What Does It Mean to Love?

Having a child seems to awaken new emotions for some people. Jaden runs a multi-million-dollar company, has a beautiful wife, and enjoys the freedom to travel as he pleases. Interestingly, Jaden's life transformed when he had his son. His values shifted, and he started a nonprofit aimed at mentoring young boys through sports. He says that nothing makes him happier than being there for his son. While not all parents experience such a transformation upon having a child, Jaden’s story is an example of discovering agape love. Agape love manifests in various situations and domains of life. Abraham J. Twerski, an American psychiatrist, introduces the idea of "fish love" versus "true love"—or "agape love" as referred to in psychology.

There was a boy who saw beautiful fish in the lake and decided to take them out of the water, cook them, and eat them. When a man asked why he ate the fish, the boy responded, "Because I love the fish." The man told the boy, "You do not love the fish. You love yourself."

If the boy truly loved the fish, he would have left them in the lake and nurtured them. His concern was more for his own pleasure, and thus the fish was merely a means for his own selfish enjoyment. Agape love is a love for another person in which the giver wholeheartedly enjoys the process of giving that love.

“I Only Love You, and Nobody Else”

Erich Fromm, a social psychologist, found it quite contradictory to see people fall in love and claim that they loved their partner "and nobody else," thinking that it was proof of the intensity of their love. But if you truly have love for your partner, you would have love for everyone. Fromm said, "If I can say to somebody else, 'I love you,' I must be able to say, 'I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.'" This means that if you truly love someone, you would have that same love for everyone else. If you do not love and care for a stranger as much as you do for your partner, then you do not know what love is. Love is a sense of concern for the other, the ability to see from their perspective, and have an urge to care for them. Agape love is a baseline level of love beneath everything. That being said, love looks different in every relationship dynamic.

The Importance of Self-Love

William James, an American psychologist, describes loving one's partner or family but not extending that love to a stranger as a "division of labor." He argues that such selective affection indicates an inability to truly love, as genuine love should embrace all individuals, including oneself. This idea supports that if agape love has truly been embodied, it must also involve self-love. Self-love holds a level of compassion and respect for oneself as much as is held for others. Self-love is a precursor for the ability to pour love outward into the world. As evident by now, agape love is post-ambivalent, transcending separation and cherishing the subtle sameness that is in everything.

The Source of Love

Fromm essentially said that to experience more love in our lives, we must increase our own capacity to be loving. He draws attention to the distinction between seeking an "object" to love versus training our inner "function" onto love. This idea might contradict modern notions of love, in which love is thought to emerge when you meet the right object: a dreamy person, someone with genetic ties, or someone you feel bad for. On the other hand, training the function of love means that love is not dependent on one "object" of love but is an awareness you develop towards the world that automatically loves. Fromm refers to this as, “an attitude, an orientation towards the world that is truly loving.”

Barriers to Love

Fromm points out that one barrier to genuine love is that people often view the problem of love as wanting to be loved, rather than focusing on being loving themselves. This desire to be loved is often automatically pursued through our animalistic instincts. For men, this manifests as making oneself more desirable through success, and for women, through physical appeal. We strive to improve our social skills, increase our status, and make ourselves more attractive, thinking it will attract love. It certainly attracts pleasure, but does it create the agape love explored in this article?

Society doesn't seem to effectively promote agape love. Instead, it is shaped by a culture of fairness ethics, which emphasizes equal exchange rather than genuine concern. Under fairness ethics, if my neighbor gives me pasta, I respond by giving muffins of equal value—nothing more, nothing less. In contrast, agape love involves true, selfless concern for others, expecting nothing in return.

Another problem presented in society is that of excessive pleasure and comfort, accessible to almost every social class. We are bombarded with instantly-gratifying activities left and right that mask our deep-seated feelings of loneliness and disconnection. Excessive consumption makes us feel so comfortable where we are that we may not realize our true inclination for growth through transcendence and unity. We settle for mediocrity by being OK with soulless comforts, treating the world like a cake to be consumed.

Pathways to Love

Present Moment Awareness: Although we live in a capitalist society that contradicts the true essence of love, we still have the choice to embody love. There is no linear or clear path toward love, but Fromm offers a few hints: First, he emphasizes the importance of present-moment awareness. When we live in the present moment, we have a level of aliveness that produces proper concentration. This concentration is fundamental to loving anything because it allows us to be active, engaged, and productive.

Relationships Essential Reads

Married to Two People: The Romantic Life of Widows

How to Tell If a Friend or Partner Is a Leaf, Tree, or Root

Liberation From Boredom: Fromm explains that with proper concentration comes liberation from boredom. Boredom and laziness are the antithesis of productive love. Fromm states, “For I shall become incapable of relating myself actively to the loved person if I am lazy, if I am not in a constant state of awareness, alertness, activity. Sleep is the only proper situation of inactivity; the state of awareness is one in which laziness should have no place … people today are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. To be fully aware is the condition for not being bored, or being boring—and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving.”

Meeting Yourself Deeply: Finally, one of the keys to loving is determined by the level of inner connection to the world. Love does not exist in thought, but in feeling. The principle underlying our level of connectedness to the world is: the deeper we have met ourselves emotionally, the deeper we will be able to see and meet others. This idea is often the reason why meditation is heavily purported, because the aim of meditation is sometimes to turn off the thinking faculty and awaken the feeling faculty.

To wrap it all together, agape is a love of wanting to love rather than seeking to be loved. The complaint of a lack of love is not that the right person has not arrived, but that our own ability to love is weak. Today's society is dominated by a give-and-take which risks diminishing the true essence of love, but we can still choose to learn the art of loving. Love can manifest in many forms, but arguably the purest that is fundamental for all is agape—selfless, giving love that extends from ourselves to our family, community, animals, and the world.