What is Love?

What is love?

What comes below are some thoughts that attempt to answer this question. What I’d like you to use it is to create a piqued interested within you or with your partner. 

Reading through this offers you and your partner an opportunity to build a deeper connection with each other - thinking through what does it mean? What is it really? is in a sense a way to become existentially intimate with each other.

That is because the question is difficult to answer. It is hard to know the truth of the answer - and for anyone you ask there might be a different truth.

You might say “I know what love is, because I know I love my partner” or “it’s the way I feel about my children”. But if pushed further to define it, you might struggle. 

Philosophers and Love

Philosophers across time have wrangled with questions surrounding love and relationships. Even now, on popular sites like reddit you can find online philosophers grappling with the idea of it.

Simone de Beauvoir explored the concept of love throughout her life. She believed that what people often describe as love is either narcissism or devotion.

Narcissism being the love you have for another person because of the very fact they love you. With this formation, one person sees themselves but doesn’t see the other.

Devotion being the love you have for another that requires you to stop loving yourself. here, one person sees the other but not themselves. And this ultimately results in self betrayal. Dr Kuburic describes this type of self betrayal in It’s On Me by writing:

[Self betrayal is] when we shift our loyalty from us to something external. It’s ot about compromising on trivial matters such as which train to take or which restaurant to go to, it’s when take actions that compromise who we are.

The type of love apparent in “devotion” is the self betraying type.

What love really is, de Beauvoir thought, was neither. It was not an act of putting yourself beneath or above another. Rather the act of learning to live beside. In living beside you are seeking to build a live in which each individual gets to follow their pursuits and have autonomy. In order for it to be love, it needed to have freedom. The freedom for each individual to build a life of their own choosing.

As I couples therapist I have the mantra “I love me, I love thee, so I can love we”.

What do you think? What do your loved ones thing? Explore it with each other.

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Elizabeth EarnshawA Better Life Therapy