What is Love?

I have been contemplating this question since I was a child.

I am a transnational, transracial adoptee from Taiwan, adopted at birth to a white family, and I grew up with an abusive adoptive mother.

As an adoptee, there was already a different definition of love I needed to take on. Love was not blood or family in the traditional sense because it simply couldn't be.

Growing up, my mom told me she loved me, but then would turn right around and tell me I wasn't good enough and call me names, and then act like nothing ever happened.

How could she love me and then treat me poorly?

I knew, deep in my heart, that this was not love.

So I questioned and thought.

I had deep conversations with my friends as an adolescent about, "What IS love?"

As a young adult studying psychology, I read many books about love by Erich Fromm, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others.

The dictionary explains love as both a noun and a verb - an intense feeling of deep affection, to like or enjoy very much.

Mr. Rogers has a lot to say about love; one of the most famous quotes being,

Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love

someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here

and now.

I think love can, and is, both of these things...and it also feels like there is so much more to love.

How do we explain these intense feelings? How do we show these intense feelings? What creates these intense feelings? How do we know we are loved?

There has to be more.

I remember a boyfriend in my 20s telling me love is a choice. He chose me everyday, which showed he loved me.

I was a hopeless romantic at that time and was so upset by this. How unromantic! I wanted grandiose gestures and proclamations about how great I was.

Wasn't that love?!?! How else would I know he loved me??

(I am still a romantic, but I wouldn't call myself hopeless, and my definition of romance has completely changed.)

There had to be more, so I continued reading and studying and questioning.

As I grew older, I did recognize that love is a choice, but love as a definition was still pretty squirrely.

Our society loves all sorts of things - hot dogs, tacos, games, puzzles, sports teams, etc.

But the love of hot dogs is not the same as loving a partner. Even loving a friend is not seen as the same thing as the love for family or romantic partners.

There seemed to be a hierarchy of love. I must love my family more than anything. If I get married, they are the most important person in my world.

What about self love? Where does that fall into this hierarchy of love?

The answer to this question, "What is Love?" was still elusive.

A couple years ago I read bell hooks' book All About Love.

This 272 page book explores all different facets of love, and deeply resonated with me.

I had finally found a text that explored what love is and explored ALL different facets of love without positing some sort of hierarchy among them.

bell states:

To love well, we need to understand what we mean when we talk about love, and what

love means to us all individually on the deepest, subconscious level, in the part of

ourselves that began to be constructed in our earliest lives.

The first chapter of this book is spent trying to define love. bell posits that having a definition gives us something to orient toward.

This idea opened up a flood of new questions for me.

The question was now less, "What is love?" and more, "How do I love better?"

Because we all can wax philosophical about the definition of love, but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually loving people in real life, the definition doesn't matter so much as how you make people feel.

You love better by defining, in specifics, what love means to you - what love looks like in action.

If love is just a feeling, that leaves the door wide open for harmful behavior while still having deep feelings of affection.

Are you loving if the feeling is still there but you're saying mean things or raising your voice at someone you love?

If you have a specific definition of love, then you have something to orient towards, and can answer the question, "Am I being loving right now?" And if you know this is not how love acts, then you can love better.

This is not a call to be a perfect lover. We are all human and have different reactions and sometimes harmful actions appear, no matter how much work you've done on yourself, and then the work is to repair the rupture, but having a definition of love can also act as a stop gap when you notice your reaction.

Since I started asking myself, "How do I love better?", when I am in a reactionary state, I find the question, "Am I being loving right now?", pops into my head, which makes me pause and course correct my behavior so I can respond with more love.

You get to do that - Stop in the middle of a reaction and course correct.

Without an actionable definition of love though, I felt overwhelmed with the infinite amount of options around being more loving, and default to the deep feeling of affection for someone, which doesn't tell me how to act loving, it just denotes I have a deep feeling of affection for someone.

bell hooks draws from the works of M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm to define love as "...care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest, open communication."

I have taken this on as my own definition, along with M. Scott Peck's definition, "the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth."

Having these definitions in my back pocket helps me love everyone better, including myself.

What actionable definition of love will help you love better?

I encourage you to share with me in the comments below. 👇🏽

If you desire guidance around creating your own actionable definition of love, I invite you to email me at antisoulmatelove@gmail.com and we can chat about ways to work together. 💖