| Hello Love,
We have been misled — gently, poetically, but misled nonetheless — into believing that love is something that arrives falling, sweeping, or crashing over us. That it is a noun we possess, a feeling we wait to be handed, a status we achieve and then simply maintain. We have written songs about finding love, losing it, chasing it across cities and lifetimes.
But the most durable science of human flourishing, and the most lived wisdom of those who love well and long, points elsewhere. Love is not a thing. Love is a practice. It is a decision made and remade, a behavior enacted in the texture of ordinary moments, a commitment expressed through attention, sacrifice, and presence.
In positive psychology, we speak of love as one of the character strengths — yet even that framing can make it sound fixed, innate, a quality we either have or lack. The richer truth is this: love lives in what we do. It lives in the verb.
"Love is not a state of being. It is a state of action."
The Neuroscience of Choosing Connection
Every time we turn toward another person — truly turn, not glance — something changes in our biology. Oxytocin floods the system. Cortisol quiets. The anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that registers social pain as acutely as physical pain, begins to soften its alarm signals. We are, at the cellular level, built for love as action.
Research from the late Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina describes love not as a sustained feeling but as micro-moments of positivity resonance — brief windows in which two nervous systems genuinely synchronize. These moments can happen between strangers on a train as easily as between partners of forty years. What generates them is not the relationship status. What generates loving moments is the active choice to attend, to care, to be present to another's humanity.
This is radical news. It means that love, in its most essential form, is always available to us. It means that we do not have to wait for the right person, the right circumstances, or the right feeling. We can begin, right now, with a look, a word, a hand extended. We can do love today.
Love Changes How We Think
When we actively choose love — not as sentiment but as stance — the cognitive effects are measurable. We become less self-referential. The part of us that narrates a constant inner monologue about what we are getting or losing begins to quiet. Perspective-taking improves. We become more genuinely curious about lives that are not our own.
Studies in compassionate attention show that when we deliberately practice love — toward friends, strangers, even those who have hurt us — our pattern of threat detection shifts. We begin to see people as whole rather than instrumental. We extend the same interpretive generosity we most want applied to ourselves. We think in terms of "we" more naturally, more reflexively, more honestly.
There is a reason that the contemplative traditions, from Buddhist loving-kindness meditation to the Christian practice of agape, from Indigenous relational cosmologies to African Ubuntu philosophy, all treat love as something to be cultivated through intentional practice. They knew, centuries before neuroscience confirmed it, that the mind trained in love sees differently.
"I am because we are" (or "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" in Zulu)
Love Changes How We Feel
To practice love actively is to become someone who experiences life differently. Not because the hard things disappear — they do not — but because our relationship to them transforms. Research on meaning-making after loss, on post-traumatic growth, on resilience in communities of high adversity, consistently finds the same protective variable: the capacity to remain connected, to give and receive care, to understand one's suffering as occurring within a web of shared humanity rather than in isolated darkness.
We know from positive psychology that happiness is not a destination but a by-product. It arises, often unexpectedly, in the act of being useful to someone else. It arises in the moment we set down our self-protection long enough to let another person in. It arises when we choose, against the voice of fear, to extend trust, to remain tender, to forgive — not because the other deserves it, but because we deserve to live in a heart that does not calcify.
Love practiced daily becomes a felt texture of existence.
Love Changes How We Act
It is here, in behavior, that love most fully becomes a verb. When we practice love actively, our actions shift — not through willpower alone, but through a genuine reorganization of what we find worth doing. We notice more. We show up differently. We find ourselves making choices we could not have predicted from our former, more defended selves.
We listen longer. We speak more carefully. We stop reaching for our phone mid-conversation. We remember the name of the woman who bags our groceries, and we ask how her week has been, and we mean it. We call the friend who has been quiet too long. We sit beside someone in the dark not because we have the right words but because absence would be a small, avoidable cruelty.
Active love is also communal and political. In political philosopher Hannah Arendt's framework, the love of the world — amor mundi — is the precondition for political engagement that is not merely self-interested. We do not build just societies, sustainable communities, or legacies that matter unless we are animated by something larger than our own survival. Love, expressed as action in the public realm, is how we make the world inhabitable for those who will come after us.
This is the love that shows up to meetings. That does the unglamorous work of tending. That speaks honestly even when silence would be safer. That refuses to let another person disappear. That votes, advocates, nourishes, repairs.
The Daily Grammar of Love
So how do we begin? Not with grand declarations but with small conjugations. Love, like all practices worth having, is built in repetition. It is built in the micro-moments Fredrickson identified — and in the discipline of returning to those moments even when distraction, exhaustion, and old wounds conspire to draw us away.
We practice by pausing before we respond in anger and asking what is being asked of us beneath the surface conflict. We practice by naming what we are grateful for, specifically and aloud, to the people who generated the gratitude. We practice by staying in difficult conversations a little longer than is comfortable, by tolerating the uncertainty of another person's inner life without rushing to resolve it into a category we already understand.
We practice by being honest with ourselves about the places where fear has masqueraded as love — the controlling gesture dressed as care, the withdrawal dressed as healthy boundaries, the cynicism dressed as realism. Love, real love, is not possessive. It is not punitive. It does not keep score. It is not afraid of the beloved's freedom.
None of this is easy. That is the point. The verb form of love requires us to show up not once but endlessly — especially when we do not feel like it, especially when it is not returned in kind, especially in the middle of grief, conflict, and fatigue. This is not suffering for its own sake. This is the recognition that anything worth having is worth the effort of continuous cultivation.
Here is the mission, if you choose the accept it: Go out and do it. Not perfectly. Not permanently. Just today, just now, in the next conversation, the next choice, the next moment when you could turn toward someone and you do.
With Love, |
