What is love? Ahh, what a refreshing question. It’s one that’s been debated for decades, centuries and probably even millennia, one that seems to have endless arguments without resolve, and one that we hate to address because of our own sad “love lives.”
According to Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, love is an emotion. And like any other emotion, love visits us in waves – it is a micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being which can last somewhere between a few seconds and five minutes. She argues that it is neither everlasting nor unconditional, and that it happens in brief moments of eye contact across the room, or in animated conversations over coffee.
Apparently it is also a necessity that can be compared to the likes of food, water and oxygen. With it, you feel well and happy; without it, your DNA can change the way it is expressed within your cells and thus cause degradation in your health, vitality and “overall well-being”. Sounds scary.
What I don’t understand is this: if love comes in brief spurs, what would the rest of the time in a relationship (for example) be called? When you say, “I love you” to someone, what are you saying? For me, it’s an all-encompassing term, also used to describe your feelings of desire, loyalty and trust. Love should be all of those things.
Fredrickson suggests that love leads to “positive resonance” which happens when two minds/bodies interact in the same line of positive emotions (for example, when two people go for a walk, eat a picnic lunch, watch a movie, tell stories together etc.). This way, she says, love is the starting point from which all other emotions (trust, devotion, etc.) follow.
She continues to say that this positive resonance and connection requires physicality – when people experience micro-moments of love, they are both “in sync” and are physically/emotionally attuned to each other. They each have to be smiling, or looking into each other’s eyes, or laughing, or touching…
But what about couples who cannot physically be together, and who are in those awful things we call “long distance relationships”? If love requires a connection and a connection requires physicality, then, logically, people who cannot see each other are in loveless relationships. That certainly doesn’t seem right, but Fredrickson’s reasoning is valid. She doesn’t spend much time addressing new technologies like Skype or Snapchat (or even the old fashioned letter-writing) but I doubt she’d be too keen on the idea that a computer or phone could substitute for a relationship.
Being in a long-distance relationship myself, I can tell you that I do agree with Fredrickson in some regards – that there is nothing better than being face-to-face and that there are moments in which I feel completely attuned and connected during the times when we are together. However, for me, love encompasses feelings of compassion, trust, desire and loyalty; such words are not separate entities, but rather, interdependent on one another.
I suppose everyone has his or her own definitions of “what love is” – Fredrickson’s is certainly one to consider and keep in mind. She’s qualified to make such assertions as she’s been studying emotions for decades and is a well-known professor, director and psychologist, complete with a Ph.D. The only wisdom I have about love is from my own accounts – I don’t have any scientific facts to woo you with, and my knowledge from experience is limited at best.
Although, even after reading her book, studying her research and listening to her speak, I don’t think everyone would necessarily buy into her ideas. It has been ingrained in our minds since the day we were born that “love is romantic” and “love is a fairy tale” and “love is unconditional”… Would people be so easily swayed to go for science rather than their own beliefs or experiences?
It’s a compelling argument, but one that I, personally, must take with a grain of salt. Love certainly is one of the most powerful feelings in existence, but what those feelings mean to you is up to you. Alas, we can not all be omnipotent Ph.D researchers and experts on love. Some of us are only human. •
