What Is Love?

Even after the 275.98 billion songs, posts, and movies, people are stumped when I ask that question. "You can't really define love. It's not something you can put into words, just feel in your heart." Is something I hear a lot. Kind of like comedy, if you have to explain the joke, it ain't funny. People have an aversion to breaking down magical things like love and laughter into their basic components with the aim to understand their inner workings better, like dissecting a dead body. 

Well, luckily for our readers, no one tells me what to do. If I want to butcher a proverbial unicorn, you can't really stop me. HA! Perks of being an author. Anyway, obviously, love is a very loose term. Like a dirty slut, if you may (unsurprisingly). Since so many different things are associated with it. For instance, the line between love and hate is thinner than a knife's edge. Yet fear is the opposite of love. And you should love thy neighbor, but also your enemy. Because love conquers all, and all's fair in love and war.

Of course, love is also blind, even though the person you love is the apple of your eye (because they make your eyes light up like a shiny apple!). You love someone for who they are, not how they look or what they can do for you. Then what's the deal with love at first sight? We accept the love we think we deserve, and to love & be loved is to feel the sun on both sides. Finally (for now), the heart that loves is always young. 

A good reason why people don't like to discuss the meaning of this word is that: If you say something again and again, it starts to lose its meaning and turns into gibberish. Just like any other word. Say bowl 10 times in a row, in different speeds and modulations, and you start to doubt if you're even saying it right. That's exactly why I feel compelled to get it all down on paper here. Like a white whale or mythic beast that must be domesticated, so I can chain it, own it, and feel good about myself. 

I can just see it now, in the far future, in a room full of poets, hippies, and stoners, when the subject comes up. Me, standing in the corner with a smirk as the clueless hacks make thoughtless comments, trying to gain social points. "Love is all you need," says the hippie. "We are all love, everything is love," says the wannabe as I think how lovely it would be to get shot in the head by a bullet made of lead, gunpowder, and love.

Slowly, they turn to me, so as not to be rude, and I can say soundly with assurance, "That? Oh, my lads & laddies, I've already conquered that beast while sitting alone in my room one morning." Then some of them chuckle a bit uncomfortably, gloss over my nonsense, and try their best to ignore me for the rest of the day, as per usual. While it's true that love does not come very naturally to me, clear from how judgmental I can be, I think it depends on how I feel about myself, which tends to be rather hateful most of the time.

Shameless self-indulgence aside, let's try to chomp down the meat and potatoes of the matter now. Well, love is affection, obsession, and infatuation. It's lust, thirst, and longing. It could be for sex, a.k.a. getting your rocks off, or it could be for comfort, closeness, and intimacy. I mean, spitting and hair-pulling are hot and all, but have you ever tried feeling seen? What's hotter than feeling like you could do anything you want around someone and they'd never leave you for it? That's what the horniness seems to indicate to me, a need for safety, above all else. It's an organism's entire being knowing that it will weaken, grow old, and die, so something else must take its place; otherwise, what was all of it for?

Life is difficult, and the world can be cruel. Sometimes you have to make ends meet in gruesome ways. Other times, you have to get your hands dirty. Before you know it, it's kill or be killed. Eat or be torn apart yourself. Shit's enough to put anyone on guard. In the beginning, it was the sun, then it became blood, after that came sweat, and today it's money. We've always had to fight for our lives, and that never really ends. Perhaps love is a sanctuary from that endless climb. A place where you can really let your guard down. Of course, a lot of the hot stuff is also about power, because no wonder. If you define love, consciously or not, as safety, and safety as the lack of danger, then it all kind of becomes intertwined together. Two sides of the same coin, and all that.

That's not just a philosophical platitude, I feel, some of the most potent and impactful parts of love have this primordial quality to them. You want to fall in love with someone you find physically attractive. You yearn for someone who you can be totally, completely, and utterly free with. There's a reckless, almost stubborn need of wanting to get everything from one person. Then comes the horrible nightmare of loss. After finding anything remotely close to it, the fear of losing it, the grief that follows, is that part of the love, too? I think it oughta be. Why not know how the sausage is made? Instead of swindling people into a shit deal, why not slap a big sticker right on it with the full price tag? 

Now, I've never really been in love, I must admit. But when thinking of loss just now, I don't imagine a life partner in the form of a wife or lover. Instead, I feel a lump in my throat, as tears swell up in my eyes, and, yep, right on the money, now I'm sobbing (like clockwork), when I think of how Finn might've felt when he lost Jake in one of our greatest modern epics, one of biblical proportions, called Adventure Time. And honestly, what could be a purer form of love than that? Two brothers, not bound by blood, who grew up together as best friends. They lived together, went on adventures, and had each other's backs through thick and thin. No matter what, they were there for each other. Best of buds, partners in crime, friends for life. 

Their world was dangerous as well, and in their bond, they found such solace that they could take it all on without any doubts or fears. So yes, love is safety, love is trust, and it might not exist without fear, loss, grief, or danger, making the two inseparable in some almost twisted way. How do you feel when you look at Finn and Jake? Don't we all want friendship and support like theirs? How do you think Finn felt when Jake died? Do you think it was a peaceful, blissful kind of departure? As heavy as the story gets at times, this entire episode happened off-screen. Because just like the sometimes unsightly and shameful aspects of romance, everyone deserves the privacy to get ugly. And that is how I imagine it went.

I don't think Finn could ever have even an ounce of grace or restraint in such an episode. It wouldn't be just for him to have to. I imagine an endless ocean of pain, too great to be contained. Seemingly endless nights full of unrestricted wailing. Some of it would be with other loved ones. The rest must be carried alone. Does this pain, then, mean the adventure was ultimately a trauma that was better left in the abyss? Of course not! No matter the price you have to pay, anything and everything was worth those awesome years full of love, joy, and fun. All the suffering and pain in the entire universe could never snuff out that flawless light. Even if you never get a taste for it in your time, isn't your pain worth it if someone else gets to feel that utter sense of joy and safety?

In that sense, it's important to note that no matter how hard it all gets, how dark the nightmares, how long the night, even if it's all connected to love, it's useful to see how it's different from it. Sure, they have a relationship. But they're still separate. After all, love is not merely the absence of danger. The birds and the bees, similarly, are a particularly shiny part of love, but that's not all it is. Although it is noteworthy how potent that shiny patch of paradise can be for many to sow the seeds of love on. I mean, if you're physically nude in front of a person, you might as well be emotionally naked as well. Hell, you're halfway there already, why not bare your soul while you're at it? Yet so many people have no problem separating the two things. For instance, who could be a purer form of love than a parent and a child?

Here's a headline for anyone who might be grossed out by the next part of this discussion: your parents have already seen you naked. Once the physical features develop, and the child takes on that tremendous burden of dignity, we start respecting their boundaries. Yet an unfortunate amount of father rape their daughters at awfully tender ages. Consenting adults have one-night stands, and kids in college experiment with each other. Now, I've grown up in an appallingly orthodox setting, so it seems intuitive to me that love is a crucial ingredient for the most sacred of physical relations. I won't presume that this is somehow natural or true, although for the people who end up on the same conclusion, there is a lot of stumbling and bumping into things before reaching it. 

Based on my personal experience, sex quite viscerally feels like the need for safety. I want to fuck with the same intensity that I need a billion bucks in my bank account. As for the countless unfortunate perversions that plague us, they seem to be symptoms of a larger disease. To me, it's staring into the void of separation and letting yourself be tainted by it. It's getting so lost in the material struggles of this supposedly hostile or indifferent world that one brings it back into the personal, private, and sacred realm where love was meant to thrive. It's the untreated, ignored, and neglected wounds that rot and corrupt your inner world. Food becomes a cocktail of molecules that fuel your mechanical body, which in turn is made up of various types of elements. Sure, things move around. Winds blow, volcanoes erupt, and stars seem to fall from the sky.

Things flow, but none of it is really, truly alive. They're all just meaningless things that make a lot of noise. Now, don't be fooled by the vernacular lingo and your associations, meaning is not some naive imbecile's crutch that a stoic like you has no use for. It's not something for the weak, faceless masses who dawdle in front of idols in churches. Meaning is simply a series of logical assumptions that produce value. To say that the world is devoid of meaning tells you that you are without value. A robot does not concern itself with its place in the world, my child. Only living beings do that. Living beings have emotions, which are short-hand for those very logical reasonings that can be so slow and cumbersome to work through.

So, instead of working out each time how a person's favor might affect you in the future, you simply feel a sense of attraction to them. Similarly, we all experience a collective trauma called birth, which inherently involves going from a safe, comfortable, and perfect place, which is also parastic in every sense, into a cold, uncomfortable realm full of sharp objects and harsh air. A very small percentage of lucky ones then spend a really long time in an equally hospitable environment. One where they are safe to experiment without long-term consequences, until they can become self-reliant, able to stand on their own two feet. 

Unfortunately, for a vast majority of us, just like for every living thing that has ever come before us in the wild, we get wounded by things that affect us long after they occur. The lucky ones carry this inherent sense of self-worth, while the majority only know how to fight for survival. When the world is scary and dangerous, it helps to put up a wall that separates you from it. It's better to live in a cocoon, pull levers that move you forward toward pleasure and away from pain. It's better to always keep a distance from the world, just in case it has hurtful horrors in store, instead of comfy goodness. Even dulling the joy seems acceptable, after all, you don't seem to remember your time in the womb, but still carry every scar that aches with each step and reminder.

However, you don't remember the womb just as a fish isn't aware of water. You aren't conscious of safety until it is taken away from you. This is a small example of the gaping chasm between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious forces that create our life experience. Coming back to perversion, when you put up a barrier for long enough, it normalises separation, making it second nature. When something becomes so essential to one's life experience, like the ground they stand on, it quickly becomes an assumption that's taken for granted. Yet, just like the ground you stand on, it shapes your perception and starts affecting how you see everything else.

Food, water, air, power, electricity, light, smells, visuals, imagery, sensation; it all starts to morph and change shape. Slowly, they all become levers. Cold, mechanical, unfeeling things to be tugged, pulled, and pushed to your heart's desire. Meaningless dead things that either cause you pain or bring you pleasure. Air becomes oxygen. Food becomes carbs. All of it just becomes fuel for the raging fire inside you; it all becomes consumable for that long-forgotten thing deep inside the cocoon. That buried sense of self, hidden out of view behind layers of armor, is now the only source of value, as it ever was. Except that the protection is now mangled with it. Where does the armor end and the person begin? Through that twisted window, obstructed by cables and levers, the view outside becomes even more distorted.

People become things. Just like a can of cola and a pack of chips. Everything has a price, and it's all part of a sick game that a hostile world has been forcing you to play for as long as you can remember. It's all rigged, and you are the victim. A helpless, pathetic, powerless creature. Always being subjected to discomfort. You didn't ask to be born, so why bother playing by the fucked up rules? So you force, and you grab, and you take. You snatch things from the inside of what used to be your cocoon, but now has become your cage. Never mind that the rules are made up, an unfortunate product of evolution, necessary, practical, and functional, but not hostile in any way. Forget how the cage is a construct put up by no one other than yourself, useful at first, but cumbersome as it stands. 

Just rebel. Throw your hands and wail. Be ugly, be horny, be selfish. You're safe inside your cage. When seeking to define love, I thought it helpful to define what it's not. The way I see it, this is as far away as you can get from it. To treat other people just like you as tools for your pleasure. To use them as you see fit, because you deserve whatever you can get away with, since it's all up for grabs in the jungle anyway. Of all the things in life to meditate upon, of all the ideas to decipher, what could be better than the opposite of that unholy mess? So love is safety, trust, and comfort. It's caring for others for caring's sake. Does this mean you can hug a murderer and love a rapist, and it's all puppies and rainbows from there? Not quite.

The whole point of that endeavor: to lay out exactly what makes a person act in such ways. It's not to absolve or rehabilitate, that can only happen if the predator chooses to do that. There's a lot of shit about being a warrior in a garden, a gardener in a war, and the blurry lines that separate the two. To be a warrior, you must go to war, and once you're there, you can't exactly tap out. It can be easy to lose your way, and after all, we all spend the majority of our time by ourselves. Who am I or anyone to tell someone that they are wrong and must change their ways? Best we can do is look out for ourselves.

My point here is that love is also understanding. It's interest, focus, acceptance, and even appreciation. They say the highest form of love is self-love. To see yourself for who you are, to spend time with yourself, and to take yourself apart. not to own, use, or manipulate. To love someone with an agenda, hoping to transform their nature, cannot be pure. It's manipulation and control in disguise. In fact, power and control seem to be the antithesis of love. Self-love, then, must involve sitting there with all your parts and trying to reconcile, assimilate, and kind of connect them together. You wouldn't discard something you love, would you? Then again, you wouldn't try to change it either.

You must let go of what you love, for it came from somewhere unknown that does not belong to you. You care for it and give it what it needs to thrive, and then let it go. But is there any real point in building such an overidealised perfect idea of the word? Is it helpful, useful, or practical in any way? I think I've never really felt loved by anyone. I've never really loved myself. And I've always had the tendency to reach for perfection. Surely, if you try hard enough, you will get better and your situation will improve. It's a natural human tendency to have such a narrative. But what if love were not a labor? What if it were as easy as breathing?

I might've started out this inquiry as a flex of some sort, a kind of posturing of the ego. Yet it has transformed into an honest search for that missing piece of myself, without which I always feel so restless. In the real world, things are messy and imperfect. You can try your best and do everything right, or you can pick a horrible goal and constantly fall short. You can lose a thousand times and die before seeing the light, or you can win forever and lose when it really counts. Today, I feel my life is more tragic than anything. I look around me and can't help but wonder where this mythical lifeforce is. All thoughtful words don't seem to make a difference. I can't help but hurt myself and no one is coming to save me.

I keep thinking, if I bring one more wall down, I'll see the horizon once more and it'll all be okay. If only I do this or that, I will be comfortable in my skin and happy to see my reflection. Once I do that, it'll all be okay. If I write and figure things out, and serve it to people on a silver platter, it will bring me closer to paradise. Or maybe heaven and hell are just places in my mind, no more in my control than my own breath or heartbeat. At first, you think you can control your breath, but the more you try, the less it works. I feel like self love is messy, nonsensical, and chaotic like that, and I don't think it could be very much different for other areas.

Sure, I love my dog, but that's because she makes me happy and fills my brain with feel-good chemicals every time I see her. I adore her. I love video games, because they make me feel a joy of discovery and a love of life. I love traveling because it fuels my entire being. Perhaps a big part of love is just what something can do for you. What's wrong with that? That's where most people let it be. Attachment, happiness, joy, and pleasure are a big part of what gives love its value. Perhaps that's why I find it difficult to love myself. As far as I can tell, all my parts only work against me. Always fighting, bickering, clashing with each other, and muddying the waters. 

Just as we all share a collective trauma of birth, perhaps we also suffer from the tyranny of the self. We might feel joy because of our egos, but happiness is fleeting, and things always fall apart. By and large, we're all just suffering most of the time. That's why it's so pleasurable to work with your hands and get away from yourself. As important as self love is, I also find it so complicated. Perhaps I'm just overcomplicating it? When Coldplay says believe in love, the message seems far clearer. "Be nice, kind, and helpful. Seek to understand, forgive, and support." Like the gospel for modern-day hippies. It's simple and hardly goes beyond the golden rule.

As with all things, my understanding of love will continue to grow and develop as I continue to live and learn. It's not about making a definitive resource, but finding joy in the process of improvement as I make my way towards it. Safety, understanding, freedom, care, kindness, comfort, acceptance, appreciation, protection, growth, nurture, interest, curiosity, wonder, pleasure, happiness, together, connection, support, enjoyment, magic, choice, value, and meaning. Just like a living organism, love seems to have many moving parts and organs that are distinct, but work together to create this especially potent idea, emotion, and experience. 

It's also useful to know how lust, power, attachment, fear, control, manipulation, hatred, misery, grief, loss, and other gnarly things are related, but distinct from that organism, like diseases and aversions to look out for when dealing with this particular mythical creature. Just like all living creatures, love might also be evolving along with the creatures that experience it. There is an obsession for more, with a want for simplicity that's left with me now. There is great pleasure in achieving new heights in pursuit of understanding. Yet it must be balanced with a need for the bare minimum viable definition, an insight simple enough to be put to use immediately, elevating the life experience of all it touches. To that end, if I were to sum it up in as short as possible, I would have to conclude that "Love is Safety," as there is no higher manifestation of the word in the real world.

Indeed, that's what makes it so difficult, because at a glance, safety can be about control. Yet, in pursuit of simplicity, it's important to note that love is simply an emotion. Rather than trying to achieve some illusory objective kind of physical safety, the most important thing is that a creature feels safe. Whatever allows one to feel safe is love. Sure, it is a lot of other things as well, but for all intents and purposes, that is what I would conclude.