Part Three: What Do We Love?
Browse any greeting card aisle in February, and you will see a hundred expressions of love, ranging from silly to sweet, from passionate to desperate. Valentine’s Day exists because, as a society, we have decided that we need to formally exalt, celebrate, proclaim, and monetize our love for others. Love is obviously very important to us as human beings, but that does not mean that we easily understand it. In fact, ask anyone who has loved someone and they will tell you that love is one of our biggest human mysteries.
Why do we fall in love in the first place? According to Dr. Hani Henry, we fall in love because humans crave “intimacy, passion, and commitment.” Love, then, is a combination of all three that we find with someone special.
Intimacy is that close feeling we have with other people, and it doesn’t have to be sexual in nature; people feel intimacy with their close friends. It can be described as comfort or a feeling that we can let our guard down with someone we trust and value.
Passion, of course, is defined by its intensity. When we are overwhelmed by emotion and desire, we sometimes call that being in the throes of passion. By itself, passion can be a pretty superficial physical attraction.
But when intimacy and passion are joined with commitment, we have the right combination for love. Commitment means we intend to stick with a relationship for the long haul, and that is easier to do when we feel close with and attracted to our beloved.
Dr. Henry goes on to warn of superficial or what he calls “consumer” love – this kind of love is more common among younger people, and he connects it to our consumer culture. When people become objects to us, they are more easily consumed and then discarded.
There are many other forms of love that humans display beyond romantic love. We have love for parents, siblings, children, and friends. We love more than just other people – we also fall in love with all kinds of things. Ask your father (or your mother for that matter) how they feel about their favorite football team. We might feel a certain devotion to our favorite guitar or for music itself or toward a study of music in our lives. Just as we posited in the chapter on value that what we spend our money on tells us what we value, we could also posit that where we spend our time and energy tells us who and what we love.