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What is Love, Actually?
Exploring the science, philosophy, poetry and pain of life’s most enigmatic emotion
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Ali MacGraw says to Ryan O’Neal in the 1970 movie Love Story. In the final scene, O’Neal repeats the line. It’s good cinema.
But here’s the thing: In all the many definitions for love in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary— nine for the noun and four for the verb—none mention never having to say you’re sorry.
True love — romantic love — involves a helluva lot of apologizing, in my experience. Love means saying you’re sorry whenever you have cause to be.
That does not define love. But it’s a damn good strategy, given the human propensity to do stupid and hurtful things when we’re in love which, as the author and anthropologist Helen Fisher puts it, makes us “bewitched, bothered and bewildered.”
So what, then, is romantic love, actually? Depends on who you ask.
Love hurts
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies,” Aristotle wrote.
Not bad, eh? Maybe a bit spiritual considering the reality of love’s daily grind, and perhaps lacking in nuance. I mean, sharing a soul doesn’t mean two people madly in love will always see eye-to-eye.
