MOMENT OF LOVE (article)

When a mother embraces her child who has just arrived after being away for so long, when someone tells his/her friend that he/she is missed and the other replies saying I miss you too, when newlyweds look at each other and just smile, these are moments of love.

To try describing such magical moments, it might be better to know what love is. Well, may be not because it seems that everyone knows what love is (at least it seems so!). I bet that if you go down the street asking everyone you meet (even children who can barely speak), they will give you an answer, i.e. a definition. The wonderful author of Love, Dr. Leo Buscaglia or Dr. Love as some like to call him, is one of the very few (if there are any at all) researchers who have dedicated their lives searching and studying love. Yet, he never attempts to define it because, as he claims, there are no words to engulf such a concept. What may be closer to a definition is his belief that the opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy.

Now if apathy (lacking feeling or emotion) is the opposite of love, then empathy (the opposite of apathy) could have something to describe love. Empathy, according to the thesaurus dictionary, is the ability to understand and share the feeling of another (emphasis added). This definition could shed a light on two of what may be characteristics of love (i.e. requires an ability and has to be shared).

First, it is an ability (to love somebody or even something); you have got to be able to do so. Stephen Covey, in his brilliant book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People describes love as “something you do” and he continues saying that it is a “value that is actualized through loving actions”. Thus, to actualize this kind of value, you need an ability to perform loving actions. Such loving actions may range between a genuine smile to a sincere statement like I love you. I do not want to dig deeper into this because (I guess) the deeper you dig, the more ambiguous it gets.

Before going to the second characteristic, the previous lines question the well-known expression, love at first sight. If love is something you do, that means it starts by something someone does and then whatever s/he does builds on that first loving action (which may be that kind of sight), so eventually it (love) gets stronger and bigger. This supports Buscaglia’s claim that we do not fall in or out of love; rather we grow in it. This also explains why sometimes people stop loving someone/something (i.e. love ceases to grow because they stop building on it). It also gives an explanation for the other end; when, for example, two people love each other to the end of their lives; they never get fed up of each other though they spend most of their lives together, but their relationship looks like it has just started; that is because each moment for them together is an opportunity for their love to grow.

The second characteristic is that love is shared. It is one love shared between two or may be more. So, love from one side may not be love really. It has got to be reciprocal; each side contributes in nurturing it. I know that I might be contradicting myself here because I have just said that love starts by one side. However, that is only the beginning of it; it is not love per say, for that kind of feeling (e.g. created by that first sight) needs to be, understood, returned, and shared in order to grow (and become a real love) otherwise it is going to remain there, at the beginning. I admit that this stage (the beginning of love) could be so much powerful, and it might be so because the one who is there sometimes becomes desperate to move on with it; that is, to grow it and actualize it.

When love between two grows, moments of real love are lived. To love and to feel loved marks the living of a moment of love. At this point some, if not most, of the breakdowns in relationships happen because somewhere along the line one side expects a loving action in return to his/hers, and in building such expectations, love starts to fade away because it stops to grow. This kind of love Covey calls a conditional love. However, this moment does exist indeed because, as I mentioned above, love has to be shared, so how would it be shared if a loving action passes unattended and unappreciated? It becomes worse at the beginning stages, for that expectation is accompanied by a fear of rejection and a hope of understanding and sharing. As love grows, fear diminishes, but hope remains still, and it may be this hope that keeps love fragile and vulnerable. On the same page, Paulo Coelho believes that the strongest love is the one that demonstrates its fragility. That is, if both sides (in the case of two) meet that moment of expectation and respond to it by a loving action that may feed into their relationship, so it grows.

In short, since love is something you do, it will never ever come to you just like that. You need to do something to get it; that something may be saying to someone hello (which you really mean), or it may be just a smile that you put on your face every time you meet someone. Love is vital and it is alive, so it needs to be fed in order to grow; if it does not grow it dies. Love is not one single moment; each loving action that is met by another loving action is one moment of love, and the next moment is always stronger because it builds on the previous one; it is not a new one. And finally, understanding that the need to meet such moments is indispensible may aid in strengthening love.So, It is between our hands; we start it, and then it is our decision to make it grow or fade away.