What is the mode of right effort we should put towards tending the flames of love, if we want them to warm us for a lifetime? What are the daily actions we can take to hold onto love when she graces us with her blessed presence?
Human beings are a little obsessed with love.
In 2018, researchers Christenson, Roberts and ter Bogt analyzed Top 40 music from 1960–2010 and found 67% of the songs related to love and relationships and an additional 29% related to lust or sex. It’s a wonder then, with all of that musing, that even in 2021, we lack consensus on what love actually is.
What is love?
How would you define love? Is it a feeling? A behavior? A state of mind? Anthropologist and researcher Dr. Helen Fisher says that love is a biological drive just like thirst, identifying separate brain regions for lust, (fleeting) romantic love and attachment, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers three definitions of love. They are:
love noun \ ˈləv \
- strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; ie. maternal love for a child
- attraction based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers. ie. After all these years, they are still very much in love.
- affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; ie. love for his old schoolmates. Related, an assurance of affection ie. give her my love
I don’t know about you, but these definitions just don’t do it for me.
Affection, attraction and admiration may be components of love, or symptoms of love, but love is more than any of these.
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Even one foray into the wild world of love is enough to make a person begin to doubt Hollywood’s depictions of love. Though the following four basic misconceptions about love are all over adult RomComs, most of us started believing them years ago, thanks to good old childhood indoctrination.
Love at First Sight: It’s extremely useful to note that Ariel is 16 years old in this classic scene. Impulsivity and peak emotional experiences characterize adolescence and have made their way into our expectations for love. When love bursts onto the scene we expect it to be immediate and overwhelming.
The Stars Align for Love: Lucky Sleeping Beauty is fantasizing in a forest when her prince stumbles upon her. Even in 2021, many expect love to arise within a context of profound and magical coincidence. We expect the stars to align for love.
Love = Rescuing: There is nothing more romantic than mistaking a savior complex for love. It’s not just Cinderella who expects to be rescued by her handsome prince. Here, true love unfolds when Belle can see past the Beast’s violent tendencies. In Hollywood, worrisome flaws are depicted as endearing opportunities for redemption.
“Happily Ever After”: The most consistent and egregious message Hollywood sends about love comes when films fade to black once a couple comes together. In these scenes, we get the impression that love is a mountain to be summited, and that once we arrive, we hold steady in breathtaking bliss at the peak. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Einsteining Love: L = A³
Love is not a mountain, and it’s certainly not a replacement for some much needed therapy. Love is a fire, and it must be tended with daily care if we want it to keep us warm for a lifetime.
What these four Disney fantasies have in common is a profound lack of effort.
Love, we dream, is something that happens to us. But, this can’t be further from the truth. Love is a verb — the most active verb around. It’s time that we stop hoping to blissfully stumble into love and instead start committing ourselves to making the consistent efforts of loving.
Love is not something that happens to us. It’s something we make happen. It’s the most important effort we expend, because as all of those Top 40 songs attest, love really is what makes life worth living. As Mother Teresa so beautifully said, “I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, He will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’ rather He will ask, ‘How much did love did you put into what you did?”
Love is the hottest, sweetest fire around, it makes life worth living, but its embers need to be fanned daily if we expect them to warm us for a lifetime.
Love = Attention+Acceptance+Acts of Service
What is the mode of right effort we should put towards tending the flames of love, if we want them to warm us for a lifetime? The answer is based on our deepest human needs, beyond food, clothing and shelter. In his 1943 famed paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation” Abraham Maslow laid out five basic human needs, which we must attend to hierarchically. According to his theory, once our basic survival needs are met, in order to thrive, humans strive to secure a sense of safety and belonging.
Giving and receiving love comes down to three “A’s”
- Attention
- Acceptance
- Acts of Service
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is an idea in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A theory of Human…en.wikipedia.org
Attention
It has taken a social media revolution to prove to us that our attention is and has always been our most valuable commodity. Today, it is bought and sold on the open market in the form of click ads and sponsored content, but even the simplest and most ancient forms of work rest upon our capacity for paying close attention. It is the attention, which yields the skill of the blacksmith, who forged the sword, and the attention of the artist that focused her gaze, birthing a masterpiece.
Love is no different. To be in love is to be held in the perpetual gaze of the beloved. When we love, we offer our mate our consistent attention.
“I see you” is a beautiful expression of love.
Acceptance
Human children are really somewhat set up for failure. We come into the world with these big sensitive hearts and no words to communicate what that heart needs for a great long while. Worse, we’re raised by overworked parents who really just want to be people themselves, not caregivers or worse, slaves to their children’s whims. The result is a species that enters adulthood with a healthy dose of uncertainty about whether or not we are “normal” or “good enough.”
To love is to say “Yes. You are just right, just the way you are.”
No human being is perfect, which is why offering our beloved this depth of safety can be challenging. That’s why loving takes work.
Part of courtship is determining if this kind of deep and total “yes” arises in you when you are with your love. But, once you’ve committed, saying it clearly and daily is an essential act of loving.
Human actions are flawed; human beings are not.
In loving, we become the sturdy witness to the deep truth that our beloved is whole, beautiful and worthy of love, just for who they are.
Acts of Service
Life is hard. Our resources are limited. Demands on our time always seem to outpace our access to replenishment. The moment we are born, we start to die. Life is rife with struggle; love can lighten our load.
No one better embodied love as service than Mother Teresa. She knew that giving of all that she had was more nourishing than taking ever could be. Even if we do not choose to become saints who devote our lives to the poor of Calcutta, we can adopt this posture with our love.
As she famously taught: “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely right where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools.”
The giving of unexpected gifts or offerings of acts of service is a key ingredient in Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt’s, IMAGO approach to healthy relationships. When our love surprises us with an unexpected gift, whether physical or a helping hand, we can’t help but respond with an excitement similar to what a child feels when they are offered an unexpected sweet treat. The brain responds to novel (ie. unexpected) positive stimulus automatically.
Having love in our lives lightens our burdens and makes life sweeter, but only when we work at it. If you’ve been blessed with love, commit now to doing at least one act of service for your love every day.
Love = A³
It’s easy to become cynical about love if you’ve been burdened by it in the past. Moreover, in the instant-gratification 21st century world, it’s easy to expect winning at love to require as much effort as winning at a video game. But, love is far more precious than that. Love is a diamond. It’s forged with time and consistent effort. It takes daily work.
It is harder to describe love than it is to invest in it. We cultivate love in our lives by giving daily of our attention, acceptance and acts of service.
Perhaps describing it is best left to the poets:
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips. — On Love, by Kahlil Gibran
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Cristian Newman on Unsplash