Dating : Love is…

Love is intangible, esoteric, and bountiful. Love cannot be described, discussed, or compared. So why do we do it? And what are we talking about when we do?

Love is an emotion. When we talk about emotions like sadness, happiness, or anger, we describe them in two ways: where we physically feel them, and what we do as a result of them. “Sadness makes my chest hollow.” “I punched the wall out of anger.” Hollowness in ones’ chest is a result of the sadness, but not the sadness itself. Punching the wall when angry is a decision one makes because of the emotion they’re feeling. This is another result of an emotion.

People talk about love as if it’s the result of itself. “I love them. I just know.” “I bought them dinner because I love them.” “We decided to have sex for the first time last night because we love each other.” ‘Knowing’ is acknowledging the presence of the emotion. Where do you feel love? Does it make your chest feel tight? Does it make you dizzy? You probably feel love all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places. For me, love sits near my sternum, close to where my heart is. It feels warm, almost protective. Sometimes, with certain people I love, love manifests closer to my brain. I can’t stop smiling, I think about how much I care for that person. This is a result of love.

Society has conditioned us to believe that love follows guidelines. To be fair, this is true for most emotions. Specifically with cisgender men, anger is expected to be stoic, hateful, and righteous. Grief is crying, a hollow sensation. Men who cry when angry and people who don’t cry at funerals are societally regarded the same: odd. Love, too. To understand how we are conditioned to love, we have to look at the ways society categorizes love.

Love is largely grouped into three categories: platonic, romantic, and familial. Platonic love is reserved for friendships. These are the people you form bonds with that don’t end in marriage and/or sex. Romantic love is reserved for partners. These are the people you enter relationships with, where the path divulges into two options: get married or break up. Familial love is for those you share a blood relation with, or a love formed out of feelings of guardianship.

The issue with categorizing love is that you can’t box down something intangible. You can describe the source of love, the way it makes you think and feel, and the way you act as a result of it, but you can’t predict those patterns. Let’s examine platonic love for a second. How do you compare the love between childhood best friends who moved far away from each other to the love you feel for your college roommate (if applicable)? There are friends I love deeply that I would never consider living with, simply because the way we exist is incompatible in that space. I have friends I love without question that I cannot hang out with in person as much as other friends. Do I love them less for this? Now let’s look at romantic love. This type of love is the biggest victim of society’s lens. Romantic love is oftentimes described dramatically: you meet someone, you see yourself spending the rest of your life with them, you’re sexually attracted to them, etc etc. What is a romantic relationship? If you asked an introvert who puts quality time low on their list of love languages, they might not be able to understand meeting someone who they want to spend every second with. The idea of going home and sharing a room with someone might be unappealing to them. Now ask someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Is their relationship lesser than because they don’t experience a desire for sex?

All of these things being described are behaviors. Sex and quality time are things we do as a result of things we feel. If we like spending time with someone, we hang out with them. If we are sexually attracted to someone and they feel the same, we have sex with them. Love, as described by western culture, is a behavior.

This is a dangerous way to think. When we reduce love to a behavior, we don’t allow ourselves to consider love’s nuances. The categorization of love matters much less than the things we do as a result of it. If two people love each other and enter a relationship as a result of it, but have different boundaries and/or visions for their futures, they’re still incompatible, regardless of what they feel. Person A wants kids and a master bedroom, Person B wants a room to themselves and a dog. They can love each other equally, but desire different things.

And what do you call love that doesn’t fit those boxes? Friends who are in love with each other, but would never do more than cuddle. Friends who live together and have sex. Partners who don’t want to get married, or even live together. Partners who don’t have sex, and don’t want to. Does platonic or romantic love feel right as a descriptor for certain relationships where love exists, but outside of societal norms?

Then we factor in how society “levels” love. Typically, platonic love is ranked last. Familial love comes next, followed by romantic love, topped by being in love. If you ask people who have been or currently are in love what that feels like, they answer with a behavior. “We’d been together for six months, so I just knew.” “We had a child together, and I fell in love with them as a parent and as my partner.” “I couldn’t picture the rest of my life without them.” The passage of time can strengthen bonds, but it isn’t a feeling. Having a child is an activity, and a hard one at that time. Wanting someone to be in your life forever is a statement of future behaviors: affirming that the other person desires the same future you do.

Is it necessarily harmful to describe emotions with behaviors? No. Emotions are nothing without behaviors. Sadness, happiness, and anger wouldn’t matter if they didn’t make us physically react. Love is the same. Love allows for some of the most complex and wonderful of behaviors. The important thing to understand is that love is not categorized, it is simply felt. Love is a sliding scale that you invent. Love is not a permanent fixture, nor is it predictable. Love often. Practice boundaries. Understand how you give love. Recognize how you want to receive love. How do you define “partner?” How do you define “friend?” How do you define “family?” Everyone will have a different answer. Your answer will change in a week. Your answer will change when I ask you to examine every single one of your friends, or your family members, or your partners; more specifically when you examine what makes you categorize them that way. It’s all a list of behaviors that have nothing to do with the root emotion: love. Love recklessly, openly, freely, and honestly. Love is very simple. Love is in everything.