I love you THIS much

A popular challenge among many is displaying exactly how much one loves another person. You take your girlfriend out for dinner, plan your boyfriend’s surprise party. With Valentine’s Day only a couple of weeks away, I’m sure many of us will be out to prove exactly how much we care about a significant other. But can love really be quantified or reliably measured?

Some seem to think so. One might suggest love to be some sort of dependent variable (y), relying on a variety of different factors like commitment or trust, either increasing or decreasing in relation to them. Perhaps then love can be graphed, throughout the years of a marriage, identifying its peaks and valleys, its high points, its low ones.

But what if you’re not married? What if love is measured through the amount of time one person devotes to the other? Or maybe it’s the total amount of gifts purchased per month. Could it be a function of the times we’ve said “I love you” combined with how often we send a smiley with a text? These efforts would be debatable in both their validity and reliability. It all seems pretty relative up until this point.

Some interested in the topic suggest brain imaging as a more scientific approach. Areas of the brain displaying more blood flow activity during an fMRI scan, like the nucleus accumbens, may be a more realistic answer. Or perhaps actually measuring levels of certain hormones such as oxytocin and dopamine associated with trust and connectedness as well as experiencing rewards, respectively, could give us a better idea of what is going on inside the mind and body. Brain chemistry is a powerful thing. There are caveats here too though; in addition to being released when in love, hormones like oxytocin are also present when spending time with friends, getting massaged, laughing, hugging and exercising.

It seems we may just have to settle for not being able to put a concrete number on love. In fact, maybe ordinally valuing things or people we love is the only way to ascribe some type of order, relying on our internal gut feelings. Even with this though, we cannot seriously carry on the classic “no, I love YOU more” argument since we cannot truly know what another person feels. Which might be best. Because that gets annoying fast.

Unfortunately, it would appear that there is no standardized test for measuring amounts of care and devotion… yet. Honestly, I would guess that this is largely due to the lack of a concrete definition for the term love, since its meaning varies across gender, ethnicity and age.

For now, it will have to be up to subjective interpretation.

“How much do I love thee, my actions will tell.”

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