# What love is Love is always a type of fondness, affection, or connection. We usually say "love" as an affectionate connection between people, but it can often be free of any affection or be toward an object or idea. The greatest psychological [motivator](purpose.md) is [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md), but that fear *always* comes through loving something else we don't want to lose. However, we're frequently unaware of what we love when we're more afraid of losing it. Love is typically [habitual](habits.md) in day-to-day life, and we begin loving when we make [decisions](people-decisions.md) that give ultimate [priority](purpose.md) to something. The [cultural](people-culture.md) concept of love is far more constrained than love as a broad concept. Typically, the cultural standard is about a strong [emotional desire](mind-feelings.md) for something (i.e., "limerence"), either [romantic](relationships-marriage.md) or [religious](religion.md), and tends to have some type of selfish aspect to it. True love is to be concerned with the best interests of the recipient of the love, which usually involves preserving that individual and their interests. This shows itself most clearly when people engage in [heated conflicts](people-conflicts.md) with one another. It may be directed to preserving a person, object, [belief](understanding-certainty.md), [mode of thought](understanding.md), or [feeling](mind-feelings.md), but it *always* expresses as some type of [action](results.md) when the situation calls for it. APPLICATION: Many people who talk about "undying affection" or "oneness with the universe" are associated with limerent feelings, which are *not* any legitimate form of love. True love is far less sensational, and preoccupies itself with the well-being of others. Everyone wants to be important, which means that everyone wants others to find [value](purpose.md) in them. In other words, each person wants others to love something associated with them, whether it's [doing](results.md) or [being](humanity.md). APPLICATION: People want to be important, so they look for [power](power.md) to find love somehow. Once they've made [habits](habits.md) about it and haven't been loved, they frequently lose their [decision](people-decisions.md)-making capacity for others' interests and slowly drift toward choosing [evil](morality-evil.md). Love is not only the pinnacle of human existence. It is *the* foundation of all human [purpose](purpose.md) and [meaning](meaning.md): 1. [Survival](mind-feelings-fear.md) is loving oneself at the present moment. 2. [Safety](safety.md) is loving one's [foreseeable](imagination.md) future self. 3. Love/Affection is to love others to gain [friendship](people-friends.md). 4. Self-esteem is to love one's [essence](humanity.md). 5. Self-actualization is to love others to [influence](influence.md) *their* ability to love all of the above. APPLICATION: All human purpose is driven by love of something, so all people are merely [prioritizing](purpose.md) one thing over another: - Self-preservation is simply self-love. - Corruption is only a desire for [power](power.md). - Greed and materialism are the love of things. - Group [identity](identity.md) is the love of the values the [group](groups-member.md) stands for. - Rebellion is the love *against* something. - Self-destructive desires are frequently the love of nonexistence or a misplaced sense of [justice](morality-justice.md). We can't directly control what we love. We can only make [decisions](people-decisions.md) to serve the interests of something until that thing is at the pinnacle of our [desires](purpose.md). Even then, we're often too [conflicted](conflicts-inner.md) over [values](values.md) to sincerely love without hesitation. APPLICATION: Since [meaning](meaning.md) comes best through love, and love is most directly adopted through religions that endorse it, we must learn love through a [religion](religion.md). This will either express through self-determination to build it (e.g., Buddhism) or through it being instilled from another source (i.e., [Christianity](jesus-gospel.md)). The opposite of love is apathy, not hate. Hate is just as impassioned as love, but is a love for something opposed to the hated thing. Apathy, however, has no sentiment because it's the entire lack of [emotional](mind-feelings.md) association. ## The objects of our love The complexity of our essence means we can specify *very* particular objects of our love. ### Self Since we're most [aware](awareness.md) of ourselves, we feel things about us more than anything or anyone else: - Ourselves in the present moment (i.e., "survival") - Ourselves in the [foreseeable future](imagination.md) (i.e., "[safety](safety.md)") - [Who we really are](humanity.md) (*philautia* in Greek) We *can* love others like ourselves, but we're incapable of loving others *more* than ourselves because we don't know about others' needs as easily as our own. While we may [understand](understanding.md) others' needs somewhat, we only extend our love as far as we can adapt our [universal human understanding](humanity-universals.md) out from ourselves toward others. If we sacrifice more for others than ourselves, we are frequently doing it from [religious](religion.md) [habit](habits.md) or our [upbringing](people-family.md). That motivation, whatever it is now, started as a desire for a [form](power-types.md) of [power](power.md). ### Other people There are many components for how we can love other people, and it's indefinitely [divisible](logic.md). APPLICATION: Even when people [pursue](purpose.md) the same thing, they typically don't love the same thing behind the pursuit, and this will eventually create a [conflict](people-conflicts.md) later. We can love what a person possesses. - Their things - Their body (*eros* in Greek) - Their status (e.g., family, spouse, child, *storge* in Greek) - Their shared [humanity](humanity-universals.md) (*xenia* in Greek) We can love what a person does. - Their labor and [results](results.md) - Their natural abilities and [understanding](understanding.md) - [Future](imagination.md) abilities or results We can love who a person is (*agape*/*philia* in Greek, depending on whether we have more [power](power.md) or the same). APPLICATION: Loving someone's physical state is easy, but isn't as important as loving someone's [soul](humanity.md). To love a person's soul, they sometimes must reap [adverse consequences](results.md), and other times must receive [undue grace](morality.md). We can love someone who doesn't exist yet, such as what they may or will [become](people-changes.md). APPLICATION: If we love others, we must frequently set aside the ideals we have for them. Otherwise, we end up loving our [imagination](imagination.md) of them more than those around us. Any attempt to overwork our sacrifice for others will fail because [our constant changing](people-changes.md) will make our [expectations](imagination.md) constantly fail. APPLICATION: The most significant [meaning](meaning.md) we can ever find is through loving other people. Every other form of love is inferior by comparison, including loving an [ideal](values.md) or loving [what a person *could* be](imagination.md). ### Other objects We can love a [deity](religion.md), [idea](values.md), [feeling](mind-feelings.md), or possession as if it were a physical, present, living thing. Frequently, we'll love specifically what a god possesses, does, etc. as if they were another person. We can even love the *idea* of someone or something. In this case, we're stripping the [values](values.md) we like from the person and creating an [image](image.md) that [reality](reality.md) can't touch, often harming the actual being that was the [source of inspiration](mind-creativity.md). Further, we can subdivide or combine various loves as our [desires](purpose.md) and [affections](mind-feelings-happiness.md) [change](people-changes.md). [Language](language.md) itself doesn't have enough words to capture the mix-and-match varieties of how we love. ## The expression of love Loving is always sharing, and it includes various sacrifices: - [Power](power.md), in [one of its forms](power-types.md). - Affection and intimacy. - [Understanding](understanding.md), and the time it takes to deliver it. - [Risking](safety.md) absolutely *any* sort of adverse self-interest for another's benefit. We can't see love directly from the [soul](humanity.md), but we can see it through what we spend much of our effort doing. And, since we're spending so much effort on it, our [results](results.md) from loving will only loosely connect to whether we actually *do* love. Small variations in portions of what we love creates profound differences in how we demonstrate it: - Loving someone's [safety](safety.md) more than their [happiness](mind-feelings-happiness.md) will mean protecting them against their [will](purpose.md). - Loving something's [use](purpose.md) over its [appearance](image.md) will mean we will damage its exterior over time. - Loving an idea's [application](people-decisions.md) more than its inherent [qualities](values-quality.md) means we will change our minds about it later. - Loving our present self over our future self provokes us to avoid [planning for the future](imagination.md). APPLICATION: Most of what we do is prioritizing what we love in some form. A faithful [marriage](gender.md) is emotionally and sexually loving a spouse *more* than anyone else. This often requires [courage](mind-feelings-fear.md). We often can't tell if others love us, or in what capacity of preservation, and it creates a [communication](people-conversation.md) barrier because we must take their love on [faith](trust.md). APPLICATION: If something harms us, we can't always be sure the person who caused it is [evil](morality-evil.md) or incompetent, and loving means to *always* presuming incompetence until proven wrong. Going forward, we may not be able to [trust](trust.md) them as much either way, but we don't risk [unjustly](morality-justice.md) harming them from assuming them to be evil when they weren't. The most effective way to love someone, however, is in a way they weren't [expecting](imagination.md). APPLICATION: If you wish to love someone wholeheartedly, do something they don't expect, or in a way beyond what they were [expecting](imagination.md). They will likely be [surprised](mind-feelings-surprise.md) by it, and your action may [change their worldview](people-changes.md). ## Ideal love Many forms of love, taken to excess, risk committing [evil](morality-evil.md) to other things that aren't loved: - If we ever love a non-living or barely sentient thing more than another aware being, we will wrongly harm a being to protect a thing. - If we love one person over another (rather than merely preferring) we are risking [unfair treatment](morality-justice.md). - If we *ever* desire [power](power.md) at another's expense, we're plotting a roundabout form of [evil](morality-evil.md). - If we desire someone's body, time, energy, or anything else they possess, we only love conditional things about that person. The easiest way to tell is how easily we'd be able to transfer that love to someone else. The only form of love with no limit requires a person to act in the interests of another living being's [soul](humanity.md) and the things that promote a [good life](goodlife.md) for them, without mixing in self-interest. That action can go as far as sacrificing one's life for that cause. Barring a legitimate transformation of one's [soul](humanity.md), there is no chance that we will naturally love. We will grow to love, however, if we allow the [religious](religion.md) inner transformation to behave through love. The conveyance of love often breaks down with respect to how others respond to it. Many people will [abuse it](power.md), misunderstand it, or receive it and not [act any differently](people-changes.md). APPLICATION: We don't always see the results of love immediately, so the groundwork to successfully loving is patience. Post-modern discussion argues on the "purity" of a loving action that's only determined toward a positive consequence for oneself (i.e., Kantian ethics). However, we love because we wish to see positive [results](results.md) in the recipient of our love, and we still choose to love ourselves by even considering ourselves as part of the experience. In that sense, just because the object of our love isn't there does *not* mean we don't love something, and it can frequently be ourselves. Society needs love [large-scale](politics-perfectsociety.md) to prevent perpetual [conflicts](people-conflicts.md) among people from quickly turning into [evil](morality-evil.md). Most unrequited love comes from [cultural barriers](people-culture.md) and [misunderstanding intent](imagination.md) to be worse than it was (often from the recipient's [past trauma](hardship-ptsd.md)). Loving people requires vulnerability, which is a [social risk](socialrisk.md) that could lead to lost [power](power.md), so most people are too [afraid](mind-feelings-fear.md) to love. Instead, most people try to find a middle ground between self-interest and love ("selfish love").