On love

As I recently stated, there are two things that make life worth living: passion, and love.

Some people say that love is something that happens to you. You fall into it. You surrender to it. Some people say that love is a series of chemical reactions in the brain. They say that it's "nothing more than a feeling".

Those people are wrong, at least partly.

Some people say you should be careful with whom and how you fall in love. These people differentiate between "true love" and that which is not true. They say love is rare. They say you can't love what you don't know. They say you must guard your heart against making the mistake of loving the wrong person.

Those people are wrong, too.

Let's consider first the argument that love is a feeling. This is perhaps the fault of our language which is, to paraphrase William Golding, the straight-jacket of our experience. We say that we "feel love." In this way, we equate love with other feelings - other chemical reactions - like euphoria, sadness, excitement. In truth, these are not good comparisons. These feelings are all simply states of being. We don't feel love the way we feel happiness or sadness. The feeling we call love is a feeling of perception, not merely a state of being. We say that we *are* sad, but we say that we are *in* love. With these word choices we reveal that we perceive sadness as a state of being that defines us, but love as something that we feel when it envelops us, just as we feel the sun when its warmth envelops us.

Love, unlike sadness or happiness, is also uniquely a feeling that is also a verb. You can't sad, you can't hungry. You can only *be* these things. But look at how we use the word love: we love our family, we love our friends, we love the city, we love the mountains. Love is an action. We are the doers and receivers of an action called love. We love and are loved. Although the feeling of love originates within us, unlike other feelings, it always and necessarily involves both a subject and an object. We cannot feel love unless someone is engaged in the act of loving, whether it is our own act of love towards others that we feel, or others' acts of love towards us.

If love is an action, does that then mean that it's a choice? Absolutely. Love is not just something we fall into, surrender to, or something that happens to us (although it does indeed often have its way with us). We can choose to love as easily as we can choose to climb mountains, which is to say: with purpose and intention. We don't (usually) find ourselves suddenly at the top of the mountain without having chosen to get there, but if we make up our minds and set out for the summit with purpose, we will eventually arrive.

The trickier question is whether we can choose not to love. We can certainly harden our hearts and close ourselves to the possibility of love for people and things. Perhaps because someone has the wrong religion, the wrong politics, or the wrong ideas, we close ourselves from the potential to love them. We find it much more difficult to choose to stop loving, which is perhaps why we begin to speak of love as something uncontrollable that happens to us. Once we've begun to love someone, whether absent-mindedly or with fullness of purpose, we have a hard time stopping. Love is addictive. We are truly "hooked on a feeling." Love is addictive because, like anything else addictive, it feels good when we're doing it. The cynics who talk about love being a series of chemical reactions aren't wrong (they're just not seeing the whole picture).

Those of you familiar with my stance on addiction will know that I don't consider addiction per se to be a negative thing. It is addiction to harmful and damaging things which is negative. Indeed, could there be anything better than addiction to something which is only beneficial? Love, like anything else addictive, is addictive even when it hurts. And like most things that are addictive, it's the sudden absence of our drug of choice that makes us hurt.

The good news is, there's no permanent damage done. We've all been hurt. Many of us have fallen in love and had our hearts broken. Or maybe we've lost a loved one to illness and death. Yet here we stand today…and we're all just fine. Most of us, in fact, are better than fine. We have wonderful memories that remind us what the great possibilities for our lives are. We often retain deep bonds with our former lovers that, despite all the difficulties and the heartache, remain much stronger than our other human connections.

Some people, recoiling from the pain of heartbreak, are like the addict going clean: they steel their hearts and determine never to love again. I'd like to suggest a second option: soften your heart and determine to love more. (We could call it the ibogaine option.) If it's the absence of love that is causing you pain, then go get more love. It's inexpensive, can be found anywhere, it's infinitely reproducible, and a steady supply has no known negative side effects.

The only reason we think we can't just go out and get more love is because we insist upon creating an artificial shortage. We create a false economy of love with all our admonishments to be careful with whom and how we fall in love, with our hesitancy and our guarded hearts, with our insistence that true love is rare and everything else we might think is love is false. It seems that we are afraid that if love is common, it won't be valuable. That if we love everyone, then our love for our chosen life partner is less significant. This couldn't be further from the truth. Is air less valuable because it is abundant? Is water? Love is as critical to our health and well-being as air and water, so let's sow it as common as dandelions and know that that makes it no less special or important.

Let's choose love. Let's create love. Let's be love.