The first and only time I ever went viral on the internet it was because of a poem I wrote about self-Love. That poem, Meet Yourself in the Mirror (watch, read), tells the story of my grandmother teaching me how to be Loving and compassionate toward myself. She rightly observed that I didn’t like who I was, and helped me begin to explore and push back on that notion, even as the world around me was telling me that as a young, queer, gender bending kid—I was far from normal and would never be considered desirable. It is in this way that my journey into thinking about Love started with how we experience Love toward, and show Love to ourselves.
Over the course of my life I have held many beliefs about Love. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
I will know within 5 minutes of meeting someone if I can ever Love them
Love makes us do ridiculous things, it is chaotic and cannot exist without a push/pull dynamic
The all-encompassing, terrifying, gratifying and chaotic experiences of your nervous system when in relationship to others are markers of Love
I can’t control who I Love
I can’t control how I Love
I will probably always Love the people who I have Loved in my life
Love is unconditional, and any attempt to change or redirect another person’s behavior is not a reflection of Love, is not rooted in Love
Love requires commitment, and true Love requires a commitment to “forever”
We access Love through romantic connection, we express Love through sexual connection
I cannot speak to the truth of each of these items. I present this list not to provide an outline for how I will debunk myths, but instead to give you a sense for where I started from in my journey into thinking about Love. And for me, thinking about Love was a necessary precursor to the ultimate goal: living my life in a more Loving way.
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I began to recognize that the foundations of my understanding of Love were being challenged when I fell madly in Love with a friend, in a completely platonic way. This was a startling and confusing experience, because everything I had learned about Love told me that to fall in Love with someone meant that I desired them as a romantic and sexual partner. I recognized in myself the stirrings that I suspected were Love, and I felt scared because I worried they would ruin the friendship. When I spent time with this person, and really leaned into observation instead of forcing anything, several very important (and further confusing) pieces of information became very evident.
To begin with, while I found my friend to be very beautiful, I did not feel any desire at all to connect with her sexually. I even allowed myself into vulnerable situations where that level of closeness might have presented itself if it existed; nothing happened. I very much wanted to hold her in my arms, cuddle with her, smell her hair, even hold her hand or sit close to her on the couch—and I did not want or need to sleep with her. While this didn’t feel especially conclusive about anything in particular, it WAS the first time I had ever felt this way, and I took note of it.
Additionally, I realized that however much I felt pulled toward closeness with this person, both physically and emotionally, the feelings it produced in me were very specifically not romantic. This realization sent me on a years-long journey to define for myself what the word “romantic” even means, but I knew in a visceral way—I had a knowing in my body—that the Love I felt was real and true and important, and that it was not romantic Love.
Even though it jumps ahead a bit in the story, I will present my personal definition of romance/romantic Love here to help you understand what about this connection seemed so earth shattering at the time:
Romantic Love is the combination of powerful attraction and intense attachment, which produces meaningful and motivating connection, and strongly affects one’s emotions.
As I considered the experience, the key elements which differentiated this Love from romantic Love, which at the time I was unable to name and which I have since defined, are:
While I found my friend attractive, I was not feeling the embodied experience of being attracted TO her, feeling a pull toward her in that sense
While I felt close to my friend, I did not experience this closeness from a place of primary attachment (think of the way we typically feel attached to partners and Lovers that might be different from other types of connections)
While I felt excited and hopeful, I did not feel motivated by these feelings, they did not compel me to take any actions at all
For me, this truly monumental experience of Loving my friend fit comfortably into the category of “friendship,” in that it seemed entirely distinct from my drives and feelings in romantic bonds. Still, there was something about the societal implications of “friendship” that felt thin.
When I thought about this person, I felt so much Love swelling up in my body that I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I lost the words in a tumble from my mouth, and just ended up announcing, “I am platonically in Love with you!” one day, with no idea how it would be received.
As I tried to make sense of that experience and allow for my vulnerability to touch this connection and make it more beautiful, I learned a lot about myself and about this person, and about Love in general, but it was all sort of floating around in my mind; it lacked a framework. I ended up with more questions than answers from this experience, though it remains to this day one of the most wholesome and beautiful things I have been through.
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For Christmas the following year, I received the book Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown as a gift. I was absolutely elated at such a thoughtful gift. Experiencing, identifying, and naming the feelings I was having in my body has been a major focus of my internal work. I skipped straight to the chapter about Love and connection because I was desperate to know what sense others were making of these experiences in connection to other humans.
The book sets out to present a research-and-evidence-based definition of 87 different feelings and experiences that were reported by people in qualitative studies about their emotions. In the 10th chapter, Brown takes on “Places we go when the heart is open,” and puts forth a definition of Love. On page 187 of the book, the author writes the following passage:
“It is always a risk to define a term like ‘love.’ I personally think it might be best left to the poets, artists, and yacht rock songwriters. However, a definition did emerge from our research, and it’s withstood the test of new data:
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.
Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can be cultivated between two people only when it exists within each one of them—we can love others only as much as we love ourselves.
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can survive these injuries only if they’re acknowledged, healed, and rare.”
To be frank, this “definition” left something to be desired for me. It told me how Love is cultivated, how it is built, what it is not, what makes it possible, and what kills it. But it very clearly fails to offer an answer about what it IS. Furthermore, as a poet, I resented the idea that possibly I was in a class better equipped to answer the question.
Despite spending 99% of all of my creative energy writing about Love over the last two decades, I didn’t feel able to offer a concise definition of Love in it’s entirety the way I was eventually able to produce one about romance.
I had so many questions in my heart and in my head:
What does Love actually MEAN?
How do you know if what you are feeling really is Love? How can you tell if it is infatuation, excitement as a result of a dysregulated nervous system, lust, or something else entirely?
How do we make sense of Love from people who have harmed us or treated us poorly?
Why does Love consume our thoughts, direct our actions, change our lives? What makes it so central to humanity that an inability to Love is criteria for the most damning mental health diagnoses?
What are we supposed to DO about Love? What is it’s purpose?
What role should Love play in my life? How much am I meant to bend in honor of it? Does Love require me to bend? To break? How will I know where the line is?
Why do I always feel that I lose myself in Love?
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It is with these compounding and expanding questions in mind that I approached National Poetry Writing Month in April of 2022. While perusing the drafts folder of my writing blog, a veritable smorgasbord of delicious but half-complete ideas and explorations, I came across a few lines I had written down about that experience of falling in Love, platonically, with my friend two years prior. In the short comment, I was lamenting that “Love” had such a heavy connotation of romance, sex, shared life, happily ever after, that it almost felt inapplicable to the experience I’d had falling in Love with a friend.
While “Love” certainly felt big enough to hold how impactful the experience was, as a piece of language it was failing me—it did not communicate well to others what I had been feeling in this situation. As a writer, poet, and wordsmith, my position is this:
Language is useful to the extent that it helps us know and understand each other. Words that have shared understanding are useful when the shared understanding makes people feel seen.
When those same words are used in a way that does not clarify or support further understanding of someone’s inner world, we are up against the limitations of language.
Dismayed by the seemingly all-encompassing nature of the word Love, as well as by it’s inadequacy in the particular expression I wanted to name to others, I started to look into what cultures around the world and throughout time have done to make sense of this conundrum. Surely “Love” is not the only word, ever, in all languages or in all of history, used to describe every nuanced way we can feel strongly toward others.
In my search, I learned that the ancient Greeks in particular had several words for Love, and as many as seven were in regular use. I knew that expanding the way we can speak about something materially changes the way we think about and experience that thing. Excited to further my capacity to explore and express Love, I devoured this information:
Seven Ancient Greek Words for Love:
Eros – Romantic, Passionate Love (Of the Body)
Philia – Affectionate, Friendly Love
Storge – Unconditional, Familial Love
Agape – Selfless, Universal Love
Ludus – Playful, Flirtatious Love
Pragma – Committed, Long-Lasting Love
Philautia – Self Love
Eager to play with my new language, I created a mini-challenge inside the larger challenge of National Poetry Writing Month. In addition to writing 30 poems in 30 days, I challenged myself to write 7 of the 30 poems as sonnets exploring Love—one for each of the seven new words I had learned. While I was writing these poems, I would read and think deeply about the core elements of one specific kind of Love, often choosing a person from my life who I’d experienced that kind of Love for, and I would write a sonnet (a classic type of Love poem) to explore the themes.
You can read my 7 sonnets on Love by clicking this link.
As I wrote, I was intensely focused on the act of considering Love from a more expansive perspective, categorizing my connections based on this new framework. I wanted to integrate not only these words into my vocabulary, but these ideas into my worldview. Ask anyone who spoke to me during this time and they will tell you I was absolutely RABID to discuss Love. I wanted to explain what I had learned to my Loved ones, talk to them about the particular variety of Love I experienced toward them, and ask them about the experiences of Love in their life.
I learned that for myself and most people I talked to, the categories were not distinct and mutually exclusive; many of us had Loved ones toward whom we experienced simultaneous and overlapping varieties of Love (ex: both Ludus and Pragma in a long term committed connection, both Philia and Storge in a friendship that becomes chosen family). I learned that for most of us, connections in which we shared Eros were the hardest to forget or move on from, even when those connections were emotionally unhealthy for us.
One person I spoke to, whom I Love dearly (Storge), talked to me openly about how they have centered their spiritual and meditative practices around Love and allowing Love to flow through their body. They shared that for them, the act of meditating for ten minutes in the morning and again at night was focused entirely on allowing their heart to roam to whatever Loving connections they’d had in their life, and letting those emotions bubble up to the surface and course through their veins.
The act of focusing deeply on the feeling of Love as a meditative practice resonated with me. The reason I had been so moved by my experience of falling in Love with my friend, the reason it had motivated such deep study, reflection, research and discussion in me, was particularly because of how clearly I could feel and identify that feeling in my body. The notion they shared with me blew my mind and rung completely true:
Sitting in, and making space for, Love to enter and live in the body for a time will improve not only one’s relationships, but also one’s life.
This conversation, which took place in the Summer of 2022, is one I will remember and hold dear for the rest of my days. Two other very important takeaways came from our discussion about Love:
You do not need anyone’s permission to Love them
Your art depends on the depth at which you can experience and channel Love
The idea that you don’t need anyone’s permission to Love them felt so welcome and comforting to me I could have wrapped myself up in it and taken a long, un-stirring nap. It awakened in me the idea that I was using language to describe my Love in the past tense in a way that I could tell was untrue. There were people whom I had not spoken to in five years, seven years, people who never wanted to speak to me again, and I would say “I Loved her…” Through this conversation I was kindly encouraged to acknowledge and accept that in a very real way, I Love these people still. Now. In my body, and in the present tense.
I Love them even if we never see each other again, even if we never speak again. I Love them even as our lives take divergent paths and our bonds remain stretched across time and space. I Love them no matter what, because Love is boundless and in actuality it doesn’t follow the very particular set of rules we as a society have collectively decided to follow, as one group of humans alive in one part of the world at one very specific point in time.
Love is true whether we can look it in the eye or not.
This changed me. It disempowered the narrative I’d created in my mind about how I “should be over” someone, how it “makes no sense” that I still care, how I “really need to let it go.” I realized that those messages were representations of shame that I was perpetuating against myself for Loving. I determined (with great help from someone who Loves me dearly and holds my heart so well <3) that framing my ongoing Love for people who have been in my life as a shameful thing to be avoided and covered over was hurting me, and most importantly, limiting my capacity to experience all life has to offer.
They told me that Loving was one of my greatest strengths, and asked me to look clearly at the ways I was telling myself it was a weakness. “This is the life source for your art,” they told me.
I’d say, “I want to be able to write about more than just Love. I feel like real writers can write about more than just Love.”
Kindly, they told me, “if Love is all you feel like writing about, then the world will be better for how you help them see Love. You are a real writer. You are a real writer even if Love is the only thing you ever write about again. And the more you start to see what a gift it is that you can translate Love into something others relate to, the more you will understand that the world needs your art, whatever it is. The world needs you to be you, exactly as you are.”
The relief was immediate. The same second that I truly accepted that all I cared about was Love, that all I wanted to write about was Love, that I could Love the people I Loved for the rest of my long life without needing anyone’s permission… the same second, I felt my soul settle down into my body with intention. I felt an eerie and complete sense of peace. I felt suddenly and entirely connected to my purpose—to Love well.
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My search for good information about Love and being Loving lead me next to revisit a book I’d read a few years prior - all about love by bell hooks. This books is on my Essential Reading List, and I am working on a Book Spotlight blog post with more information and analysis about this book in particular. For the purposes of this post I will highlight the definition of Love put forth by hooks, borrowed from Erich Fromm, which is written in the book:
Love: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth (p. 4)
This definition, according to hooks, seeks to identify Love as something concrete rather than nebulous - something that can be understood and maybe even measured or approached with a plan of action. This definition felt like something I could really sink my teeth into, as it was neither wrapped in poetic language nor vague, and because it reaffirmed what I had learned through my experiences: that Love is something we DO rather than something we HAVE.
In the book, hooks goes on to share many ways that a Love ethic can be implemented in one’s life in order to improve the quality of it. One of the many conclusions hooks draws is that our society has an epidemic of lovelessness, and that a return to Love is the answer to stronger communities and happier, healthier humans. She goes on to assert, “a culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by a spiritual awakening.” (p. 71)
Hooks advises us that a search for Love inevitably leads us to the spiritual. That what we go searching for takes us on a journey toward age old spiritual questions, and we are likely to stumble onto the collective work we have done as a species toward trying to answer those questions across time. As a queer person with some pretty serious religious trauma, I first resisted and even dismissed this notion. The first time I read the book, I “liked it except for the God stuff,” but upon re-reading I noticed that there was something true underneath the language of religion - the universal human experience of Love.
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I first discovered Dr. Marc Gafni on the Aubrey Marcus podcast. I’m not big into podcasts, but this episode was sent to me by someone I Love deeply, so I made a point to listen to it. I will begin by saying that my first listen was mostly mind boggling and a bit confusing. I listened once all the way through, and then several more times, slowly, pausing when I wanted to think more deeply on a particular point.
Through studying the world’s major religions, as well as considering deeply the spiritual needs of humans alive today, Dr. Marc Gafni provides an interesting angle on what Love means, and what it looks like to live a life that is more Loving.
While I have been as of yet unable to find a transcript of the episode, I continue searching, and have it my mind to maybe make my own transcript as a point of reference for deeper thought and meditation on the topics discussed.
It is mentioned briefly in the episode, but Dr. Gafni and Aubrey Marcus use the word “Eros” in the podcast to describe Love. In particular, they assert that the term “love” has become so overused as to be meaningless, and that the term “Eros” retains its sacred characteristics and calls to mind the appropriate scale and sanctity that “love” fails to elicit. For my part, I use Love with a capital “L'“ to indicate this higher meaning of love, one divorced from the capitalist underpinnings of Valentine’s Day candies and the guilt currency that binds together the nuclear family. While commenting on the podcast itself, I will use Eros for the purposes of simplicity.
The primary thesis of the discussion taking place in the podcast is:
Eros (Love) is the defining force of the cosmos. It is the driving force behind everything that ever has been, everything that is, and everything that will be.
They define the attraction of an electron to a proton as an act of Eros, and in this way posit that it is Eros (which produces attraction) that underlies all of the basic forces at play in the universe.
The conversation is winding, deeply spiritual, and certainly takes some contentions as facts to build it’s further premises. It is also a conversation between two middle aged, affluent, cis, straight, white men. Holding those things constant, the podcast spoke to something in me that knew and felt truths deeper than I was capable of reasoning out or following rationally. I was especially moved by the phrase “anthro-ontological knowledge,” which Dr. Gafni explains is a fancy way of saying “inner knowing through human lived experience.” I’ve used this phrase many times since to describe any manner of things that we know in our bodies but can’t always make sense of.
If you’re interested, the podcast is worth listening to. Bring both a critical mind and an open heart. It’s strength for me is in presenting Eros (Love), Desire, and Intimacy as principal elements of our universe, and especially of our lives; the suggestion that by turning toward and tuning into these principals, by giving them the respect they deserve as the building blocks of the known world, we allow ourselves to be connected to something higher.
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The many thoughts and perspectives I encountered while learning about Love began to shape me, and my life. For months, every time I would catch up with a friend I was essentially frothing at the mouth to recount this transcendent experience in a way that would invite their input and feedback. I so badly wanted to be able to converse with my Loved ones about the things I had learned, and yet they were so many and so layered I sometimes felt I wasn’t doing the conversations justice.
In addition to discussing with my friends, family members and partners, I began recognizing Love in all the little places in my life.
I began nurturing my connections more tenderly, leaning into their most honest iterations without fear.
I want to kiss my Loved one on the cheek, on the forehead, I want to hold them in my arms. I’m not talking only about partners here, I am talking about Lovers and friends, colleagues and cousins, siblings and neighbors. I began to wonder: how can I exist inside of a relationship, a culture, or a world that does not allow these perfectly natural, Loving experiences to exist free of shame? How do I find or build something better?
As you can imagine, these questions do not have immediate answers. I continue my studies in the form of investing profoundly in those I Love, and being a generous and present member of my communities. I ask for nothing in return because the opportunity to be involved in the great animating force of the universe and connected to the oneness of all things is reward enough. I wake slowly, I spend more time contemplating my emotions, I make time to think about those I Love and how I can show them what they mean to me daily.
I am changed by the experience of holding big Love inside of my body. My relationship are changed. My life is changed. My PRIORITIES especially are changed. I feel grounded and sharp and eager to craft a life that is beautiful and kind. I feel my world changing in response to me.
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Whenever I make an effort to put big ideas or big experiences into words, I am reminded of the limitations of language; the ways in which we throw words at human experiences to try and make them bite-sized. I desperately want you, the reader, to know what all this knowledge of Love feels like inside my body. Words are my only tools.
As I continue my lifelong journey into Love, here are some things I still believe are true:
I will probably always Love the people who I have Loved in my life, and that’s not the same as wanting to have them in my life
Love is unconditional, and any attempt to change or redirect another person’s behavior is not a reflection of Love, is not rooted in Love
Love requires commitment
Loving energy is comforting and safe - if you do not regularly feel safety in your body, there is something else at play
To Love is an active choice we make, and that choice is informed and shaped by how well we identify, acknowledge and honor the boundaries around our unique sense of self
Loving is a skill that we learn in large part through watching it happen in our lives - if you have not seen or known Love, to be Loving will be a more difficult challenge
This has been my attempt to select some words for what has been one of the most riveting, remarkable, awe-inspiring, life-giving, purposeful and thoughtful experiences of my life. It has brought me into close contact with all I want, all I am, and all I care about, in a way that is both ethereal and tangible—both head-in-the-clouds and feet-on-the-ground. It is the greatest gift of my existence thus far and I suspect will be the great work of my life—to Love and be Loved well.
If any part of it resonated for you I am glad to have come into your orbit, and wish you all the serenity and tenderness you can hold.
**Edited 12/1/2023 for continuity and flow, links updated, no content changes.