By Tina Kemp
Blame it on years of studying the logic and objectivity one must in order to earn a math degree, but when as question such as “What is love?” is posed to me, my first inclination is to hammer out a definition. A lot of common definitions of love rely on feelings—affection, desire. A friend of mine, when I expressed my distaste for defining something on such subjective metrics as these, suggested the following operational definition: suppose that we define love as the willingness to give up your own comforts, wishes, and desires to provide for someone else’s needs.
The idea is not that one trades wants and needs like two kids divvying up Halloween candy, but that one person identifies another person’s physical, psychological, or spiritual needs and is willing to give up certain comforts of their own to meet those needs. The degree of the need factors into this, as well as the impact the sacrifice of comfort has on the giver. I might not have to love a pregnant woman on the train—or barring that, the ideal of common courtesy—very much in order to give up my seat, but I would have to love someone a great deal to quit my job and move across the country with them because they needed me to be closer.
There are degrees of variation in the amount of comfort certain situations or decisions provide for the “lover” and degrees in variation of the role that the “beloved” and his or her needs play in our lives. These two variables create tension with each other. The more entrenched in comfort someone is with regard to certain things, the harder they are to give up. The larger role that a relationship with someone plays in our lives, the more the needs of that person concern and influence us. A stronger link to a person and their needs pull us toward someone while our own sense of comfort pushes us away.
It makes sense then, that we can’t simply ask “do you love someone or something?” but rather “how much?” Love is best modeled by a continuum rather than a binary variable. On the far left end of such a continuum, we could put hate, which everyone who passed second grade should know is the opposite of love. On the right end of this spectrum, we would put love, which leads to the ultimate sacrifice—one’s life. In the middle would be indifference—the reaction that most of us have to the majority of individuals whom we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Because we are seeking a definition of love, we’ll leave the left end of this spectrum for another essay (which I highly doubt I will ever write).
If we were going to plot our positive relationships with others as dots on this continuum, where would they cluster? How much variation would there be between your continuum and mine? Most people would probably have most of their relationship dots closest to the zero-point of indifference and then extending out to somewhere in the middle of the right-hand side. We might have a few that that get pulled toward the right end because the person plays such a large role in our lives, but for most of us, we’re probably not willing to go that far.
So, for example, let’s say I have a dot I call “Mom.” If I consider some of the things I would do for Mom—call once a week to catch up, move back to my hometown to take care of her if, God forbid, she ever became seriously ill—and some of the things I wouldn’t do for Mom—like date her friends’ sons just because she imagines it would be nice to be related to one of her friends someday—I can figure out where the Mom dot should go. Given that I’m willing to do anything that would meet her needs and isn’t insurmountably difficult, I would put the Mom dot pretty far to the right. (Would it go all the way to the right? Most of us have never been tested far enough to draw that conclusion.)
We could also plot dots for our beliefs and ideals. We can love freedom, justice, peace, God, or Barry Goldwater. Ideals don’t have physical or psychological needs in the sense that people do, but you could argue that they do have requirements in order to be preserved or upheld. Peace, for example, requires restraining oneself from reacting to aggression with more aggression. Does peace prevail if I flip the bird to that guy who just cut me off? No. Did he commit an act of aggression, which might make me feel he deserves that reaction from me? Yes. Is my comfort zone of wanting to always be in the right and wanting to defend myself going to make it very hard for me to resist this particular counter-act of aggression? Probably. (The conscientious reader, who will have been following along and sketching out my love continuum, should now be able to calculate where to put the peace dot.) The same logic applies: the more we are willing to give up what makes us comfortable, secure, or at least momentarily pacified to preserve or uphold some other purpose, the greater right we have to say that we, in fact, love that ideal.
The neatness and tidiness of this definition and corresponding visual of little dots on a line are comforting in some way, not to mention aesthetically pleasing if you like to have everything well-defined and plotted out. For me, this is the language in which I’ve learned to dissect and address the messy issues in my world. The quintessential math example of a neat definition is the circle: a set of points all an equal distance from a center point. We can visualize it, imagine it, use it to model shapes that we see in our everyday lives. But the circle has a problem—when taken off the geometry classroom chalkboard and into the real world, we find that its edges are ragged and its points not quite as equidistant from the center as we imagined them to be.
My model for love runs into similar problems. Two years ago, I quit my job and moved out of my parents’ house, into another state to be closer to a former boyfriend. This seems at first glance like a perfect example of comfort-versus-needs to fit into this model: Processing annuity applications and living at home was hardly the self-actualization that my pre-masters degree self had dreamed of, but the paycheck and lack of rent was cozy enough. The boyfriend and the relationship were at a critical point where long distance was no longer working and if I loved either of them, I was going to have to meet the need for closeness, so I did what I had to do.
That’s not why I made the decision to move, however (though my parents accepted that as an explanation of why I was disrupting their comfort of having me back at home by my announcement that I’d be leaving just two days before I did). The truth is that I felt awful about my life at the time—the lack of meaningful and interesting work, frustration with art projects some friends and I were struggling to bring to fruition, fear that I wasn’t capable of being financially self-sufficient, and feelings of loneliness and emptiness because I was in love with someone I could only be with once a month. The spark, the impetus to actually make the changes I did arose solely out of the way that I felt about everything at the time. In terms of why I made the decision, the relationship was at least as much of an excuse as it was a driver.
This brings us back to those messy, unreliable, and unquantifiable feelings we were trying so hard to avoid when trying to define love. The optimistically logical among us might try to argue that these things are just additional variables: Given enough research, thought, computing power, and scientific progress, we can know anything there is to know about what makes us feel, think, and act. Love could be modeled, calculated, and sealed in a formula, and the experiential aspect of it reduced to a novel side effect. While efforts that explore this direction might comfort the side of us that seeks boundaries and conclusions, they miss the point. The affections, desires, confusions, and frustrations that surround love—and everything else in our lives—are too subjective to define it, but they are exactly the things that govern our decision-making and drive us to let ourselves become tangled up in relationships with the people around us.
Tina Kemp dabbled throughout the Midwest in mathematics, German literature, cognitive science, and performance art before stumbling upon a gig turning unstructured customer interactions into actionable business insight. (Her employer’s marketing team wrote that last phrase.) She currently resides in Chicago.
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