What Is Love? A Common Sense Approach

Most of us know the feeling before we know the word. You watch your parents, your younger sibling, a friend you haven't seen in a while, a puppy, a stranger's kindness on the metro, a bird crossing an open sky — and something in you softens. We call a lot of different things "love." But if you stop and ask what the feeling actually is, the answer gets slippery fast.

This isn't an attempt to hand down a final, authoritative definition. It's one person's ongoing attempt to make sense of a word that poets and philosophers have circled for thousands of years — offered here not as doctrine, but as a perspective worth sitting with.

Why We're Drawn to Certain People

One useful starting point comes from performance coach Tony Robbins, who observed that people tend to be drawn to others in one of two ways.

The first: we like people who already have the qualities we value in ourselves. If you take pride in your taste — say, an eye for good cars — you'll naturally admire someone who shares that taste. You see your own values reflected back and it feels good.

The second is almost the opposite: we like people who have qualities we wish we had. A shy person can find themselves drawn to someone confident, almost hoping some of that confidence will rub off on them — "I wish I had what you have, maybe some of it will land on me."

There's a flip side to this too. The traits we can't stand in other people are often traits we don't want to admit exist in ourselves. When something in another person triggers irritation completely out of proportion to the moment, it's worth asking what that reaction is actually about.

Robbins's observation isn't a definition of love by itself. But it's a hint — a clue pointing toward something deeper about how attraction and identification work.

Two Voices, One Origin

There's a line — paraphrased here — from A Course in Miracles, a text with its own long and unusual history, that suggests a person really only has two voices available to them: the voice of love, and the voice of a call for love, which shows up as anger, irritation, or distress.

The idea is that when someone is short-tempered, hurting, or lashing out, it isn't the opposite of a need for love — it's a distorted expression of that same need. Someone crying is often trying to regulate themselves, or hoping someone nearby will help them regulate, so they can find their way back to a calmer, more loving state. Even anger, in this framing, is love in disguise — love that has lost its way and is asking, clumsily, to be found again.

That's the second hint.

A Working Definition

Putting these threads together, here's the definition that emerges: love is what happens when I consider you a part of me — when the line between "you" and "I" stops feeling meaningful. My parents, my closest friends, my community — these don't feel separate from me; they feel like an extension of who I am. That, more than any warm feeling in the moment, might be the real marker of love.

Is that fully achievable? Probably not, all the time, for everyone. It's fair to admit that feeling this completely — a total dissolution of "me" and "you" — is rare, maybe even something most people never fully reach. What's more common is a spectrum: we care more for family and close friends, and extend a smaller, conditional version of that care to strangers. Some people manage to extend it much further — enough to devote themselves to a cause, a country, or humanity as a whole. That's not a failure of love; it's simply love operating at different radii, with different levels of ego still attached.

Puppy Love and the Trap of "Unconditional"

It's worth naming the difference between this and what's often called "puppy love" — that early rush that feels boundless and unconditional but is really hormone-driven. It's a temporary, artificial version of unconditional love, not the real thing sustained by choice and depth.

There's also a caution worth holding onto here: if you can't set boundaries, this kind of expansive, self-dissolving love can hurt you. Loving without limits doesn't mean losing yourself entirely or letting people walk over you. If this whole idea feels abstract or hard to grasp — that's fine. It's a genuinely deep concept, and this is only a first pass at understanding it, not the final word.