Love is a choice

…not a feeling.

A quirk of our common vernacular is that the word “love” is a more intensive expression of the word “like,” which is an expression of positive affinity towards a subject.

“I like dessert, but I love ice cream.”

In fact that’s the way we’re conditioned from the earliest time we that develop consciousness and concepts as young children. “Oh Liam just loves that plushie; he just won’t go anywhere without it!”

The problem is that this relational definition simply doesn’t work in the context of long term romantic partnerships in modern day society.

Coincidentally, I’m writing these words in a Starbucks sitting next to a young couple that simply cannot keep their hands off of one another. How wonderful! “Isn’t it great? Those two are so in love,” we would say.

I’m sorry to be a grouch, but I would posit this is not love.

A biological basis for “love”

A paper foundational to the worldview I’ve developed and carried through adulthood is Marazziti and Canale’s “Hormonal changes when falling in love.” (As an aside, isn’t it funny how the most impactful classes you take in college turn out to be the ones not at all related to your field?)

It’s not a perfect study. The sample size is pretty small, and as the authors readily admit, qualifying “in love” for the purpose scientific research is a difficult premise to begin with. But the findings make a lot of sense to me and they explain a lot so let’s go with it.

The authors take 24 couples who fell in love within the last 6 months and they compare them to 24 subjects who were either single or had been in a relationship for a long time. They take blood samples and they find that the “recently in love” cohort shows distinct hormonal patterns - significantly elevated cortisol (the stress hormone), men showed reduced testosterone while conversely women had increased testosterone levels, and both sexes show an increase in FSH which is related to reproductive capacity. All these observations are made all relative to the “single or long term relationship” individuals.

They bring back these groups over time and keep taking their blood samples. By 12 to 24 months later, all “recently in love” cohort individuals showed hormonal levels that had returned to baseline.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t profess to be a biologist nor an evolutionary scientist, but I do understand at a high level that evolutionary pressure will over time select for individuals that successfully reproduce and raise offspring, who in turn pass on their genetic code, and on and on.

From a biological perspective it would make sense to evolutionarily select for individuals who tightly bond, sexually express and in the process procreate, who stick together for some period while the offspring gestates and early develops, and then after that (sort of) who cares. I don’t understand the science and the math well enough to tell you why that one to two ish year period for hormonally induced kinship is the optimal duration from a genetic replication perspective, but it roughly passes the smell test to me.

And from an anecdotal perspective, it certainly matches up with what I have observed and what continues to be observationally reaffirmed to me over time. The “honeymoon” period. The “oh they’re so in love.” The “this feels so good, so right” feeling.

On love

I like that feeling. I like to feel good. I like affirmation.

The problem is that this hormonally induced intensive affinity is not synonymous with our modern sociological conception of partnership.

To the extent that you define partnership as something that aspires to endure over time, over a lifetime, and to the extent that you broadly accept the premise and the conclusion of the Marazziti and Canale paper, then the basis for successful long term partnership is not the hormonal “stuff” that’s biologically happening inside of us.

Love is not a feeling. Love is a choice.

(In some sense I’m conflating “I love you” said in the romantic sense with “I aspire to long term partnership with you” which unfortunately doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way. I’ll admit I’ve rarely being accused of being excessively romantic.)

I worry when I hear love used (in my opinion) in the wrong way. Love as an expression of “I am experiencing very intense positive affinity” towards another human. Flay my character if you must, but in my opinion this subject is not expressing love. They are expressing the result of an evolutionarily induced biological process which they seemingly have no awareness of or are otherwise controlled by. Alternatively, they mean something other than an aspiration for long-term partnership when they say those words. It would be pretty helpful if we had developed a language and norm which distinguished between those two different sentiments. Let’s be clear!

The times “I love you” is at its most meaningful is not when sentiment is riding high and two people feel tightly bonded immediately following some really wonderful shared experience; it’s when despite feelings of anger or sadness or resentment or loneliness an individual chooses to continue to invest in that which hurts.

“I’m feeling really good” is not the same as “I choose to be here in the face of adversity.”

On a personal tangent

You will scoff but I choose to tell this story anyway.

Some five and some change years ago I got a dog.

He was my first dog. I’d been dreaming of an incredible dog. The Ivy-League-educated paragon of awesome doginess. Like so many things up to that time, I thought that my smarts and my efforts and my own awesomeness would mean that I could have anything I wanted, including perfection dogified.

The dog I got was not that. He was an anxious puppy, and he was hyper active, and he was really quite expressive (loud). His distress caused me pain. I didn’t leave him alone for eighteen months (for those who’ll say I encouraged separation anxiety: one of us is a dog trainer and it’s not you, thank you). He made it difficult having guests over to my home. He cost a lot of money, especially so when he broke his leg hyperactively playing with a toy, and having him severely curtailed the travel heavy lifestyle I’d grown accustomed to.

I love Milou. The bond I have with him gets deeper and deeper over time. And totality of all of that does come with good feelings.

In some sense Milou taught me how to love - how to put into action what that I already understood conceptually.

Choosing to love

Love is a serious thing. Love must be given before it is received. It must be given consciously. Love must be chosen.

I have chosen love before - humans, thank you - and I have been castigated for it and I’ve been hurt. I was certainly not happy to be rejected, and it’s left some scars that still ache at times inopportune.

But in some sense the ache of that experience makes the love I express now more meaningful. I choose to love despite the echo of my experience. So I am grateful for it.