What Is Love, Anyway?
In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.
Fredrickson, a researcher 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 marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
So what is love? Using Fredrickson's research, this is the question that I (try to) answer in my latest piece, "There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love":
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. Louis Armstrong put it best in "It's a Wonderful World" when he sang, "I see friends shaking hands, sayin 'how do you do?' / They're really sayin', 'I love you.'"
Fredrickson uses biology and psychology to show that there is no such thing as everlasting love. Rather, mirror neurons, oxytocin, and vagal tone all work together to create these micro-moments of love.
Though the science and the studies that she writes about (and that I summarize) are fascinating, what's even more interesting are the cultural implications. With Valentine's Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality--they are love-starved:
Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.
Though Fredrickson's ideas about love are not exactly the stuff of romantic comedies, by lowering cultural expectations about love she is making love more accessible to the average person. Our cultural expectations are so misguidedly high today that they have inflated love into something that it isn't, and into something that no sane person could actually experience. Fredrickson tells me, "I love the idea that it lowers the bar of love. If you don't have a Valentine, that doesn't mean that you don't have love. It puts love much more in our reach everyday regardless of our relationship status."
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Sep '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Any description of love that characterizes it as solely emotional is nearly worthless. We have numerous other words to describe the feelings Barbara Fredrickson is talking about.
Love doesn't exist to make us feel awesome, love exist to make us do things we wouldn't ordinarily do. To sacrifice for a person in ways we ordinarily wouldn't. Without such sacrifices there is no love. Just fleeting "Positive emotions".
In fact love is as likely to make you feel bad as it is to make you feel good. An obvious example is a child who is addicted to drugs. If it's not your child, you will likely feel very little in regards to them. If it's your child, your love for them is going to make you feel like crap. It's also going to make you more likely to endure great sacrifices to help them.
I don't like this way of framing love as something that should be making you feel warm and fuzzy all of the time. It's supposed to make you a better person.
Dec '12
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Saint Thomas Aquinas said it best. "To love is to will the good of another."
Mar '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Disregarding Haddaway for the moment (which, now that I've typed it, somehow sounds like the title of an obscure Woody Allen film), the Greeks were wiser than we are in dividing these "loves" by using separate words to describe them: philia, eros, agape, storge.
But, really, progress people. Forward!
Edited on January 25, 2013 at 8:26pmMay '10
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Great plan! Deny love is real, and nobody will suffer from not having it!
Edited on January 25, 2013 at 8:25pmMay '10
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
I have an 86 year old friend dying of cancer. You should see her eyes light up when she talks about her husband of 65 years.
Jan '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Also, it's important to make the distinction between an event versus the reaction to it.
Is love the connection, or the feeling that accompanies it? Most cultures choose the connection.
May '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at - I 2nd Katie's comment that this seems to be lowering the bar in order to allow more people to reach it. Love, to me, is something akin to "natural law," or, what we daily experience being created in the image of God. Just as marriage and family, then church and community, are reflections of a God-Man relationship, so is love just a small piece of a larger reality. To describe love as a series of chemical reactions and electrical impulses is the same as claiming that there is no difference between humans and animals - in the end it is pointless. You don't comfort a person who has become painfully aware of his own mortality (or is experiencing the death of a loved one) by saying that emotion is only electrical impulses ... because while that is an interesting description of the mechanism, it is an inadequate description of the reality. Love is a ridiculously high bar, and one that we will never reach. I think it is worth-while to observe that what we define as love is often misguided - but your approach seems even worse.
May '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
And when she dies, as I said, it will be of no comfort to her husband that all of that "love" was just electrical impulses. Better to think of love as the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.
Jun '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
I'm on a business trip in weather 60 degrees warmer than home and I got a lump in my throat as I read this post and comments. I miss my wife muchly.
Nov '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
That's not a definition of love, it's a definition of warm fuzzy feelings.
Nothing against warm fuzzy feelings. They're good things. They make life better and connect us to our fellow-man. They can brighten a lonely day like a ray of sunshine.
But they're not love in the deepest sense. True love isn't a mere feeling -- it's a self-sacrificial commitment, not a chance happening, or something one falls "in" or "out" of.
Much of the emptiness today comes from expecting that kind of love to happen instantaneously -- from expecting the joy and beauty of it without the sacrifice and commitment and hard work. Not just in romantic relationships but in all family relationships, we expect it to just happen. And if it's not, we think we can consider ourselves wronged and walk away.
Mar '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
KC Mulville
Yes, Frederickson's claim is only stunning in its garishness, and in its illiteracy of the Western tradition.
But, no worries, it is the perfect modern response. Love is being reified by the commercialization and hallmarkification of Valentine's Day (me personally, I prefer Lupercalia, but to each his own) you say?--oh, dear me! We must democratize it!
Sep '10
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
To echo some of the sentiments expressed above, let's dumb down love much as we've dumbed down education and almost everything else worth striving for. Are we in a cultural death spiral?
Feb '12
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
But but where does Ridge and Brooke aka Logan fit into the picture? I can't give you anything but love, baby.. Take it Ella
Here's another take on love in Bringing up baby .. ain't life grand.
Mar '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
From another context:
The incessant attempts to over-analyze and break down all aspects of being human is worrisome. Can we disassemble Love that we might re-assemble it elsewhere or manufacture it?
Love is more than its constituent parts:
This reads like someone who can't see the forest for the leaves on the trees.
Certainly "Romantic Love" as promulgated by Hollywood and many Harlequin or even highbrow novels is warped, and Fredrickson seems to have the laudable goal of puncturing that illusion. But to "Lower the Bar" on Love is to sell it cheap.
Love is not out of reach for any of us, but it does require work. This just seems another way of building self esteem.
Mar '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
My favorite line might be this one:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day/
But thou art a micro-moment of positivity resonance....
Jun '10
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Help me out here. Does this mean that we can now call raw sexual attraction love?
Thus, the frat boy who sleeps with as many women as possible gets to experience the "warm glow" of love each time he has a one night stand (never mind that he doesn't bother to find out the woman's name). And the woman gets to call it love too (never mind that he never calls her again).
This sounds like dumbing-down a test so that everyone can pass.
Tell me again what her point is?
Jun '10
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Crow's Nest: My favorite line might be this one:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day/
But thou art a micro-moment of positivity resonance.... · 7 minutes ago
And I suppose history's great couples like Dido and Aeneas get a full "moment" (as opposed to a measly "micro-moment") of positivity resonance.
Edited on January 25, 2013 at 9:36pmMar '12
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
I just have one thing to say to Ms. Fredrickson:
Mar '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
Schrodinger's Cat: I just have one thing to say to Ms. Fredrickson:
0 minutes ago
I preferred the Weird Al Version: I Want A New Duck
Nov '11
Re: What Is Love, Anyway?
This is another example of modernity's misplaced faith in science.
I do not claim that science produces no knowledge. But Emily's post shows hows helpless, how ridiculous, science becomes when it attempts to apply its method to questions not appropriate to it.
Love is an activity of the soul. The soul and love are beyond the reach of science. So, instead of describing love, science describes a set of physical phenomena (electrochemical reactions and the observable anatomical effects thereof) and mistakes those physical phenomena for love itself.
Mistaken (misplaced) belief in a scientific description of love dehumanizes love. Most of us understand this very easily, very deeply, in the blink of an eye, when we reflect upon our own most profound human experiences: very few of us have had our souls hollowed out so thoroughly by modernity, as to accept that our mother's love for us or our love for our children is nothing more than a transient electrochemical reaction.
Science teaches little about human things: love, friendship, honor, faith, courage . . . .