What is Love? (Try not to dance like Chris Kattan)

Earlier this week, a client asked me what love is.

I’d never been asked that before.

Three separate images, all set to music, flashed into my head at approximately the same time. That’s how my brain works. Ever seen Scrubs? My head works a lot like JD’s. Let me just show you:

Image 1: I Wanna Know What Love Is (Foreigner). Quintessential butt rock.

Image 2: Moulin Rouge. "Love is...like oxygen! Love's a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love." I don't have every word to this soundtrack memorized or anything. 

Image 3: Yeah, the no-brainer. Night at the Roxbury.

If you experienced all of that media as overwhelming....well, imagine living YOUR WHOLE LIFE in the inside of my head. It's a little crazy up in here.

So anyway, back to the story: I’m sitting in my office, all of these images and songs competing for space in my brain. I felt a strong compulsion to start bobbing my head a la Chris Kattan. 

Meanwhile, my client sat there, blinking at me, having just asked me an important question.

I stared wordlessly at her for a lot longer than either of us probably expected, far past what is socially acceptable. (Therapists do a lot of weird socially unacceptable things with silence, I’ll admit it. This one was unintentional on my part, though.)

Pretty sure my face looked like this:

Finally, I opened my mouth, and all I could think to say was, “Damn girl. I don’t know. But let’s work through that question together.”

And so we did. She was able to tell me a few things that love looked like and felt like to her. And I validated her experiences and added a few thoughts here and there. After she left, though, I sat still grappling with the question. What is love?

I’d always thought Duke Ellington said it best when he said, “Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is.” I *ironically* love this statement—the honesty of it, the embracing of the ambiguity of love’s definition. Yet sometimes I crave definition and simplicity, and at these times, the ambiguity unsettles me. How can you know something is there if you can’t define it?

I suppose atheists have been asking the same thing of people of faith for centuries: How can you believe in a god that you can’t see or define or have proof of?

Yet, I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t have a least a little faith in love. Who didn’t share some universal thoughts on what it is, and what it isn’t. People can’t describe it worth crap, yet they know it when they feel it.

So many questions linger within me, though.

Such as—what about when love gets complicated? When is gets all mixed up with one’s history, experiences, and other emotions? A bulk of my caseload is adult clients who have been abused as children, usually by a parent. So often, they grapple with still loving the parent that hurt them, and intense guilt or shame for that love still being there. Love, so celebrated an emotion, tears these folks up.

Which is a decent segue into this question: Can love really go away, all the way away, once it’s been there inside of you? Or does some bit of it remain, always felt, even if just a shadow of what once was, a faded imprint on one’s heart?

And what effect can we even have on our internal experiences of love? Can we make it go away if we want? Can we make it stronger if we want? How much of this operates outside of the sphere of our control?

Oh man, it’d be nice if just one thing in life could be simple. I want this to be simple.

In my desperation, I turned to those who, by default, give me clean answers.“What do you think love is?” I posed to my kids this morning. Their sleep-heavy eyes squinted as they mutually leaned their bed heads back into their cold car seats. “I don’t know,” Evie (8) said. Jonah (7) feigned sleep and said nothing.

At supper I asked again. “Did you have time to think about it? What is love?”

Evie said, “I think love is a heart.”

I can get behind that.

And Jonah shrugged and said, through a full mouth of Mac N Cheese, “Love is love.”

Indeed, son. Love is love.

Though apparently I can’t tell you what love is, or what it isn’t, I can beyond the shadow of a doubt tell you with a certainty that passes even my own understanding—and I never feel certain about much of anything—that I feel love when I look at those kids. I know what love is when I look into their sweet round faces, hold their grubby hands, or get the privilege of hearing their giggles.

I suppose maybe that’s simple enough.

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How do you experience love? What is it? What ISN'T it? Can it go away once it's there? Share your thoughts in the comments: