Love is not a feeling

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What is love?

Most of our definitions are bad. Not just inaccurate, but actively corrosive, weakening the word “love” in our vocabulary to the point that we can barely even comprehend its true meaning.

So let’s start with what love is not.

Love is not a feeling.

In fact, it can’t be a feeling. Why? Because we do not have direct control over our feelings. They happen as they will. They are reactions to external and internal stimuli.

Love is not a noun.

Love is not an adjective.

Love is not an object, or a subject.

Love is a verb. A choice. A decision.

This is very easy to prove. If I ask you to use love in a sentence, what is the first sentence you think of?

“I love you.”

If we’re fortunate enough to have been born into reasonably loving homes, this was one of the first expressions we ever heard, and it’s one of the first expressions we learned to say.

If love was a feeling, we couldn’t do it, because you can’t do feelings, all you can do is feel them. They are nouns. They are objects. I feel sad. I feel happy.

But wait, you say, can’t you feel love?

I’m going to argue that you can’t. You can feel the byproducts of love. You can feel happy. You can feel safe. You can feel joyful. You can feel affection for the person or thing that seems to be the source of those feelings.

But if we equate “affection” with “love,” we have drained the power from the word love. We have turned it into a noun, a feeling that passes like smoke through our hearts.

Love is not something you feel, it’s something you do.

So what is love? What is it to do the verb “love”?

Love is to act in the best interest of the object of love.

To love you, I must do whatever is best for you.

An urgent follow-up question: Who’s to say what is best?

Often, perhaps most of the time, the answer is both obvious, and terribly demanding. This is why we are bad at loving, and this is why we prefer to think of it as a thing we feel instead. It is so much easier to feel nice feelings than it is to do love as a verb.

It is also much easier to do love when we’re feeling those nice feelings. Which is why we wait to do love until we feel the feelings we inappropriately label as love.

This is what makes Christianity so difficult. Jesus said that the whole law was to do the complicated, radically demanding work of love. The Christian law isn’t to feel nice things about everyone all the time, it’s to love them. All of them. All the time.

This is a hard thing to hear. We don’t want to hear it because we don’t want to do it. Most so-called Christians make Christianity look bad because they make every excuse in the world not to obey the ONE law Jesus both demanded and demonstrated.

Despite our resistance to this, though, the good news is that it is actually possible to love everyone, all the time. It is possible to do love in every circumstance, if we choose to, despite how we feel.

It would conversely be pretty bad news if love really was just a feeling. Because then loving everyone all the time would require that we feel nice things about them all the time. And if you’ve lived on this planet for more than five minutes, you know that isn’t possible.

But if love is a choice, and not a feeling, then we don’t have to like each other to love each other.

So let’s stop making excuses, and do it.