What is love (and hate)?

For all relative things in existence, there is one constant beneath them all...

Love is used in a broad context of applications to the point it has vague meaning when looked at more carefully. People will say I love this song, or I love this sweater, but they will also say, I love my child, mate, or friend, and each time it gets used in a different context, it is meant in a slightly different form. When I asked people what love is, they gave all the usual answers. They would say things like, it is going out of your way for someone no matter what, or it is someone you always want to be around when they are away, but these answers do not define the broad use of the word as it is used in all its numerous contexts.

Sometimes you get a situation where someone has a crush on another person, and they will get asked if they love that person. They sometimes say they like them, but do not love them. This is where we can start examining what love is more deeply. It is obviously an attraction to something, but when placed relative to liking, it appears love is a stronger version of liking something. We can safely assume they are both words to reflect forms of caring about something or someone. If this is the case, like and love are on a spectrum of caring with many other words that could possibly be placed at points on the spectrum that mean like more, and more, and more till love is finally reached, but most people will use the word love liberally regardless, because it is an easy blanket term to throw over things they care about without trying to look closer at the reasons why in themselves.

Visual Spectrum:

(Forms of caring, and how much we care.)
Like <----like more-------really like-------> Love

Maybe we should look at the types of things people say they love before moving on to understanding why. Things people love are inanimate objects, music, pets, friends, family members, children, and spouses. There may be more, but these are the most frequent objects of affection you hear people use the word love towards verbally. Once again, the word love is thrown around liberally, so nobody can love a jacket the way they love their spouse, and this is the reason I put them all under forms of caring. Perhaps it would be easiest to start with the simplest objects, and define why they are loved before moving on to more complex objects. We can use a jacket as an example, because unlike living objects, the jacket cannot feel anything back towards us. This makes love a one way struggle by the user toward the object. Why would someone care about a jacket? The jacket keeps us warm when we get cold. We most likely like the way the jacket looks too compared to other jackets. We picked this jacket over others for a reason at the store. Was it just warmer, better looking, or both? I would say the combination varies depending on the situation we are buying the jacket for. If we care primarily about warmth, we lean more towards a purchase for warmth. If we are buying this to look attractive for work, school, or another occasion, we are buying it for aesthetics more. This means we can care it keeps us warm, but another reason we care is it makes us appealing to others. We like the jacket beyond warmth. We like it makes us more attractive to others. There is a primary and secondary purpose for the jacket depending on how much we care for warmth versus our attraction to others it gives us.

This leads to the conclusion nothing is good in itself, but that everything is good for other things through interconnection. If we look at music, we like the way a song sounds because it makes us feel more strongly on an emotional level than without the music, but we also like that we can share the music, and see other people's emotional level intensify through facial expressions if they like it too. Once again, we like the song because it makes us feel good, and we like the way it makes others feel towards us when they listen to it in front of us. When they feel good in front of us, we have two factors of satisfaction. We like the music, because of what it does for us, and the other people caring more for us when we play the music for them they like, which makes them like us more.

Now a pattern can be seen forming. We do not like the jacket in itself, but the fact the jacket makes us feel good either in warmth, attraction to others, or both. We do not like the music in itself, but the fact it makes us feel good listening, and that others can like us more while playing it for them. Just as we defined levels of liking and loving are all levels and forms of caring, it can now be said everything we care for is cared for because of what it can do for us. What about people? We care about our friends, because they keep us from feeling alone, help us when we are hurt, and give us people to tell about ourselves, so we can feel important. Why do we care about making them feel good? It is because they take the time to make us feel good. We care about benefiting ourselves first.

This is where an illusion occurs in reciprocal interactions at the cultural level. We convince ourselves we love people for who they are in themselves first, that we go out of our way for them because of who they are in themselves, and listen to them for who they are. It is obvious we do these things because people do something back for us we like, or we developed the habit through past interactions where reciprocity was taking place in hopes that showing interest in others in the present will get us rewarded in back similar in the future like the past. The same is true for a spouse, and a child is cared for by a mother no matter how badly it treats the mother most times, because nature gave mothers a natural tendency to protect their genes. Genes are a part of ourselves a mother wants to pass on, so a child's well being in this sense is because of what it can do for the mother, which is allow part of herself to live on after she dies. We love a jacket, because we care what it does for us. We care about people, because of what they do, or we think they might be able to do for us, but we care for nothing in itself for itself. People who seem altruistic to help others for god are only doing what god wants in return for the reward of heaven and god's love. God is said to love us no matter what, but will not lead us into a good life, and leave us in hell if we do not do what god wants. We only do things for god, because we want god to give us a good life. God only does things for us because we love god, or because god hopes we can love god. Even god only cares what benefits god.

Why do we hate something? Many would say it is for the opposite reason we loved it. I would say not always for the opposite reasons. Once again, we are on a spectrum, and this spectrum is the same one as before. It is just much wider.

Spectrum of caring:

Hate<-----dislike-----like----->Love
I
I
I
Indifference

Hate cannot be the opposite of love. It is at a different end of the spectrum of caring, but it is still a form of caring. If your jacket develops holes, goes out of fashion, or is not attractive to enough of the kind of people you want to be attracted to you, then you begin to dislike it. Some would even liberally use the word hate for how much they dislike a jacket. The same goes for a song that gets old, or a person who begins to displease us more than they please us to a point we do not want to deal with them. We dislike or hate something when we want an object to do something for us and it cannot do it. We dislike or hate people when we want them to do things for us, and they are not capable and/or do not care about what we do enough to want to satisfy our desires in return. After we care enough about something that manages to lose satisfaction, we reach a state of indifference toward it. Love and hate are both forms of caring for what objects or people can do for us in our lives. The opposite of both is indifference. When we feel nothing and no longer care, we are finally on the opposite side of the same coin. The opposite of caring is indifference. The opposite of both love and hate is indifference.

The only constant in life is ourselves. The only thing we never become indifferent towards is ourselves. We are the constant all things relative to us are continually judged by in worth to ourselves.