We throw around the word love quite a bit. But what does it mean, really?
At a base level, it is something I have to offer, and hope that I will eventually find someone to reciprocate.
The goal is to find someone whose presence I enjoy being around on a regular basis. Someone I find fun and interesting. Someone I find attractive. Once found, I can trade my love for theirs. So from that perspective, love is almost tangilble, a commodity we can exchange.
But what are the intangibles of love?
At its core is mutual acceptance, that leads to a feeling that we belong and are safe. At this level, love provides a foundation, an anchor, and an external validation that we exist and matter in this world.
At another level, love provides an expression of unmet potential, which is demonstrated in the “opposites attract” phenominon.
The problem with love, then, is that at it’s essence it is a crutch. It is a band-aid that we run to instead of fixing the core issues of existance or unmet potential. Not very sexy.
Similar to my post from Friday, however, this poing really is more academic than practical, because it is my belief that while these are the ideas behind love, our brain has trained itself through biochemical pain and pleasure to desire love. So while love present itself through weakness, in the end, love conquers all. In the end, we all give in.
Like many things in life, though, knowing its essence enables better decisions, and in this case, by examining what we desire to gain from love, we can better learn those things that we need to fulfill ourself and insource, instead of outsourcing our needs.