I’ve thought about questions like this for a long time. I spent a long time on “What is happiness?” This question is almost as complicated and interesting as that one.

I speak passively, even coldly, but this is obviously something thats been bothering me for a long time, something which I feel very passionate about. The question was there through my whole relationship with Kayley and has weighed heavily on my mind since it ended.

My first thought is to wonder whether the concept has any meaning at all.  But of course it does. We use it all too often. We mean something by it. The word “love” puts a name on a desire, just like the word “happiness.”  Happiness entails the desire for purpose and for a positive (subjectively so) experience in our existence (this was my conclusion before). What desire is love? Why do we seek it so diligently and so desperately?

Love, of course, is a social desire. As I am coming to understand it, love is born out of the intense loneliness of our existence. Our experience entails that we can only know ourselves, and even that somewhat hazily (as we constantly recreate and redefine ourselves in our every day lives). We cannot be someone else, i.e. we cannot experience their experience, seeing the world as they do, with their set of knowledge and memories, with their train of thought, with their bodily experience, and their social situation. So we can never fully comprehend another being. All we can do to connect, to comprehend another being, is to use our limited and woefully insufficient tools–words, physical contact, imagination, art. Thus loneliness is born, an intense feeling of disconnect. These people around us appear like objects, unknowns, unable to be comprehended.  Likewise we see others and know that we are not comprehended but are constantly misunderstood and mis-characterized. We desire to be comprehended and we desire to comprehend.

While our mediums of communication are, in the end, ineffective at completely knowing another person they are enough to give us a sense of another’s existence, a hope for the intertwining of two existences, for the beginnings of a mutual comprehension of another’s experience.

Nature has built for us a physical counterpart for this philosophical desire. We call its sex.  But in a broader sense it is the whole sense of attraction that we feel for family–for children, for lovers, for parents–all of which are either a part of us or which we exchange physical intimacy with in–all of which is physical

So as far as I can see there are three reasons we love, which essentially makes up the three elements of love.

1. The desire to comprehend another’s existence, and to be comprehended
2. The overcoming of loneliness, to share one’s experience
3. Sexual and physical desire

These are the reasons we seek relationships. Elements of these three are what form love. The second involves the sort of thing we have when we say that someone is “really fun to be around.”  The first is more implicit, involving knowing the other person–on a simple level their likes and dislikes, on a more complex one, their deeper desires, feelings, and preferences. Both one and two involve the sort of thing we share when we help each other out and listen to another’s thoughts, concerns and feelings.

Thats my basic conclusion. I have some more questions about the role of sex in relation to the first two but that is an issue for another moment. Specifically, I wonder about the classifications we use in “friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, “fiancee”, “husband/wife.” What do all these labels mean given the three reasons that people love? How does relationships change between each? What use do these labels have for us? I have some thoughts on it but I’ll wait for another post.