Every Day Is Valentine's Day

Romantic love is decidedly out among many younger adults, viewed as a silly, unnecessary thing that can be a major disruption in one’s life if you “fall” into it. Against this rather critical and perhaps cynical backdrop, however, is the irrefutable beauty and wonder of love that have led some to refer to it as the “supreme” emotion.

Love is hard and probably impossible to define but, like pornography, one knows it when one sees or feels it. If love was not real, or at least didn’t appear to be real, it would never have been possible for it to realize the degree of status it has assumed in popular and consumer culture. It is an unmistakable sensation that is like nothing else and impossible to replicate, ensuring that the anti-love movement can gain only a certain amount of traction.

The magic of love has continually befuddled scientists, with all efforts to slice and dice it over the years falling short in some respect. The hundreds of studies parsing the who, what, where, when, and why of love have without a doubt added much to our understanding of the dynamics of love, but no kind of research design can ever capture the mystical aspects of the emotion or even the operative laws of attraction. In short, the workings of Cupid’s arrows defy full scientific analysis and the methodology of any algorithm, for me a very good thing as I personally like the idea of a behind-the-scenes force existing beyond our corporeal world.

Upon considerable reflection, the story of love in America has made quite a good love story itself. We are a heavily myth-based culture, making it perfectly sensible that we’ve been strongly attracted to fables and parables involving romance. The fact that love is a timeless and universal subject also works to its advantage; it is never going to be considered passé or become obsolete. Love is fundamentally immune to social, political, and economic upheavals, this too ensuring that it remains a topic of interest to many across the spectrums of time and space. Like other emotions such as fear and anger, love is a staple human experience; while its interpretation and expression may differ based on where one happens to live, its essence transcends cultural diversity. Unlike many other arenas, love is never really “in” or “out” or “up” or “down,” making it largely resistant to the constantly shifting winds of change.

Much of the cultural currency of love is based on its rare ability to straddle what may appear to be opposing or contradictory forces. From a psychological perspective, love is located in both the conscious and unconscious, for example, crossing over the recognized mental boundaries of awareness and unawareness. It combines both left- and right-brain thinking to form a cognitive mash-up of sentiment and logic. It operates on both a macro and micro level, its universality matched by its individuality.

As well, love is both learned and instinctive, a unique forging of nurture and nature. From a disciplinary view, love is both an art and a science, supported by a rich history of the philosophical and a generous dose of sound, data-driven research. Finally, romantic love is characterized by both great joy and great despair, its drug-like emotional high matched by a very deep low should things go south in a serious relationship. Love is a prime example of the Chinese concept of yin and yang, one might reasonably conclude, illustrating that seemingly conflicting principles can be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent.

The Zelig-like nature of love and its insistence to make its presence known at any time and any place has endowed the emotion with a special form of power. Despite widespread criticism and concerted efforts by many to crush it out of their lives, love has of course survived, with little reason to think it will ever disappear. With the rise of individualism over the last half-millennium and triumph of the self over the past century, one might have thought that a practice based on the interests of two people would recede.

But exactly the reverse has happened, an indication that it is those things in which experiences are shared that will stand the test of time. Like friendship, community, volunteering, and philanthropy, love is humanity at its best, I think, a collective activity that is characterized by kindness, empathy, and caring. More of all kinds of love, romantic and otherwise, is a very good thing, I hope we can all agree, as any activity in which the interests of others are prioritized would make the world a better place. The future of love in this country is unknown, but I have no doubt that the emotion will continue to contribute abundant purpose and meaning to our everyday lives.