groom each other exactly like those hipster couple pictures on Pinterest. They care about each other and protect each other when it comes to dangerous stuff. Then if one dies the other one “looks” pretty unhappy by not doing anything and staying away from all the foods and fun. Is it love then? no idea, in my Behavioural Ecology course they were calling it monogamous pair-bonding but who cares. Maybe it’s the prototypes. The benefits are kinda clear here: “family”. You can have a higher chance of raising healthy children by sticking with each other and sharing the load instead of mating and leaving. Focusing on one person and avoiding all the sexually transmitted diseases, spending time, fighting with the cruel world together instead of doing it alone then producing babies and protecting them from dangers instead of letting them do it themselves. It’s fewer but precise shots comparing to lots of random ones and apparently, our species found it better than the other.
Well then, we know what love is now. A glue that makes you a family person who raises successful children passing the genes but wait, so, I can’t be the sadomasochistic disturbed lover and pass my gene or what? What if I don’t even want to pass them? Can I be polygamous now that we have condoms and science to help us with the diseases? I guess I can be whoever I want though but why I’m here still being the boring heterosexual monogamous pair bonder? I simply have no idea but I suspect my family and society and school and everywhere I learned how a normal love looks like. It looks like this and not the sadomasochistic disturbed one. I feel happier this way so that’s why I’m being who I learned to be. I’m loving the way I learned to love because that was all the information I had. Praising my love and her soft long hair, while she’s smiling, was the love for me probably because this is all I saw on TV or all I read and heard about love. Should I even care about the biology of love and those hormones and neurons? How does it gonna help me anyway? I knew about them but all it was doing was to say why you feel the way you feel and not why it exists and what was the point of it.
Now what? What should we do? rethink the way we love and accept love. We have no idea what love is so I feel like we are blindly following an evolutionary blueprint. If you are happy with it then be and if not, change it before you feel happy with it! Is it important if you’re already in a relationship? yeah, it actually is. Accepting that love is not the same for everyone and some people have a totally different way of feeling it is probably important for your relationship. How about the rest? Personally, I feel pretty annoyed by the fact that I didn’t choose or studied the way I define love and all I did was to accept some predefined traditions. Let’s not do that to the next generation.
