Tag: empathy

People have been trying to define love for thousands of years, and I don’t think we’ve ever really succeeded. That isn’t because love isn’t real. Quite the opposite. It’s because love is an emotion, and emotions are incredibly difficult to describe without simply replacing one emotional word with another.

People will often define love as affection, devotion, attachment, or deep care. To me, those aren’t definitions. They’re descriptions of other feelings that often accompany love. They don’t really answer the question of what love is.

I’ve come to believe that we’re asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “What is love?” I’ve started asking, “What gives rise to the emotion we call love?”

This isn’t a philosophical proof or a scientific theory. It’s simply the understanding I’ve developed through my own experiences and the way I’ve come to see human relationships.

To me, love is the polar opposite of hate.

I don’t use either word casually. People often say they “love” pizza or “hate” Mondays, but those words have always meant something much stronger to me. Hate is one of the most powerful emotions a person can experience, and because I see love as its opposite, I believe love deserves the same respect. Neither word should be thrown around lightly.

Over time, I’ve also realized that trust is central to understanding love.

I used to think you couldn’t trust someone unless you loved them. I’ve changed my mind about that. Trust exists on a spectrum. We trust strangers to obey traffic laws. We trust coworkers to do their jobs. We trust doctors with our health. Those relationships don’t necessarily involve love.

What matters isn’t simply trust itself, but what trust makes possible.

I’ve begun thinking about relationships as rooms connected by a doorway.

Trust opens the door.

Acceptance keeps the door open.

Every time we trust someone, we allow them a little farther into our lives. Every time they accept us for who we genuinely are, rather than demanding we become someone else, that doorway remains open. The relationship deepens.

Eventually, something may begin to emerge from that shared space.

We call it love.

I don’t believe trust automatically becomes love any more than I believe planting a seed guarantees a flower will bloom. Trust and acceptance don’t force love into existence. They simply create the conditions in which love has the opportunity to grow.

The opposite is also true.

Distrust begins to close the door.

Nonacceptance locks it.

That doesn’t mean hate is inevitable. Distrust doesn’t automatically become hate any more than trust automatically becomes love. But distrust and rejection create conditions where resentment, fear, contempt, and eventually hate can begin to grow. They move a relationship in that direction.

To me, love and hate aren’t simply emotions floating around inside us. They emerge from the way we relate to the world around us.

This way of thinking also explains why I don’t believe in the phrase “unconditional love.”

In my mind, it’s almost an oxymoron.

If I only love someone as long as they become the person I want them to be, then I have to question whether I ever loved them in the first place. Perhaps I loved an idea of them. Perhaps I loved my expectations. But I wasn’t loving the person standing in front of me.

That doesn’t mean love has no boundaries. Relationships absolutely should have boundaries. Trust can be broken. People can become abusive, dishonest, or manipulative. Sometimes the healthiest choice is to walk away from a relationship.

But walking away because someone has violated trust is different from asking someone to abandon who they are in order to earn your love.

To me, genuine love begins with accepting another person as themselves.

As I’ve reflected on all of this, I’ve realized something else.

I don’t think love has an essence.

You can’t point to love the way you can point to a mountain or a tree. Love isn’t a physical object waiting to be discovered in nature. It’s a human construction—a way of understanding an emotional experience that arises through our relationships.

That doesn’t make it any less real.

Language is a human construction. Money is a human construction. Marriage is a human construction. They’re all profoundly real because they shape the way we live our lives. I think love belongs in that same category.

The way we experience and understand love is influenced by our individual lives, our cultures, and the historical moments in which we live. Someone from another society or another century might understand love differently than I do, and I don’t think either of us would necessarily be wrong.

Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to anthropology.

Anthropology has taught me that human beings create meaning. We don’t simply discover it lying around in nature. We build it through our relationships, our cultures, our histories, and our shared experiences.

Love, I think, is one of those meanings.

So if someone asked me to define love today, I wouldn’t describe it with another emotion.

I’d say that love is an emergent property of a relationship.

Whether that relationship is with another person, a cat curled up beside you, a hobby that has become part of your identity, a place that feels like home, or even an idea that has shaped your life, love doesn’t simply appear. It grows through trust, acceptance, shared experience, and the ongoing relationship itself.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with this definition.

In fact, I hope they don’t feel obligated to. Every person’s understanding of love is shaped by the life they’ve lived.

This is simply mine.