On Love

This is my favorite definition because it captures love's recursive, mirror-like quality. You don't just want to be desired - you want to be desired in a way that makes your desire irresistible to them, which makes their desire irresistible to you. It's a feedback loop, which explains both why love can feel transcendent and why it can become obsessive. Frost understood that love isn't a simple emotion but a complex system of mutual amplification. I return to this quote whenever I need to understand why love feels so different from other attachments.

Voltaire gives us both the biological basis (the canvas furnished by Nature) and the creative elaboration (embroidered by imagination). This has helped me understand the difference between attraction and love. The canvas appears suddenly - chemistry, pheromones, evolutionary impulses. But the embroidery takes time. It's the stories we tell ourselves, the meanings we assign, the ways we interpret each other. The canvas can appear in minutes; the embroidery might take years. Both are necessary.

Leave it to Plato to call love a disease, but he's not entirely wrong. I've watched rational, competent people become temporarily insane under love's influence - making wild decisions, ignoring obvious red flags, restructuring their entire lives around someone they barely know. Love hijacks our decision-making apparatus in ways that would be diagnosed as illness if we didn't collectively agree to romanticize it. This quote keeps me honest about the fact that the intensity of love doesn't necessarily correlate with its wisdom.

This is the definition that has aged best for me. When I was young, I thought the music was the important part - passion, intensity, drama. As I've gotten older, I've realized the friendship is the foundation and the music is the enhancement. The best relationships I've observed (including my own) are fundamentally friendships that happen to include romance. When the music fades - and it always does, temporarily - the friendship is what keeps people connected until the music returns.

Mother Teresa's definition of love is about availability and universality rather than romance. She's talking about love as action, as choice, as something you can extend to anyone at any moment. This quote balances the others in this collection by reminding me that romantic love isn't the only love, or even necessarily the highest form. The love Mother Teresa describes - accessible to all, available always - is actually rarer and more valuable than the dramatic romantic version we celebrate in movies.

Einstein understood something about motivation that I've seen play out repeatedly: people learn more from subjects they love than from subjects they're obligated to study. This applies beyond education. I've watched people transform themselves dramatically when motivated by love (for a person, a craft, an idea) in ways that duty or obligation never achieved. Love unlocks energy and focus that can't be forced. The challenge is that you can't manufacture it - it has to arise naturally.

Nietzsche's cynicism here is earned. Love does distort perception - we overlook flaws, invent virtues, project qualities onto people they don't actually possess. But I've come to think this distortion serves a purpose. The idealized version we see in early love is sometimes a preview of what the person could become with support and belief. Love's "unrealistic" vision can be self-fulfilling prophecy. The trick is knowing when you're seeing potential versus when you're seeing fantasy.

Dewar's sardonic observation always makes me laugh because it's painfully true. Love costs money - dates, gifts, weddings, houses, children, divorces. The ocean of emotions exists, but it's encased in relentless financial reality. I've seen relationships founder not because the love disappeared but because the expenses became overwhelming. This quote serves as necessary pragmatic ballast against love's tendency toward financial magical thinking.

Capote captures love's interconnectedness - how the love you received shapes the love you give, which shapes the love others receive from you, creating an endless chain across generations. I think about this when I observe how people replicate (or deliberately avoid replicating) their parents' relationship patterns. We're all links in this chain, passing forward variations of love we learned, hopefully improving it slightly with each generation.

Euripides, writing 2,400 years ago, understood something we keep forgetting in our era of self-optimization and independence: we need each other, and love is the mechanism through which we help each other survive. This isn't romantic sentiment - it's anthropological observation. Human infants are helpless for years; we survived as a species because of love's ability to make adults sacrifice for children who contribute nothing. Love is practical biology wearing emotional clothing.