What is love???

What is love? Seriously, what is it? A verb? A noun? A universal truth? An ideal? A common thread of all religions? A cult? A neurological phenomenon? There is no shortage of answers, some are all-encompassing. It conquers all. Its all you need. It's all there is. These are all comparisons though, ways of defining it by contrast, by saying it's more important than all other things, but is it?

Sure love matters more than your favourite dessert but does it matter more than shelter? Or sanity? No matter what your answer is, you are just ranking it, not defining it. Another challenge to defining love is that we often try to do so while falling into it or out of it.

Love is potentially the most intensely thought about thing in all of human history and despite centuries upon centuries of obsession, it still overwhelms us. Some say its a feeling, a magical emotion, a feeling for someone like you have never felt before. But feelings are fluid, not very concrete foundation for a definition. Sometimes we hate the person we love.

Love is a set of behaviours we associate with the feelings: holding hands, kissing, hugging, public displays of affection, dating, marriage or having kids, but these loving actions can be subjective or culturally relative. You may love or be someone who cannot have kids or doesn't want to, who believes in marriage but also in divorce, who is from a culture where people don't really date the way we think of dating, But if love is a thing that we can define, then how can it mean opposite things for so many people. So, maybe love is just all in our head, a personal mystery winding through our neural pathways and lightning up pleasing, natural rewards in your nervous system. 

Perhaps these rewards are addictive, perhaps love is a temporary or permanent addiction to a person, just like a person can be addicted to a drug. Evidence shows that chemicals in our brain stimulated by another person can make you develop a habit for that person. The person comes to satisfy a physiological craving, and we want more. But then sometimes, slowly or suddenly, you don't. You have fallen out of love, become unaddicted. What happened? Does one develop a tolerance or hit a limit? Why do some lovers stay addicted to each other their entire lives? Maybe to create new lives or to proliferate their species?  Maybe love is just human DNA's optimal method for bringing about its own replication.

There are evolutionary arguments regarding every human mating behaviour, from how we display ourselves to potential mates, to how we treat each other in relationships, to how we raise kids. Thus, some argue that the feeling you think you feel in your soul is just biology's way to make you continue your species. But is that all love is? Or, perhaps worse, is it just a construct of some fake concepts we all convince each other to try to live up to for a fake sense of purpose? Maybe it is a construct but let's be more precise about what a construct is because love is constructed from reality: Our experiences, feelings, brain chemistry, cultural expectations, our lives. And this edifice can be viewed through countless dimensions: scientific, emotional, historical, spiritual, legal or just personal. 

If no two people are the same, no two people's love is the same either. So, in every loving relationship, there's a lot to talk about and partners should be open to that, or the relationship probably won't last. Love is always up for discussion and under construction. So, if we can't define it, that's a good sign. It means we are all still making it.