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Key points
- There are four fundamental elements to all kinds of love.
- All love involves affection, or feeling warm toward the person you love.
- Loving someone means having a positive connection with them, and feeling empathy and compassion for them.
- When you love someone, you accept them for who they are, not for who you want them to become.
Like the sparkling of a diamond, the beauty of love is multi-faceted. There is the exhilaration that lovers feel for each other. The love that overwhelms a parent’s heart as they watch their child sleep. The platonic love you feel toward friends, as well as the love you feel toward others you don’t even know, simply by virtue of your shared humanity. These experiences are all different enough that it can be hard to know exactly what love is.
Though it is tempting to respond with a simplistic, I'll know it when I see (or feel) it, that is hardly satisfying or enlightening. At the very least, we can agree that love, in all of its forms, is a powerful force. And with further consideration, some basic elements emerge as fundamental to all of the different kinds of love.
The Fundamentals of Love
It is important to understand that the feeling of love is not a permanent state. It must be maintained. This means that although you love someone, you may not always be fully connected to, and acting from, that feeling. At times, for example, you may yell at the person you love, acting more from anger than from love. But you might soon reconnect with your loving feeling, allowing you to stop yelling and reapproach the person with caring. So, as you think about what love is, be sure to remember that the love you feel for someone is like an underground river that might always be there, but must be tapped into for you to enjoy its nourishment.
Though the various manifestations of love each include some unique traits, they all share these four basic elements:
Affection: This aspect of love is simple. It involves a sense of liking and fondness for its object. This is true whether you speak of loving your mother, spouse, or friend.
Empathy: Empathizing with someone allows you to feel the affection that goes with love. It connects you with the other person’s experience, enabling you to relate and feel close to them. At its core, empathy is the ability to connect around experiences we have in common as humans.
Compassion: When you empathize with someone, you are more likely to feel compassion, a desire for someone’s pain to be alleviated. This is true whether it is compassion you feel toward an injured child you see on the news or toward your own child. Importantly, feelings of compassion also make you more likely to take action to try to ease another’s pain.
Acceptance: True love, in all of its manifestations, involves perceiving someone with an open heart.
In personal relationships (especially romantic ones), we often love the idea of someone before we love them. Because we can only know so much about a person when we first meet them, our initial reactions are often based largely on our fantasy of who we imagine them to be. It takes time to get to truly know, accept, and love someone.
Even as you perceive their less than desirable traits, you recognize that being imperfect is part of being human, which allows you to accept them as they are. This can be tricky because acceptance is often misunderstood to mean agreement or approval of someone’s actions. This is simply not true. You may accept someone you love for who they are and still very much disagree with some of their decisions or actions, and even refuse to support them.
For instance, if your friend drinks too much, you may decide to no longer go out to bars with them. And if that drinking gets worse, you might create more distance in your relationship. Yet, should they decide to get treatment, you might be there to help. In this case, you would be accepting and loving them as a person even as you refuse to encourage or support their destructive behavior.
Love Is a Healing Force
In my work as a psychologist, I have been surprised to discover that my exploration into what creates emotional and psychological healing has led me to view love as central. To my ear, this sounds trite or hokey, and way too simplistic. And truthfully, without elaboration, I think it is. But the healing power of love is well worth further exploration.
I have written a lot about attachment theory, which has been researched extensively for decades. It tells us that being connected to others is essential for our physical survival and emotional well-being. And as I’ve explained, love is essentially a powerful experience of open, caring connection. This is true for how you connect to yourself as well as others. For this reason, compassionate self-awareness is an essential step in personal healing, as I explain in this brief video, Self-Love: A Source of Strength and Healing:
As you learn to be more compassionate toward yourself, you will discover not only self-love, but an openness to loving others and taking in their love. You will naturally want to pursue a life that feels authentically you. When faced with the inevitable trials that accompany such a life, love will help you to be resilient and to persevere. Don’t get me wrong. Love will not make life all hearts and sunshine. But love, in its many forms, offers a sense of connection that can enable you to feel strong in yourself and to feel a sense of meaning as part of a life bigger than just you.
