Love is NOT a noun, It's a Verb
Being "In Love Is" Not The Same as Loving Someone
A few years ago, a girl asked me a question. From the moment I answered with “yes,” I couldn’t sleep properly. Not until ‘The me’ that answered her question was no more. Before that, I heard stories of people’s lives being changed by seemingly small things. Every other video on Youtube has some variation of it in its title these days.
The girl who asked me this question always managed to confuse me (in a fun and exciting way). But this question was light years ahead of any other she had ever asked me. That’s because the situation between us changed when I confessed my feelings to her (the feelings of love, obviously). She didn’t answer me when I asked her what she thought about me. Not for 6 months. By then, It was too late.
This moment happened in the middle part of those 6 months. The question was simply - Will you love me forever? The problem was that I didn’t know what "Love" meant.
Unfortunately, It was through a messenger app. If it was in real life, I would probably use my signature move and would ask her to repeat what she was saying and try to come up with an answer while she did so. I did that so many times she probably wondered if I was going deaf. (I did it so many times that even I thought that I was losing my hearing. But trying to think while watching her was the hardest thing I have ever done, so far). You might think that in my situation, I’d have a lot more time. I did, but thinking is hard, and I am lazy. I also thought that it was just a simple question, and I answered it without a second thought.
When you make a promise, you should understand what you are promising. At the very least. If you don’t know the meaning of the most important word in that promise, you have already failed. This is what set me off on the path. The path which led me to find the answer to the question:
What Is Love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.
You see, the idea of Love I had in mind was - The overwhelming feeling of desire to be with the person you love. It should be rare, almost unreachable. Yet I had those feelings for every girl friend I ever had (almost). As long as they were not rude, there was a real chance for me to fall for them. The girl from the beginning was one of the nice ones.
As you can imagine, that fact really messed up my definition of love. Then the problem got ten times worse when I thought about love in non-romantic cases. You can love your relatives very much, but, likely, you don’t want to be with them (all the time).
When I realized this, I decided to not stop until I had discovered a definition of love that worked in all cases. It was harder than I thought.
The Incompleteness of Love
If Love is “an intense feeling of deep affection” or “a great interest and pleasure in Something” (as Google would tell you), Then what about the annoying relatives? Some of my relatives are not subject to my interest or pleasure, And a few don’t have my affection. But I still love them.
But if I don’t know what Love is, how could I? And yet, I do know that I love them.
Then I made a crucial distinction. The feeling of love, or the thing we call “being in Love” is not “The Love”.
If the feeling we call Love, is “The Love” as a whole, then it’s not all that it’s hyped up to be.
I came up with this little diagram (in my head). As you can see the “feeling of love” (I’ll call it FOL, for our sanity’s sake) is part of The Love, but it is not The Love itself. It’s just a part of it.
The tire is part of a car. A very important part. But it is not the car itself. If we take this example to its extreme, it is possible to have a car without any tires.
Great, now I know what Love isn’t. If only I could understand what it IS.
C.S. Lewis To The Rescue
It didn’t take a long time to find a very good way of looking at love. The Four Loves, according to C.S. Lewis, is an eye-opener. He explains that the love for your close relatives is different from the love for your friends, which is, itself different from the love you have for your spouse, and that is different from the love God has for us. Well, that’s pretty obvious, you might think, and you’d be right.
Turns out C.S. Lewis had a perfect answer for me, I just had to keep reading a bit longer before complaining. He offered us the following definition:
“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained”
That’s much better. Now we have a concept that is not just a feeling (or feelings). A new concept is added to the definition, the mind (from which the “wish” comes). If you are not wishing good for the subject of your love, you do not love them.
Fair enough.
At this point, we can easily combine my hastily concocted definition with Lewis’s definition. What we’ll be left with is a definition of “The Love” which includes the feeling and the will. I almost stopped here, because I was somewhat satisfied with my findings. But something was bothering me.
The Crucial Problem
By far, the biggest problem I had with the new possible definition is that it lacked the third aspect of personhood. A person is a being who has the Mind (to think), Emotion (to feel), and the Will (to act).
Love is the ultimate expression of one’s being. And if that’s truly the case, then the ultimate expression has to include all three main aspects of one’s existence.
That’s why the Girl’s question set me off on the second-greatest journey of my life (so far). Although, I didn't realize that back then. Even before I knew these three aspects were necessary for the true definition of love, I already knew that it was more than just an emotion or wishful thinking.
Deep down, we all know that.
The Breakthrough
I am some sort of deep thinker who has been searching for the “truth” for years. Do not think that.
I thought about the definition of Love ever since the Question, but most of the time, ideas I had about it were way back in my subconscious mind.
As happens with a lot of other things, this post was conceived the moment I first heard the most brilliant definition of “The Love” I’ve ever heard. It often happens to me when I have thought about something for a while. Then all of it just clicks with one precise trigger. That’s when all the sedimented thoughts came back, and together they revolutionized my way of looking at “The Love”.
So what is it exactly?
“Love is an act of the will accompanied by emotion that leads to action on behalf of its object.”
Oh, man. Where do I even begin? This quote is really worth remembering.
This definition belongs to an American pastor and author, Voddie Baucham. I heard it in one of his sermons, But it turns out, he has a whole book about it.
The definition includes all three main defining factors of personhood. It’s a brilliant definition because it is both general and specific enough to apply in all cases. If you use this definition you can explain all four different Loves we discussed earlier.
That means we are at the end of the beginning of this journey. In the continuation of this post, we will tackle that definition from an objective standpoint, and for that, we have to reach for an objective standard himself.
This is what inspired me to write this post:
Voddie Bucham’s sermon
C.S. Lewis explaining love