Love?

Do we really love each other? By each, I mean our spouses, children, brothers, sisters, parents, in-laws and extended family.

Perhaps some of what we call love is actually our need for validation, companionship, security and acceptance. We may not necessarily love someone as much as we love the way they make us feel about ourselves.

Can we love someone without understanding them? And can we love people whose experiences, beliefs and choices are fundamentally different from ours?

Can we love someone without understanding them? And can we love people whose experiences, beliefs and choices are fundamentally different from ours? But then, am I talking about empathy or love?

Should it also include our country, religion, nature, fellow human beings and the universe at large, provided, of course, that we care to know more about them?

Or is love a loosely used word? A word that, more often than not, encompasses possessiveness and several other things, rather than what its dictionary definition suggests?

Or is it conditional and situational, bound by time and circumstances, and dependent on our own moods and emotional states?

Do our fluctuating feelings imply that the underlying attachment has withered, at least temporarily?

Do we love people for who they are or for what their presence contributes to our lives?

Or is it just a neurochemical construct that has been glamourised by literature, movies and the advertising industry to help sell their products? They have certainly contributed to shaping our cultural expectations of what love should look and feel like.

Or is it simply about getting used to certain people, religious festivals, cultural practices, our neighbourhoods and workplaces, and the extended family whom we keep bumping into during family gatherings and festivals?

Do we become so accustomed to their existence around us and to the things they do for us that we almost become addicted to their presence? And when they leave permanently, or when we leave them or the place we call our home, hometown or home country, do we experience something akin to a neurochemical withdrawal? Does this, along with our memories and emotional conditioning, make them seem far more important to us than they might actually have been?

When someone leaves our lives, do we miss the person, the relationship, the routines, the emotional security or the version of ourselves that existed in their presence?

So the question actually becomes, do we love these people and places, or have we become neurochemically dependent on their predictable presence in our lives, perhaps reinforced by societal conditioning?

If we strip away possession, familiarity, biological dependency, social conditioning and the need for emotional security, what remains of love?

Many questions. Multiple answers. From societal, literary and neuroscientific perspectives, and perhaps many more.

Which one is true? Are all true? Are all partly true? Are some true and some false? Or are some partly true and partly false?

Many more questions.

Could the answers be more nuanced and more layered?

Perhaps we tend to assume that love is a singular emotion, something that can be defined and recognised across different relationships.

But perhaps what we call love is actually an umbrella term for several distinct experiences:

• Attachment to someone.
• Affection towards someone.
• Desire for companionship.
• Empathy for another’s experiences.
• A sense of belonging.
• Biological bonding.
• Emotional dependency.
• Concern for another’s well-being.
• A willingness to sacrifice or accommodate.

These experiences can overlap, but they need not coexist.

Perhaps we have been using one word to describe several different human experiences and then wondering why we cannot arrive at a satisfactory definition.

Perhaps this confusion also contributes to misunderstandings, unrealistic expectations and ambiguities about our perceived rights and obligations towards one another, creating avoidable conflicts in both personal and public spheres.