What Love Is

Recently I was watching a tv show and there was a quote by one of the characters that got me thinking. She said, “love is just a transitory chemical feeling that is not worth losing your career over”, and I can remember having this exact same attitude. Perhaps not specifically in reference to the losing your career part, but I did mentally reduce the experience of love to that of just a “transitory chemical feeling”. So I decided I wanted to talk about why I thought that way, what I think now, what love really is, and also some common misconceptions about it. 

I think most would agree that love is the ultimate feeling. Whether it be romantic love, familial love, friendly love, self love, or spiritual love, when we experience love with each other or ourselves we feel whole and free, we feel accepted, understood, and appreciated. You could say that love or the fear of not having it is the underlying motivation behind all of our decisions. So how is it that I and many others were able to view it as simply just a chemical reaction, implying that it is some sort of illusion, an intangible fleeting experience?

Speaking for myself, I lost respect for what people called love when I was a teenager. I never was someone who had a desire for that Disney fairy tale type love, but I still believed in it in general and I thought one day I would have it. But in Junior high I got my heart broken and I started to look at love differently. I started to distance myself from it subconsciously because I didn’t want to be hurt again. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but looking back at it now that is definitely what was going on. But during all that, since I changed my lens on it, I used to see people who fell head over heels in love with someone as foolish because I was a man of logic and rationality and love did not seem logical or rational to me. I saw people do really stupid and selfish things because of love and even what I considered to be evil things. 

So when I learned the biochemistry of it, that the experience of love is just a flood of “happy hormones”, such as oxytocin, dopamine, or serotonin, I started to disregard it as basically just an illusion. And this idea was only solidified by how people could fall in and out of love so easily. This just made think that it wasn’t real in a sense, it wasn’t something we could depend on. So it became the least of my priorities.

In high school however I had developed friendships that were so strong and so loving that it gave me a totally new idea on what love could be. I started to realize that this idea that was sold to me by society, that love is limited and that the truest form was only that with a single other person, wasn’t accurate because I felt true love for many people in my life, none of whom were a significant other. I deduced that there was no real difference between love with a romantic partner and that of your friend or family member. The connection, the feeling of being accepted and wanted was the same, the only difference was degrees at which you experience it and the activities you partook in with the person you loved. Some may think that the sexual union you have with another is the ultimate form, but that just begs the question, ‘can someone who doesn’t have the ability, or the parts even to copulate, not have the ability to experience true love?’. Of course not, because love is not only possible through romance. It is a state of being that goes way beyond just a sexual connection.  

The kind of love I believed in was the feeling of it but I felt as if I could back up that feeling with logical reasons for it. But it was this kind of mentality, of weighing the positive effects of a relationship I was in to justify my love for someone, that began to tarnish the very meaning of it. I thought that one should be able to give practical reasons for loving someone, and this thinking in a way caused me to see everyone as either worthy or unworthy of my love depending on their behaviour or characteristics. Over time I started to see that the way I was viewing love was like seeing someone as a commodity, seeing them only in terms of what they could provide for me. I loved people because they were dependable, someone I could always turn to, I loved them because they made me feel good about myself, I loved them because they made me laugh a lot, I loved them because they were kind to me and would do anything I asked. So when I asked myself if those people could no longer provide those things for me, would I still love them, often times the answer was no. I wasn’t loving the other person, I was loving what they could do for me or what they could be for me. I noticed later that this is basically how a lot of people see love. They see others as potential sources for love and it is their personal preferences that dictate whether or not that source is a good one or a bad one.

All of this eventually lead me to the truth about love: Love is the feeling of connection. It is the sensation we experience when we fundamentally believe that we are connected to something beyond ourselves. 

We all feel love in varying degrees depending on how we view ourselves in relation to it. Pure love, the truest form is like white light, and light splits into many colours when shined through a prism. Similarly, pure love splits into separate kinds of love including romantic love, familial love, friendly love, self love, spiritual love, and love for experiences, events, and things. It is when we attach ourselves to one of these colours and believe it to be the only kind of love that we separate ourselves from the source, and the love then becomes limited and we feel and act as if we need to harness it or cultivate it so we can never be without it. But in reality we ARE never without it. That pure light that IS love is our essence, it is our natural state of being, it is the energy that builds us. You’ll often hear people talk about how after they lost everything and hit rock bottom they were able to actually find love within themselves. This happens because they stop looking outward for it and subsequently realize it had been within them the entire time. It is through the very action of clinging to love and trying to hoard it for oneself that we end up cutting ourselves off from the source and believing in its limitation. 

It is easy to believe that we can only experience love when we share it with someone else and when that someone returns it to us. But this belief is based on the misconception that love is a feeling that only exists between two or more people, that it is borne of the connection between the two. This comes from the idea that we are somewhat fragmented when we are born, that we are not whole and in order to experience wholeness we must connect to another. This is patently false, because we are never actually truly disconnected from anyone else. We are all tethered together by this tapestry of energy that exists within all matter. And this energy being infinite provides every living being with the commensurate amount of love to experience it forever and always. It is but a joy and our gift that we GET to share it, and experience it with another. It is a bonus of living a conscious experience to feel what it is like to be in love with another while simultaneously being in love with the Self. But by no means are we limited when we are not actively sharing our love with someone else. In a way our love is even more pure when we are in the understanding that we are all one being and that there isn’t any separation between us and another. Love for someone else is merely a vehicle to bring us back to our natural state of pure love within the self and the recognition that the self is everyone and every thing. What happens when we are in the state of being “in love” is that we love, admire, cherish, or even worship another person so much so that if that person loves us back then we give ourselves permission to feel the infinite source of love within ourselves, but I am here to say that that love of another is not a prerequisite for feeling this. We can practice a life of self love so that we can always be in love regardless of who loves us back. But it just so happens that when we find this love within ourselves we begin to attract love from others. And it is an ongoing cycle. 

In order to have true everlasting love one must recognize that love comes from within and not from without. We can experience fragmented love given certain circumstances but those experiences are accompanied by a desire to obtain more of it or a fear of losing it. This is not the truest form of love, love in itself is infinite. The same way a mother loves her child, true love is unconditional. We can experience the fragmented version but if we truly want everlasting love then we have to see that it is not the other that provides it but the recognition of who and what we are. And in that recognition we can choose to share our love with another, to choose to connect our equally infinite sources and this experience is beyond any earthly material love between subject and object that could ever be known. Because Love ultimately is not a subject/object relationship, it is not I love him, or she loves me, it is I AM love, he IS love, we ARE love. We are in love, it is a state of being, it is what we feel when we fully accept ourselves and everyone else for who and what they are. It is our natural state of being. The only reason we don’t all feel it all the time is because we’ve come to believe lies of separation and love being limited and conditional. This is not to say that everyone must immediately understand love at this level and disregard all subject/object love that we experience, but rather see subject/object love as a stepping stone to one day loving ourselves fully and in turn loving everyone and everything else. Love is a feeling, a state of consciousness that allows us to transcend the lower, denser, heavier vibrational thoughts of fear, guilt, shame, unworthiness and ultimately separation.