All We Need is Love

Love is a force with such power it is hard to believe. What other emotion has the ability to so alter our perception of the world? What other feeling could drive humans to utterly enslave themselves for another? What other force for good will cause someone to give up their life, other than love?

Love is hard to define. Could you call it an emotion? Emotions are fleeting responses to stimuli that come and go like the wind, where love can last a lifetime. Is it an idea? While it has different interpretations and can be a powerful motivator just like ideas, it comes with a physical force that seems to transcend even the ability of an idea. Then what do you define something with such power over us? In all of its forms, I believe love is a force so powerful it is beyond true definition. That doesn’t mean we should give up trying to understand it, actually, I think the opposite is true; love is so important, so mysterious and so powerful that even though we may struggle to understand it, we must live our lives trying our best to truly grasp it and allow its full potential into our life.

Love has many forms. The most common form attributed to the word is romantic love. Songs and stories abound detailing the triumphs and tragedies of romantic love and the power it has over us. When people say they are searching for love, or they are in love, it is almost taken for granted that they mean romantic love. At it’s core, scientists have attributed an onslaught of different chemicals and hormones released by our body for our feelings of lust, attraction and love. One of the most often cited hormones is oxytocin, known sometimes as the “cuddle hormone”, it goes beyond the other mood altering hormones to create the strong feelings of attachment associated with love. The different hormones make you think about your partner, get you excited when you see, hear, or smell your partner, and give you joy whenever you spend time with, touch, or make love to your partner.

Yet, even with this scientific explanation, anyone that has suffered through true romantic love knows that its power goes beyond the physical realm and forms a connection beyond definition. It also doesn’t explain the trials faced to keep romantic love alive that I feel is encapsulated perfectly in this quote by Ann Landers; “Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weakness.” We are driven by self-preservation, yet love makes us care for an entity other than our self. Love is when the other persons happiness is more important than your own.

While hormones go a long way to explaining many of the mental and physical forces we feel in our bodies during romantic love, it also doesn’t fully explain an important form of love that I will call universal love. Universal love is the kind you feel towards others that in no way has a relationship with sexual attraction. This is the love you feel for a family member, a friend, an animal, or any other life-form, including the earth itself. Just like romantic love, this force can drive you to do things utterly against your own self interest. It can cause you to truly deprive yourself for something else. Again, there is a scientific basis for caring for one another, known as reciprocal altruism, it basically states that we learn through experience the benefit of helping others because of the increased likelihood of them returning favors. Again, I think this stops short of true altruism, or universal love, in which one will do things for others not because we expect anything in return, but because of a connection we feel for them, a deeper understanding that we are all one, and that what we do to one another, we do to ourselves.

It is easy to feel this universal love for a good friend or family member, but we must dig a little deeper to realize our true capacity for love. Once you see the world for what it really is, you see that so much evil derives from a loss of connection, a lack of love. You see the power and beauty of loving all living creatures and the planet that sustains us all. You see how important it is to love and be loved, through family, friends, and your romantic partner.

I am fortunate enough to say that I have lived my life with a family that loves me. I am so lucky to say that I am currently with the romantic love of my life who I plan on being with for the rest of my days. I can say that I have many friends that I love, and that my level of understanding has increased to where I am extending the love I have received my whole life to the world around me. To strangers, to animals, and to the environment. I plan on living a life based on returning the love I am so privileged to have had during my time. Many people are lost because they never received love, or had it and it was torn away from them. Many animals are being tortured and killed because of a lack of love. Many parts of our environment are being destroyed because of a lack of love, a loss of connection. This world truly needs more love in all of its forms.

In the best of my ability, the definition of love is putting something else before yourself. Sacrificing some of your own comfort, happiness or well-being to ensure that someone or something else is better off. In a world that has grown too selfish, too cold and so badly disconnected, this powerful force is something we all have the ability to wield in order to heal this planet and ourselves. The ability to create a better world, one where we realize our true connection and fight for the well being of all living things, is within our grasp. All we need is love.