What is Love?

There’s a moment that happens in nearly every long marriage, and it usually arrives without warning. A husband sits across from his wife at the kitchen table, coffee cooling between them, and realizes he doesn’t feel the way he did at twenty-two. The fluttering pulse, the breathless anticipation, the giddy certainty that this person hung the moon—much of it has quieted. And in that quiet, a question rises: Do I still love her?

If love is a feeling, the answer might be uncertain.

But if love is something else, something deeper and more enduring than the weather of our emotions, then the answer might be a resounding yes, even more so than on the wedding day.

We live in an age that has confused love with feeling so thoroughly that the confusion now seems like common sense.

Songs tell us we “fall” into love, as if it were a hole in the ground we stumble into. Films treat the disappearance of romantic feeling as the dissolution of love itself. And in our own hearts, when the warm tide recedes, we wonder if something has gone terribly wrong.

Even the subject above, "What is love?" is answered in a song you probably know with feeling: "Baby, don't hurt me... no more." When I googled "what is love" I got an array of definitions, most of them wedded to "feelings," or "a complex set of emotions and behaviors characterized by deep affection, intimacy, passion, and commitment."

I think these definitions fall short, if for no other reason, than they "mingle" love with feeling and passion in a way that leads to a net-loss of love if the feelings or passions change. As is usually the case, smarter people a long time ago were far more grounded on this question than the "smart people" of today. 

St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, offered a definition of love so simple and so revolutionary that it has the power to reorder a whole life.

To love, Aquinas said, is velle alicui bonum—to will the good of another (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26, a. 4).

That’s it. Six words in English, three in Latin. To will the good of another.

Notice what is not in this definition. There is no mention of butterflies. No mention of attraction, chemistry, sentiment, or warmth. Aquinas is not saying these things are bad. He is saying they are not the essence of love.

Love, in its proper sense, is an act of the will directed toward the genuine good of the beloved.

 

The Difference Between Love and Passion

To understand why this matters, we have to make a careful distinction—one our culture has almost entirely lost. There is a difference between love and the passions.

The passions, in classical theology, are the movements of our sensitive appetite.

They are our feelings: joy, sorrow, fear, anger, desire, delight.

They rise up in us, often unbidden, in response to what we perceive. We see something pleasant and feel attraction. We encounter something threatening and feel fear. These are not chosen acts; they are reactions. And Aquinas is quite clear that the passions themselves are morally neutral. “Passions are neither good nor evil in themselves,” he writes; they take on moral character only insofar as they are governed by reason and ordered toward the good (cf. Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 24, a. 1).

This is an enormous relief, isn’t it?

You are not a bad person because you felt a flash of irritation at the slow driver, or a pang of envy when your colleague was promoted, or a sudden coolness toward a spouse you genuinely love. Feelings rise. They are part of being embodied creatures, fearfully and wonderfully made (cf. Psalm 139:14, NRSV).

The question is never whether we will have passions but whether our passions will be ordered or disordered, whether they will serve love or counterfeit it.

Here is where things become spiritually serious. When passion masquerades as love, we end up willing what feels good to us rather than willing what is genuinely good for the other.

We use the language of love while doing something quite different. We say “I love you” and mean “you make me feel a certain way.” And when those feelings change—as they inevitably will, because feelings are like weather—we believe love itself has died.

But love has not died. We might never have had it, or if we did, our perception of it was so mingled with passion that we mistook the two. 

 

The Good That Love Wills

Aquinas’s definition raises an immediate question: what is the good we are supposed to will for another?

If I love my child, do I will whatever my child wants? If I love my friend, do I support whatever path she chooses?

Here we must go deeper. The good, in classical thought, is not merely what someone desires. The good is what genuinely fulfills a person, what leads to their flourishing as the creature God made them to be.

The deepest good of any person is union with God, in whom alone the human heart finds rest. Augustine’s famous line still rings true: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee” (Confessions I.1).

So to love someone is to will their ultimate flourishing—to desire that they become who God created them to be, that they walk in truth, that they find their rest in the One who made them.

This means love sometimes looks like comfort and sometimes looks like correction.

Sometimes it means giving what is wanted and sometimes it means withholding what would harm.

Sometimes it is gentle and sometimes it is fierce. But always it is oriented toward the genuine good of the other, not toward our own feelings about them.

Love is not that which simply "accepts" someone as they are, particularly if they are not currently fulfilled as the creature God made them to be. Too often, we think, that love means "approving" of whatever kind of life they are choosing for themselves, ratifying it, imagining that their imagined self was their true self.

This is why Paul’s great hymn of love in 1 Corinthians 13 reads the way it does. He does not say love feels patient; he says “love is patient” (1 Corinthians 13:4). He does not say love feels kind; love is kind. Love bears, believes, hopes, endures. These are not emotional states. They are sustained acts of the will, oriented toward the good of another, that continue whether or not we happen to feel like continuing.

It is the love that hung on the cross. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). Love, in its highest form, is gift.

 

Joy and the Disordered Passions

There is one more piece to this puzzle, and it is perhaps the most practical. Aquinas teaches that genuine joy—the deep, abiding gladness that the world cannot give and cannot take away—comes only from union with the good.

We rejoice in possessing what is truly good. If we attach our hearts to what is not good, or to what is only apparently good, we may experience pleasure, even intense pleasure, but we will not experience joy.

And eventually, the pleasure will turn bitter.

This is why disordered passions, when followed instead of governed, lead so reliably to misery.

The person who pursues the passion of lust under the name of love finds himself emptier than before. The person who indulges anger in the name of righteousness finds her soul corroded. The person who feeds envy or vanity or the endless craving for approval discovers, sometimes too late, that these passions are insatiable.

They promise satisfaction and deliver only restlessness.

Jesus put it this way: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). If our treasure is feeling, if we live to chase emotional highs and avoid emotional discomfort,our hearts will be tossed about endlessly, and the deep joy God wills for us will remain just out of reach.

But if our treasure is the good itself, ultimately God himself, then even our passions, properly ordered, become servants of love rather than its counterfeits.

This is the path the saints walked. Not the path of emotional flatness or stoic indifference, but the path of integration, where feeling is neither suppressed nor enthroned but submitted to the rule of love.

 

Living This Out

How do we begin to live in the light of this understanding? A few practical suggestions, offered humbly.

First, stop trusting your feelings to tell you whether you love someone. Your feelings will tell you the temperature of the moment. They will not tell you the truth of your commitments. When you wake up one morning and don’t feel love for your spouse, your child, your friend, your parishioner, your neighbor, do not panic. Ask instead: Am I still willing their good? Am I still acting toward their flourishing? If yes, then love is alive and well. The feelings will return, often, when the will has been faithful.

Second, examine what you are actually willing for the people in your life. This requires brutal honesty. When you think of your spouse, are you willing their genuine good, or are you willing that they be more convenient for you? When you think of your children, are you willing their flourishing, or are you willing that they reflect well on you? When you think of difficult people in your life, are you willing their conversion and joy, or are you secretly willing their failure? The will reveals itself in such honest questions.

Third, do not despise your passions, but do not be ruled by them. Feelings are gifts. They are the music of the soul, and life would be impoverished without them. But they are not the conductor. The will, illuminated by reason and grace, is the conductor. Let your passions sing under that direction, and they will lead you into joy. Let them direct themselves, and they will lead you into sorrow.

Fourth, pray for the grace to love. This is finally a matter of grace, not merely of effort. We cannot will the good of another consistently, especially when it costs us, without the help of the One whose very name is Love. Ask daily for this grace. “Lord, teach me to love as you love. Teach me to will the good of those you have placed in my life, even when I do not feel it. Make my love resemble yours.”

The husband at the kitchen table, looking across at the woman he has known for thirty years, is not in a crisis of love. He is in a moment of clarity, if he will see it. The fluttering pulse is gone, yes. But something far more remarkable has taken its place: a settled, faithful, daily willing of her good.

A thousand small acts that no longer require the fuel of feeling.

This is not love’s diminishment. This is love’s maturity.

This is what love looks like when it grows up.