Thoughts on Love

What use does love have in this world? This is a question I’ve been pondering for a while. I’ve always been a romantic; some of my earliest memories are of having my stuffed animals marry one another and form families. These tendencies continued into my adolescence, where my number one goal was to enter a romantic relationship. I don’t think I’m abnormal for this, as it’s widely known that teenagers are fairly driven by their hormones and their need to belong, but I thought it worth mentioning to demonstrate the long-lasting ponderance I have had on this topic. There is much more to be said about my relationship with love through those years, some of which I may write about later, but it’s not the focus of this post. Instead, I’m more interested in exploring the question of how I view love within wellbeing, and what function love has within therapy.

Love is a difficult thing to measure. Statistics Canada suggests that rates of love are the same as they were in 1921, if we measure by the number of Canadian adults in a union or partnership. However, romantic love is not the be-all, end-all. If we look at an inversely related measure, loneliness, we may reach a more negative conclusion: nearly seven in ten US adults surveyed suggested that they needed more emotional support. Just about half of those adults also suggested they felt isolated, left out, or lacking in companionship.

We know that love is important to well-being. There have been multiple studies correlating love with decreases in stress, increases in longevity, and overall better well-being. Granted, many of these studies are limited in scope, usually examining only romantic love, and of course, correlation does not equal causation. Regardless, love is seemingly quite important within our lives.

One suggestion for why love holds such importance within our lives comes from evolutionary biology and ties in with a field of psychology known as attachment theory. The hypothesis is as follows: human infants are quite bad at surviving by themselves. We are born unable to fend for ourselves, unlike other animals. While other higher mammals are similarly pathetic (have you ever seen a litter of newborn mice?), human infants are ultimately heavily reliant on their caregivers to survive. The bond between infants and caregivers is therefore heavily emphasized, and a need for a safe and secure attachment is ingrained into our core beings. This need doesn’t just go away after infancy either; it needs to remain present within caregivers to ensure there’s some drive for the caregiver to take care of the infant. There are a lot of nuances within this hypothesis that will not be discussed here, and obviously many other aspects in life will factor into the attachment bond and love’s presentation. However, the idea of love remaining a core need and drive within us is ever present.

So, if love is so core, why do so many of us not feel it in our lives? Moreover, why does the world not feel more loving? I don’t really have a great answer to these questions, as there’s obviously a lot of reasons for any sociological phenomena*. We can look back at our anthropological history, and the idea that humans were never really meant to have such large communities. We could cite more current cultural conditions or the rapid societal changes that occurred past the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately, I will leave the larger second question for someone else to answer. Instead, I want to explore the first question.

I would suggest that there are two main reasons why people do not feel love in their lives.

One: they do not have it.

Two: they have it but have mischaracterized it.

The first is an obvious reason at first glance. Sometimes, life is horrid, and you are placed in a bad situation. Perhaps a close loved one died, leaving you without their active presence. Perhaps you were born into a harsh environment or, through circumstance, found yourself alienated from others. In all these situations, there are aspects that you do not have control over. However, in all these situations, it is still one’s responsibility to find and form appropriate and truly loving connections**. The reason why I suggest that is not only due to the benefits that love offers, but because lacking a sense of love or connection with others is so often what drives people towards therapy***.

Yalom once wrote,

“If, on the other hand, we are overcome with dread before the abyss of loneliness, we will not reach out toward others but instead will flail at them in order not to drown in the sea of existence …We behave toward other beings as toward tools or equipment. The other, now no longer an "other" but an "it," is placed there, within one's circle of world, for a function.” (Existential psychotherapy, p. 363)

This situation is untenable, not just for us, but for our community around us. It may also be why the world does not feel more loving, but again, I leave that discussion for someone else. So, how do we start to feel that love again? How do we turn to others when the environment around us is so damaging or when we have been hurt before? The answer is that we must reprocess that trauma to let our guards down. We must gain insight into our own unique psychological defences that have formed through the pain we’ve experienced and actively take the leap into love once more.

Therapy can help with this by providing clients with someone who can help explore those unique inner worlds and by modelling how to take that leap for them. Speaking as a therapist, I love everyone who comes through treatment. That does not always mean I will agree with my clients nor approve of their actions. However, regardless of what they do, I will choose to love them, hoping for the preservation and maintenance of their wellbeing. It is an active choice on my end to love them, one that is not always easy and that I will fail at. There have been many times in both my personal and professional life where I have fallen into the abyss of loneliness and begun treating people unduly. It is okay to fail; it is not okay to stop trying.

Here’s the rub: Everybody has these loss-of-love experiences to some degree. We have all experienced rejection and isolation. Nobody goes through life without some negative relational experience occurring. Certainly, some people have it worse than others, but the abyss of loneliness is a universal constant. That is not a bad thing, however. It is because we are all fundamentally isolated that we can choose to look towards one another and relate. As W.H. Auden wrote, “You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart”.

Now, for the second reason. Anecdotally, I’ve found that there is a constant societal message that “If I am loved, then everything will be okay”. To a degree, this statement is true. As discussed previously, love and connection do statistically increase your wellbeing. However, love is not always enough.

Sometimes love is conceptualized as enmeshment; that if I absorb myself fully and completely into this relationship (be it romantic, platonic, familial, or otherwise), then I will be safe from harm. That statement is not true, nor, in my opinion, is it love. Love takes vulnerability; it is the intimacy to be a crooked neighbour and to show those flaws. We cannot be vulnerable if there is no sense of self. We must learn to accept the limitations of love to feel it more completely and truly. We must understand that love does not prevent harm nor is it always comfortable. None of this means that love is not worth it. We cannot live full and true lives without love, but we also cannot expect that love is a panacea. It will only make the hardships easier to handle.

To continue with my theme of referencing media, I will leave you, dear reader, whom I love with all my heart, Millay’sLove is Not All(Sonnet XXX);

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

* There is also an element of subjectivity to these questions, especially the latter. I live in the Western world, and there tends to be an emphasis on competition, hierarchical structure, and individual ruggedness within Western culture, all three of which preclude the pleasant intimate union with others that characterizes love. Of course, culture is not monolithic, and the extent to which you or any other individual living within a given culture subscribes to the norms varies wildly. However, from my standpoint, the base assumption of my questions – that being, love has diminished – feels accurate.

** I say this assuming that the reader is an adult. If you are a child or adolescent, you are somewhat exempt from this responsibility, as society should be caring for you and helping you build these appropriate and loving connections.

***This isn’t the only reason why people enter therapy. I am simplifying here and looking at therapy through a deficit model because it makes this post easier to write. However, there are many reasons why someone may enter therapy and not all of them have to do with shoring up a weakness or “fixing” an issue. Many times, people want to improve what is already present in their lives or simply learn to understand and live with a specific circumstance.