What is love?

The nature of love is an elusive mystery that has existed since time immemorial… that I obviously won’t be able to “solve” on my own. Instead, my goal here is merely to cast a dim light on this inscrutable fog.

Humble beginnings:

At the start, there’s you, and another living being (human or animal). You spend time together and come to appreciate each other’s company, you develop a mutual attachment. This attachment, combined with the memories and knowledge of each other you both have, is what constitutes your unique relationship.

Actually, it’ll be more convenient to separate how each individual feels for the other (we’ll call that a bond) because they can be completely different, causing the relationship to be asymmetrical. For example, when one of your friends secretly hates you, or when you fall in love but get friendzoned.

As we’ll see later, bonds are fundamental to love, and since we’ll need a good understanding of their inner workings, let’s focus on them for now.

By now you can spot when I make these myself, can't you?

First, the asymmetry hints to us that they’re something entirely personal, they don’t require someone else to reciprocate our feelings. Actually, it’s possible to develop a bond even if the recipient doesn’t know you, that’s what happens when people fall in love with celebrities.

We can thus define a bond as:

The unilateral set of knowledge/memories and feelings someone has for a given person.

But you don’t feel or know anything about most people… because you don’t even know they exist! This is why I believe there are two requirements to have a bond with a person:

• Have specific feelings towards them - you might have “default” feelings towards everyone, but these don’t count.
• Acknowledge their existence - I don’t see how you can satisfy the first item otherwise.

As you can guess, those conditions are easy to reach, and our definition encompasses a lot of different types of bonds, from acquaintances to inseparable friends. In order to help us tell them apart, I listed some bonds’ critical features:

• variable in strength: a stronger bond will use more brain resources (memory/thinking time), ranging from mere indifference to unhealthy obsession.
• evolve with time: they often start weak and grow stronger over time, as you learn more about the other. They can also decay, if you grow apart or lose interest. The feelings themselves can change too, you might start disliking someone and then learn to appreciate them.
• polarity: bonds can be “positive” (love, admiration) or “negative” (jealousy, rivalry), and they can be both: it’s possible to like and hate someone at the same time. Although those emotions generally interfere destructively, weakening the bond in the process.

Another area of importance are the many factors that influence the creation and evolution of bonds, here’s the most important ones, according to me:

• Psychotype: Unsurprisingly, it’s the main factor determining the bonds we are able to create and sustain with others, and how easily we’re able to form them.
• Compatibility: We already discussed the role of compatibility in relationships in its own article. Basically, a high compatibility will facilitate positive bonds, while incompatibility will impede them, or even favor negative ones.
• Events: Some events, mostly tough ones, can bring two persons closer or pull them apart. Although, I suspect that they do so indirectly, by modifying the factors below.
• Mood: Imagine you’re depressed or grieving, it might alter your ability to form bonds, one way or another.
• Motivation: The more you want or need to create a bond with someone, the easier it will be, as you’ll spend more resources/energy for it.
• Reciprocity: If the bond is part of a relationship, in general, if you like someone, and they like you back, it makes you invest yourself more, creating a feedback loop. The opposite is common as well.

Keep everything in mind as we’ll need it for later, but as a side note, let’s talk about why we bond in the first place. Fundamentally, it has to be biology, pathways, hormones, resulting from the chisel of evolution… but that’s not a satisfying answer, so here’s my own unsubstantiated take on this.

At first, we’re mammals so, like other animal groups, we have parental care¹. Meaning, caregivers and their juveniles need to form bonds (potentially between siblings as well) in order to implement this behavioral strategy. If it stopped here though, our bonds would fade come adulthood, as we can observe in many species.

The thing is, we’re also social animals, we’ve evolved to live in cooperative groups. That means we needed to keep track, identify and care for our kin. That’s what constitutes the basis for our bond-making ability. It’s just that, for some reasons, those bonds are not limited to other members of our family, of our species, or even to living organisms.

Surely, other social or eusocial species have a similar ability. It’s pretty easy to tell that dogs can bond with humans… and pretty much anything. While it’s not that obvious for bees or ants, they must have bonds, but they’re just too different from us to easily comprehend.

Back to topic:

To begin, we need to address an issue: The word “love” covers a wide assortment of concepts depending on person, country or language. Before writing, I asked some of my friends to tell me what love is. They all started very confused, and then went into totally different directions each time…

That’s why in this article we’ll consider “love” as “the feeling of love” which is still pretty vague, but we’ll make do.

You see, all my life I’ve thought of love as this strong feeling you could have towards a person/animal/object. Actually, this is also the Cambridge Dictionary definition:

to like another adult very much and be romantically and sexually attracted to them, or to have strong feelings of liking a friend or person in your family

But you probably feel very differently about your significant other and your parents. In fact, I bet your feelings differ for each recipient of your love, with more or less variations depending on your relationship’s nature.

Another way to signify this, is to have different “categories of love” with their own name: parental love, sibling love, romantic love… You could say it’s like lightning, it’s never exactly the same twice².

If everyone has their own love, with a different “way of loving” for everyone and everything, we can picture this as a forest: The trees would be everyone’s unique love, with each branch the way they love a particular whatever.

"Forest of love" by WST - I know, I totally missed my vocation in art.

It’s not like each tree and branch are entirely unique and distinct, though. There will be significant overlap between everyone’s trees and branches. Sadly, this metaphor hardly represents how your feelings can evolve with time. It also stops short if we want to understand the similarities and differences across the forest.

For example, the branch of past and present romantic interests will have in common a love flavored with physical and sexual attraction. While on the friendship branch, we’ll find close friends that are more like siblings.

What if suddenly you’re attracted to one of them? The change doesn’t warrant a complete redefinition of your love, it’s more a continuation of the past that took a different turn. But now this branch has more in common with the romantic branches, to accurately compare we’d need many more “degrees of freedom” in our metaphor. We’ve reached a dead end.

Emergent love:

You might have realized we’ve been describing a bond, and that’s no coincidence, I warned you at the start. Indeed, love corresponds to a specific category of bonds: a strong feeling for someone that varies over time and from person to person.

In addition, since bonds are bundles of stuff, love is probably not monolithic but the result of interactions between various underlying elements, an emergent property.

This means that each branch, each bond uniqueness results from the specific mix and proportions of feelings/factors that comprises it. Like a cooking recipe, each one has their own ingredients and quantities, except here, the list of available ingredients depends on the person the love blossoms from.

For example, a father’s love for his offspring might be comprised, among other things, of a desire to protect and provide for them, to make them happy and ensure they grow into healthy adults.

That makes you wonder what makes love bonds special, what exactly separates them from others? It could simply be a strength threshold, a strong enough bond automatically turns into love.

But wait! You can totally be attracted to someone without loving them, people don’t think twice about their one-night stands. That’s true of other feelings as well: a teacher, like a parent, wants their pupils to succeed, however, it can hardly be called love.

Those feelings aren’t necessarily weaker outside of love, rather, they feel different. So perhaps, for a bond to qualify as love you need a love factor that will morph those regular feelings into their love counterpart, akin to an oven that bakes our ingredients into a cake. We can then redefine love as:

The specific state of mind of a person, resulting from the interactions of their bond towards a particular someone or something, and the love factor.

Also, feelings are not alone in this. All the other bond-related elements, like influencing factors, might interact with the factor as well.

A diagram showing an example of love, again expertly drawn.

Let’s imagine for a second that everything here isn’t speculation and this factor is real. First thing that comes to mind, what would it be? I feel like caring, in a broad sense, is the concept most inseparable from love³, so maybe this love factor is somehow linked to caring and attachment.

That said, we can’t rule out that it’s itself something more complex, less tangible, with roots in our biology. For instance, oxytocin may have an effect on the mother-child bond, it’s possible it, or other compounds, have other love-related effects.

Next, we can try to imagine how exactly it interacts with our feelings:

• Create: The feeling doesn’t exist outside of love (e.g: desires to help at your own expense).
• Amplify: The feeling exists outside of love but in generally tamer versions (e.g: attraction, need for skinship).
• Transmute: The feeling exists outside but is radically transformed (e.g: jealousy, possessiveness).

There might be more, it’s only what I could come up with. In addition, it also depends on psychotype since everyone has their own ability to love, so the factor’s influence has to be personal too.

As romantic love is the most influential of all, it’d be nice to know if it has any unique interactions with the love factor. Is it special because it has the strongest interactions? Or is it because it involves unique ingredients, like limerence?

What about the relatives of love, like admiration, obsession or passion. Are they the result of other factors? Or are they influenced by the love factor? Sadly, for all those topics I don’t have the answers, only more questions… For now, at least.

Transient trap:

I wanted to warn you of a trap I see some people fall in. You see, at the beginning of a relationship there’s this moment where you have everything to discover from the other, where you see everything through a rosy lens, it can feel a bit exhilarating and overwhelming.

Once it inevitably grinds to a halt, the relationship will suffer a return to reality if it doesn’t have a strong foundation. This is perfectly normal, but it’s a problem when people mistake this early stage with romantic love… because it’s not. So where does this come from?

A common bond trajectory, love or not, is one of maturity: It starts rapidly as you get to know each other, before settling in an equilibrium state, progressing more slowly. Of course, this state can be upset by events in either direction, like if your friend sleeps with your fiancé or something.

Illustration for an uneventful friendship bond.

When it comes to romance, it often translates in this magical period I talked about before, which is often romanticized about. Although I’m pretty sure it’s a case of rosy retrospection.

The thing is, I recall clearly how I felt back then. Sure, getting to learn about my significant other, discovering their quirks, their hobbies and all that, was totally dope. However, it was also nerve-wracking. You become self-conscious, you don’t dare act normal in the hope to present the “best” version of yourself, since you’re really anxious about losing the other’s affection and interest.

If those troubled waters are crossed incorrectly, this can yield a relationship based on self-deception, trapping you in a role that isn’t you. Most of the time, it’ll be fine though, you’ll either come to accept the other entirely, good and bad sides, entering the mature state of the relationship… or just breakup and move on.

Anyway, the conclusion is, transient feelings, especially those at the start of a relationship are not love, they’re just (a small) part of it.

The dark side:

Until now, I’ve focused mostly on the positive side of things, but life is not all roses and butterflies. Time to delve into the dark side of love: Toxic relationships, crimes of passion, domestic violence…

You might argue that they aren’t the result of love, how can you abuse or kill someone if you love them? In some cases, this is certainly true, but not loving means not caring, and I’d bet those acts can result from caring too much, or in a twisted way at least⁴.

My conjecture being, those nefarious acts result from a buildup of negative emotions (resentment, jealousy, rancor…) in the bond, originating from whether:

• the slow poison of incompatibility and time.
• actions from the other side that caused harm, disappointment, or broke trust.

Again, these emotions exist outside of love, and are generally minor. It means they also interact with the love factor… Which technically makes them an official part of love, as per our definition. Including them directly as a part of love isn’t super convenient, though.

I’d rather consider they generate a mirror/negative version of love that’s akin to hate, a “love hatred” if you will. We do speak of the love-hate duality and of love-hate relationships, after all.

The silver lining is, hatred is less prevalent than its love counterpart. That isn’t too surprising, you rarely harm someone you love on purpose, and if you do, you’ll at least try to patch things up. This leads to more positive interactions in relationships, overall.

When unaddressed, this hatred will create a strain on the relationship, even before leading to drama. In most cases, I’d expect it to simply trigger a loss of love by somehow weakening the love factor. Not directly by itself, it might just make us reconsider the relationship and sever the ties as some kind of self-protecting mechanism.

In that scenario, the expected outcome is a progressive dying of the positive and negative bonds. Leading towards either Platonic love, plain indifference, or bitter spite.

Alas, sometimes we just screw things up beyond a fixable state, we hit a major incompatibility wall, we aren’t honest with ourselves or the other, and love grinds to a halt. This is part of life, we need to move on before indifference numbs our skull, and hatred corrupts our souls⁵.

Wrapping-up:

Alright, I’ve been torturing my mind for too long with this subject, it’s time to wrap things up. Suffice to say, all these ideas are not based on facts and only reflect my own opinion on the matter.

I won’t be surprised if you don’t agree with me, it’s perfectly fine. Still, the bond approach, the “forest of love” metaphor and the love factor hypothesis might help you gain insight into the mess that’s our loving hearts.

For myself, I (re)discovered that love is a beautiful yet excruciatingly complex topic