Love ... The Lost Feelings

Again away from politics, problems and the ugliness of this world. Let’s talk about love, the most overrated, abused, and in the same time ignored feelings. What is love and how it became the feeling we acknowledge as love today and why it became so painfully unsuccessful, weird and empty!

Actually the term love may refer to different types of feelings; vary from affection and compassion to preference and enjoyment to attraction and emotions but let’s see what sciences (biology, neurology and psychology) say about love:

A new psychological study led by Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a relationship; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship. Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store.

From the neurological and biological point of view, Larry Young, professor of Neuroscience at Emory University, attempts to define love in chemical terms. Young contends that love is a result of chemical reactions within the brain. Asserting that human emotion and behaviors have evolved from those found in the animal kingdom, Young argues that maternal love among a woman and her child is not that different from that of a monkey or chimpanzee. In which case, he rationalizes that maternal love can be understood as a result of the mammalian hormone oxytocin being released into the brain. Approaching love from a biological perspective, cultural anthropologist Helen Fisher, PhD. asserts that hormones, often differing form one’s own, are key, as individuals are often attracted to those whose chemical makeup differ from their own. Dopamine, a neurochemical made in the brain that is involved in many brain activities, including movement and emotion, is “a brain chemical important for controlling emotion response and the ability to feel pleasure and pain.”  In examining the biological aspect of love Fisher identifies love as it occurs in and involves three different brain circuits in addition to the chemical mix that Young mentioned.

If we looked deeply to those scientific bases or definitions of love we can notice that all scientists in different fields just focused on one or two types of love (kinship love and romantic love) ignoring not only different other types but I would go further and say more important types of love. One might think that with scientific and technological development we grow closer to understand the human nature but a quick research in not so complicated issues like, dreams, desires and behaviors may reveal for us that the more advance we go the more complications we add to our lives, and might discover that ancient civilizations might answered some of our questions in a very simple way, but since we think we are smarter now than we used to be in let’s say 2000 years ago we decided to ignore that and build up new theories based on our complicated “development”. 

If we look to what the Greeks' ideology of love we would  find they were more accurate in their views to love; Greeks for example define different types of love with different types of terminology, while in English Love is used to describe different set of feeling we find the Greeks had different terms to describe different types of love which differentiate between physical attraction, ideal love, love of the soul and the love of the body, they go further than that by defining to love someone and to be in love with someone; we find Plato refined his own definition by saying; "although Eros (is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing) is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself. Eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth by Eros. Some translations list it as love of the body." Another type of love is Philia (dispassionate virtuous love), was a concept addressed and developed by Aristotle, It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality, and familiarity. Philia is motivated by practical reasons; one or both of the parties benefit from the relationship. It can also mean love of the mind. Another types of love are Storge (is natural affection) , like that felt by parents for children, and Xenia ( hospitality and gratitude), was an extremely important practice in Ancient Greece, It was an almost ritualized friendship formed between a host and his guest, who could previously have been strangers. The host fed and provided quarters for the guest, who was expected to repay only with gratitude.

From these examples we can find that the modern view for love though it made it more complicated but ignored important parts of the emotions and feelings that can be categorized as love; it simply ignored the simplicity of love and put a huge burden on us to feel loved or to give love to others. In today’s life it became so hard to say I love to a friend, a lover, parent, child or even a person you just enjoy their company, because we limited our love feeling with two types of love (kinship and romantic love) so if you say I love you for example to a not so close friend from the opposite sex it become so weird because immediately they will think either you are in love with them or you are naïve and stupid because that’s usually the only love feeling we acknowledge in our daily life and human interactions, this created a huge emotional burden and built up a tremendous emotional barriers between us as humans, it made us more emotionally and psychologically isolated which complicated the whole system of partnership and romantic relationships because of this emotional isolation we started to put so much requirements on the romantic love or kinship love; we required our lovers, parents, siblings .. etc. to fulfill more than they can do because we deprived ourselves from other types of love which we expect two types of love should make it up to us and compensate the lack of feelings that we deprived ourselves by the misconception the modern life created which eventually led to the failure of most of the relationships we experience today; not only romantically but in all aspects of human interactions. We put so much pressure on the other and we doomed to failure because we wanted to compensate one feeling by totally different set of feelings; we can’t ask our lover to love us the same way our parents did, we can’t ask our child to love us the same way we love them, and we can’t ask  our spouses to love us the same way a lover will do, every stage of our life will bring new type of love, every person we will meet will make us feel different type of love, all we have to do is to open our hearts, eliminate expectations and lower our requirements to be able to feel these types of love from different people. Only then we will not put so much pressure on the closest people to us because we acknowledge that they are not responsible to compensate what we deprived ourselves by being emotionally isolated, that is exactly love unconditionally because we accepted life and people as it is and as they are, we didn’t put them in a test to succeed, eventually we are not a prize we are just another humans no matter how good, amazing and incredible we are, there are A LOT of other people like us out there.

Let’s live, love and enjoy simply without feeling so much pressure to do so, allow others to share their feelings with us even if they are not that close, share their lives and experiences that will enrich our lives in very incredible way, we would feel more connected, more alive and most importantly more loved not only by couple of people but by the whole universe, where peace will shadow our destiny and we might finally be about to live in harmony.