Definition of love, Soulmates, Can We Survive / Thrive Without Love?

NOTABLE POINTS OF DISCUSSION:

we create personality boxes to categorize who/what to love and how (personality tests, love languages, attachment styles, etc)
we made diagrams !!
love as a biological evolutionary process
love exists in so many different dimensions and layers, and if we were to plot it on a graph the highest level of love would cover the entire graph, it would be a circle encompassing every aspect of it
dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin are what they say causes the feeling of love, but still it must be activated by some outer connection/experience
love is a connection to life, an individuals’ receptivity to love determines how much they could love someone/something. being able to love a tree or a bird is important to be able to love a person
the most basic essence of love is a thread connecting you to something/someone else
there must be some level of attachment for love to form

QUESTIONS WITHOUT CLEAR ANSWERS:

what are the different levels of love?
how to define love
does love come from us or is it a feeling that comes to us?
how important is timing when it comes to love, specifically for romantic relationships?
can romantic love be truly selfless?

THE GENERAL CONSENSUS:
Love is a confusing topic, so much so that we mapped out diagrams of how it works at this discussion.

Humans have this tendency to sort everything into categorized boxes, assign methods to nature, define undefinable abstract processes. Though love cannot be objectively defined into a one-sentence fits all box, we still try to understand how it works and what it means at the most universal level. Where does love come from? Is it something that we generate from our own being, or is it like a cloud raining down that we feel when it passes over us? Is it chemicals in the brain, dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin? Is it our mind or our soul that experiences love?

There are different layers to love that exist as different feelings, like how the love for your mother does not feel the same as the love for your partner or best friend. Maybe there is a different type of love for every relationship you have with other people or things, each type completely unique to you. In general, we can think of the different layers as the following types of love:

platonic
romantic
universal
familial
community
self
biological

I included “biological” in order to include the skill of love as an evolutionary adaptation that encourages humans to procreate. Biological love is the primal need to continue one’s gene pool and give birth to healthy, functional children who will (hopefully) be raised by their mother and father and surrounding family/community. It is driven by hormones and very involved with bodily feelings. It might be considered the first layer of love, the foundation, the most basic explanation of why we feel love. But we’ve evolved to understand different levels of love, and the order in which they evolved remains unknown, likely unknowable at all.

Self love is a concept that seems as though it was only recently defined, and before we encouraged it so aggressively to one another, it may have been an intrinsic predisposition that we were always born with, something so natural that we did not even notice we had it. Now it is something that our culture tells us to actively maintain as though we were dating ourselves. While it is true that we must have some type of relationship to ourselves, self love may be a more natural and subtle layer than we are led to believe. Trying to force a fanatical love of our own selves seems a bit overkill, when in reality all the love we really need for the self is keeping a connection to life by doing the things the body, mind, and soul need to stay alive.

Romantic love must be mutual, and if it’s one-sided, it cannot be a loving romantic relationship. It also tends to be a selfish love, it wants to receive as much as it gives. Feeling this type of love is typically exciting, consuming, confusing. It rushes forward, trampling over other forms of love.

Platonic love is a calm and steady feeling, grounding and nurturing and fun. Platonic love can be one-sided, it can be towards anything and anyone.

Universal love is a big vague feeling where we feel like one with the universe and everything around us.

Community love is usually kind of hidden in plain sight. We don’t often think of the love we have for the people we live near, for our waiters and yoga instructors and park goers. But the love for your community is vital to a balanced way of life, and exploring that feeling can drop the false boundaries closing you in on yourself.

Familial love is a tricky one for many. I don’t think I need to say much about it.

Whenever we feel love, it is usually triggered by something outside of our own consciousness. A bird, the sky, a person, a word. The feeling of love is what connects us to the outside world. It is the thread that passes through others and self and unites them as one. It is beyond our ability to transcribe into language, it is something that must be experienced to be understood. It also is more commonly felt in people who have opened themselves up to the possibility of feeling love, people who expose their hearts to the world and let it touch them deeply. There’s an underlying layer of sadness beneath great love, sadness that comes from having an openness to the world around oneself. It is tender and mellow, this breeding ground for love. Love is different for each person, it’s meaning and purpose varies throughout one’s lifetime. To love is to live.