On love

This image is not what love is

I do not know much about love. But I do know that love is not like anything else.

It is not like any of the other emotions. Love is not like curiosity. Love is not like excitement. Love is not like pride. In a big map of all experience, the highest-level division ought to be to drawn between love on one side and all other experience on the other side.

The thing that makes love different from all the other emotions is that it does not have a valence. In our culture we think of love as “positive” but this is absurd. One who is in love immediately sees that “positive” vs “negative” are to love as “big” vs “small” are to the concept of supersymmetry in particle physics: woefully inadequate.

Love is not an instrumental thing. Love may form part of a partnership between two humans, but love is not sufficient on its own for a partnership to succeed, and some partnerships lack love yet persist.

We think we understand love. We know that there are three main types of love: romantic love between lovers, friendly love between friends, and familial love between family members. This is nonsense. These are merely three tiny pinprick-size points in the space of possible love.

I heard a talk by a man whose greatest love was for a powerful teacher he met in his 20s. He held his love for this man with pride and would talk about it. This kind of love is as great and as deep as any romantic, friendly, or familial love.

There is also love for a teammate, love for one’s competitors, love for a child, love for all children, love for the forest, love for all humanity, love for one’s country, love for oneself, love for the Earth, love for the poor, love for the present.

It is difficult to trust love, because we do not really know what love is or how it works. We know that love has great power, so we become frightened. We invent stories about love in order to feel safe. This story telling is a kind of love, too. But it is the belief that we know about love that cuts us off from love. When we think we have understood love is when we understand it least.

I do not understand love. Do not believe the words in this essay. This essay is not correct.