A Google search on the word “love” produces roughly seven billion, thirty million responses. Love is mentioned in nearly every movie and book created, and is, if not about the absence of, the inspiration for art of every medium. We use this word every day to describe our affection for any manner of person, object or situation. But do we really know what love is? The answer is no. Love is a myth, and what was a comforting fabrication has snowballed into a worldwide delusion of expectations that undermine our biology.

First, we need to view love in the abstract. Because a mere four-letter word supports a multitude of definitions, both personal and communal, we must remove ourselves from the idealism to see it objectively for what it is; a simple creature burdened with representing our every motive for existence.

Let us establish a few baselines to ensure we agree on the definition of love. We agree that: love represents support - “If I love something I support it.”; that love represents acceptance – “If I love something I accept it wholly and welcome it into my life”; that love represents caring – “If I love something I honestly worry for its welfare and will care for it”; and that love represents comfort – “If I love something I choose to comfort it and take comfort in it.”

Let us also agree that there is no empirical chemical or physical evidence establishing the existence of love. There are no documented, confirmed connections between brainwave patterns and thought processes associated solely with love. All “proof” is anecdotal at best.
The biggest weakness in love’s myth is the lack of clear definition. Every dictionary requires a host of explanations to capture its substance. Thesauruses are just as beguiled, associating an array of words from “attachment” to “cherish” to “yearning” to “glorify”. This broadness leads to interpretation, and interpretation leads to confusion and fallacy. Woody Allen best captured love’s circular logic in Love and Death:

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

As described through generations of literary expression, the idea of love is pure; an altruistic expression of whole acceptance and, in the mating sense, an opting for more intimate interpersonal relations. The fabric of it comforts people from beginning of life to the brink of death. It is the balancing opposition to evil, providing a shelter from hatred and sound reason to forego violence. It is the marathon of devotion, a commitment to everlasting fidelity after the physical expression is gone. Although these are positive aspects of love, we must also recognize that these are the main expectations of religious tenet.

Love, as an entity, holds so many similarities to modern Christianity that it is difficult not to consider it an integrated belief system. It views itself as a uniting force while downplaying its destructive potential and history. Thousands have killed in the name of it. Millions profit from it daily. Love is heaven for the lovers and hell for the lonely. We need only look to the bloody crucifix and the breaking heart-shape to see congruencies in their symbolic idols. The most defining similarity, though, is the millions of people the world around who believe firmly in love’s presence in the absence of pragmatic proof. Believers claim “feeling” love, just as Christians attest to “feeling” God inside of them, but neither claim provides a commonsensical explanation nor can authenticate existence. It is its own religion, complete with cryptic messages, twisted variations and an intangible existence.

The only proof given that love exists is anecdotal; situations in which a person experiences extreme emotion, typically of a devotional sort, that is so powerful they find no other words to describe it. It not only transcends language, but the physical response is also bewildering and indescribable. But becoming clammy, ashen and bereft of proper descriptors when in the presence of an important person, or bearing an unyielding responsibility for family, does not necessitate an oversimplification in order to understand and provide comfort. When is it solely the innate response, through the bonds of shared DNA, to protect the species? When is it merely a person with limited vocabulary experiencing natural physiological stress symptoms associated with homosapien mating habits? By combining beautiful human interactions, like romantic yearning and kindred accountability, into one general “feeling” we trivialize our intricate chemistry and relationships.

The danger of love’s presence nowadays is the same danger archaic religious modalities pose on modern society. It was constructed in an era when life necessitated moral law and the commandments were gaining behavioral control of the masses by way of fear. Monogamy encouraged marriage, a man-made institution critical in building the family structure we would eventually shape our laws around. Now marriage, more specifically the wedding, is a multibillion-dollar generator in the U.S., binding two individuals legally for shared health benefits and tax purposes. Sitting atop the celebration and commerce is the figurehead of the industry: love, a puppet master pulling the strings of 5,690 joyous occasions per day (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).

If love is the basis of marriage, why is there no standard for verification that a couple is in fact in love before they get married? The only qualification for this privilege is a litmus test of one’s current emotional state, which is essentially a collection of chemical reactions to internal desires and outside stimuli from their environment. Love is, for all intents and purposes, made up. Yet we rest such powerful implications, from spousal privilege to U.S. citizenship, on the shoulders of an oral tradition.

We are taught early on to find our Prince Charming or Cinderella. The values bestowed upon us in childhood are the same our parents and their parents were raised with: delusions of potential grandeur in monogamy, a lottery of sorts that could bring prosperity and life-long happiness to you regardless of your station. Neglected in this utopian vision, however, are the lovers forced to sacrifice their indoctrinated expectations when they learn perfection is not a likely scenario. To account for the majority of people failing the fairytale standard, we have painted over the margin of error with an industry of surface reinvention.

We still praise characteristics of fertility and health, but the metaphysical has been replaced almost exclusively by aesthetics. We have effectively reinvented secondary sex traits and placed an emphasis on possessing them. Primary sex characteristics are now enlarged surgically to represent ancillary virility and femininity. We have perfumes to mask our natural pheromones, designer clothing to label our bodies, and money and notoriety to distract from shortcomings. Qualities that lead one to find “true love” have been purchased by corporations, manufactured, and sold back to us as “true beauty”. People are now scientifically engineered and adorned to trigger the feelings attached to love spontaneously, further diminishing the effectiveness of our natural chemistry.

Love implies rules unnatural to the human organism. In its ubiquitous form, it belies warranted negativity and unreasonably suggests peace in matters too complicated to lay down arms. As its romantic embodiment, it encourages monogamy for the sake of commerce when coupling is no longer necessary to the species. It perpetuates a grandiose idealism that builds false hope, compromising our ability as youngsters to differentiate lust from long-term, and compromising our ability as adults to merge our expectations with the realistic landscape of society. In the end, the term “love” marginalizes the complexity of human emotion by squeezing our romantic yearnings, our nurturing impulses, our mating habits and our aversions to violence into a simple, single word incapable of translating even one definition thoroughly.

Love does not conquer all, it only conquers those foolish enough to place their faith in a myth. Turn off the fairytales. Learn your physiology. Let peace happen. Enjoy your companion and tend to your kin. There is no need to translate emotion verbally because we are built with senses capable of communicating with one another. If you truly “love” someone, they will know how you feel in every touch, in every glance, and with every minute spent in their presence. When all the words are gone we can finally break the chains of language’s contraint and enjoy the subconscious whispers of our anatomy, as the only language left will be spoken by our bodies.





Works Cited

Allen, Woody. Love and Death. Los Angeles: United Artists, 1975. Print.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2009. Vol. 25.: National Vital Statistics Reports, 2010. Print.