What is Love?

An article with help and insight for anyone looking for love

Everyone is searching for that special someone. Judging by the articles on Medium, it appears that for many, it is an elusive quest. There is no shortage of advice on what to do, with plenty of articles explaining why love can be so hard to find — from unrealistic expectations to an unearned sense of entitlement, from impersonal Tinder to a lack of opportunity to meet new people.

Part of the problem of finding love is the romanticized stories we tell each other about what love is. Cinderella tells us that love is found in outward beauty, Snow White tells us that it is found in being kind to everyone other than yourself, and Fatal Attraction tells us that it is found in fidelity. However, none of these stories reveal the true nature of love. Without understanding the true nature of love, it can be difficult to recognize which of its seeds that cross our path have the potential to grow into something real.

This problem is not limited to those seeking a partner; it is just as difficult for couples who have lost the love they once shared or never truly felt it in the first place. Shockingly, over 40% of marriages in the UK end in divorce.

If this resonates with you, this article offers an insightful understanding of love that may help you find or rekindle the flame of love you once thought you had.

Defining Love

Confusion about love is commonplace, as we use the same word to describe a variety of different feelings. We love food, family, friends, and nature, all in different ways. To better understand how to develop successful, long-term relationships, let’s take a look at a unique definition of love.

Love is an emotional response that is triggered when our brains associate someone with our current or future wellbeing. When it comes to romantic love, our brains have two distinct ways of connecting people to our wellbeing. It is essential to recognize which type of love is present when making decisions about our future relationships.

The Love of Attraction

Romantic love based on physical attraction is a powerful force that can lead to love at first sight. It is important to understand why we find certain people attractive, as our preferences are heavily influenced by society. For example, two hundred years ago, the ideal woman was plump and full-bodied, while three hundred years ago, the ideal man dressed effeminately and wore wigs and make-up.

However, our attraction to someone is not only based on biology. We are also influenced by the messages we receive from the media, our friends, and our own experiences. We may be drawn to someone who reminds us of someone we have liked in the past, or we may experience a sense of repulsion if they remind us of someone who has hurt us.

The love of attraction is a powerful, yet often selfish, emotion. We may be tempted to use it as a way to get something from the other person, without considering what they stand to gain from the relationship. Ultimately, it is important to remember that attraction is only one part of a successful relationship, and that it is important to get to know the person before making any decisions.

It has a subconscious expectation that the relationship will bring us good things with little regard to the good it might bring to our partner. What can we do to entice the person into a relationship? Some people talk about attractive love as transactional. They mean we have a motive. If we do something nice for them, we expect them to do something nice for us in return.

This love is superficial because it is not necessarily based on the personality or behaviors of the person we are attracted to. Even if there is more to it, attraction is often fleeting. It may last weeks, months, or even years, but it rarely lasts a lifetime. Our physical appearances change, and the level of excitement we experience being with someone diminishes as the new things we do together become repetitive. What initially drew us to someone will not remain the same. If we want to find lasting love, we must look to the other form of romantic love that is based on more than just physical attraction.

The Love of Connection

The love of connection is the love of mutual bonding. It is driven by personal experience. It is not based on what we want from a relationship or what we hope the relationship may become. It is based on the actual benefits we enjoy from an existing relationship. This love is based on the positive association we have with benefits from the relationship we have built with our partner.

This love is a lasting love. It lasts for as long as both partners continue to maintain and build the relationship and the relationship continues to deliver benefits. If the original definition of love is correct, it lasts as long as we continue to associate our partner with our wellbeing.

A key part to knowing if you are bonding with your partner is understanding what are the unique benefits of your unique relationship that the bonds deliver. In order to understand that, we need to understand our own unique needs and the unique needs of our partners. This is how we are able to judge whether this relationship is the one. Can our partner help us meet our needs within the relationship, and at the same time, can we help our partner meet their needs? And if so, how?

You and Your Partner’s Needs

Since everyone is unique, there is no general advice anywhere that can give all the answers about what you need from love. All the advice can do, including this article, is to point you in the right direction. And this one piece of advice is key.

The purpose of a loving relationship is to provide for you and your partner’s needs.

Everyone’s needs are based on securing our overall wellbeing. We all have multiple levels of need. The intensity of our needs is identified as our basic needs, our wants and our hopes. Our basic needs govern whatever we need to survive. They are largely driven by our instincts to survive, by becoming single-mindedly determined if we need to eat, drink, warm up or cool down or do whatever else we need to stay alive. Our wants are whatever we think will support our survival, such as looking for a better job or finding a partner to make our lives easier, or just having fun. These are influenced more by our upbringing and intellect. Our hopes are just our needs and wants for the future.

Our actual needs may not be the same as what we think we need. This is one of the fault lines for finding a suitable partner. Many drug users, for example, believe drugs improve the quality of their lives, despite their experience to the contrary. Many people who are abused believe that they are to blame for the abuse, despite having no hand in the abuse itself.

Understanding our own and our partner’s actual needs is much easier said than done. The full article from which this is extracted offers a deeper explanation of how our bodies, shaped by evolution, determine our real needs. It offers suggestions on how we can use this information to get a better understanding of what we and our partners actually need. As a taster, there are three realms of need that determine our overall wellbeing — material needs, emotional needs and stimulation.

The Worth of a Relationship

Perhaps the most significant failure of marriages today is a failure to understand the benefits and opportunities of a successful relationship. It is far easier to walk away from a bad marriage than to repair it if we can see no upsides.

As mentioned above, the worth of a relationship is in the way it serves the needs of its partners. We can all care for ourselves if we set our minds to it. But there are some needs that can be served only by the relationship itself. It is analogous to two people building a house. Once the house is built, the partners can enjoy its shelter and other benefits regardless of what either does at the time. Without a roof over their heads, both partners would get wet when it rains. In the same way, there are benefits from a relationship, built from mutual bonding, that are not accessible to either partner outside a successful relationship.

The worth of a relationship is measured in terms of a balance between the needs it serves and those it does not. Part of understanding our collective needs, wants and hopes involves communicating them with each other, honestly and respectfully. It helps us make sense of our own needs when we feel confused or depressed. It helps us understand what our partners feel they need. Examples of benefits that most people experience include gaining emotional security, having a wider perspective to deal with challenges, making it easier to raise children and the financial benefits that arise when two people share a single living space.

Connected love is sometimes described as transcendent. Its benefits are associated with the relationship itself, transcending the individual behaviours of either of the partners. It is almost as if the relationship acquires a life of its own, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Relationships are more secure where partners understand and value the benefits of the relationship.

Being Honest with Yourself

Although there are two different types of romantic love, they do interact.

The love of attraction is what usually draws us into a relationship that has the potential to grow into something more. It turns out that the initial attraction is not necessary. There are many successful marriages that began as arranged marriages. But in Western cultures, arranged marriages are largely dismissed in favour of personal choice.

Yet the love of attraction is a powerful draw. It is so powerful, it is easy to mistake it for lasting love. We so want the relationship to succeed, we choose to ignore the very factors that help us judge our compatibility with each other. A further issue is, even if we do not choose to ignore them, most of us are ill-prepared to know to judge in the first place.

This and other articles offer advice on how to judge relationships, whether it is a new one that is starting to blossom or an existing one. Whether you choose to follow the advice is down to you. But if not, remember that over 40% of marriages end in failure — and it is likely many of the “successful” marriages continue for a variety of reasons, even though the partners have fallen well out of love. The choice is yours.

The Ingredients for Love

The love of attraction opens the door to a connected love of mutual bonding. The question is, how do we build and sustain the connection once we walk through its door?

The answer lies in its characteristic of mutual bonding. We develop bonds of care through our social actions and attitudes towards each other. Social bonds can only develop in baby steps. Each step gives us the confidence to delve deeper. The goal is to be able to expose our deepest desires and fears to each other, our innermost vulnerabilities, without fear of judgement or exploitation. Intimacy is what happens when we open the parts of ourselves to a lover that we keep hidden from the rest of the world, and sometimes from ourselves.

There are four ingredients required to develop and sustain mutual bonding.

• Mutuality is the equal status of both partners in the relationship. Both partners’ needs must be served. If the relationship is one-sided, it is not a loving relationship. This is largely a question of respect and attitudes towards each other.
• Compatibility is the ability of both partners to understand and serve the needs of themselves and their partners. Conventional wisdom teaches us that compatibility comes from having similar backgrounds and sharing similar interests. But there is more to it. At its heart, compatibility is about having shared values and views about how the world should work.
• Compromise is about balancing and accommodating the needs of each partner at any point in time. Again, this depends on developing mutual respect and positive attitudes towards each other.
• Intimacy depends on both partners having the trust, confidence and experience of each other to know that their partner will use the intimate knowledge they gain about their partner to support their needs. If the knowledge is misused, intimacy opens the door to abuse.

Conclusion

Romantic love proves elusive to many. If we can understand the difference between the superficial love of attraction and the longer-lasting love of mutual bonding, it helps us develop the attitudes and understandings we need to forge a successful, long-term relationship with the love of our life.

This article is an extract of a more in-depth article. The full article explores many of the subjects touched on in this extract in more detail. It offers a greater understanding of our human nature. It offers a deeper insight into how to identify whether someone is likely to be a suitable long-term partner. It offers more detailed advice on how to work towards stronger, more effective relationships. And it offers many specific suggestions on how to build the bonds of love that underpin any relationship designed to last a lifetime. To download the full article, click here.

Further Reading

For more of my articles on a variety of topics written to provoke thought and to bring a vision for the future to life, check out my blog website: www.animating.vision