The Wrong Definition of Love

The prevailing cultural emphasis on the self and personal well-being has consequences.

- David Brooks

The time I used to spend on Twitter I now spend on Substack, and my life is much better for it. There are a lot of interesting, eclectic writers in the world. Last week, for example, I stumbled across a post from culture writer Antonia Bentel, who asked six strangers and friends about how they fall in love.

One woman responded, "I fall in love when someone sees me in a way I didn't know I could be seen." A young man answered, "Falling in love is like seeing yourself reflected in someone else's mind." Another woman said, "I fall in love when I don't feel like I'm performing competence."

She added that love happens "when someone sees you in the absolute mess of it — your pain, your pettiness, your unpaid parking tickets". Another man replied, "Falling in love is like entering a room you didn't know existed in your own house."

Bentel makes it clear that this is far from a scientific survey, but what struck me about these answers is that they all had a common definition of love — that love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.

We can all relate. We all want to be seen and to be beheld. You've probably come across American writer Raymond Carver's famous poem, Late Fragment:

And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.

And yet I'd say the Substack answers betray a common misunderstanding of how you become beloved. There was a lot of self in these answers and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person, or even putting that person's interests above your own.

These answers didn't come from nowhere; they're a perfect distillation of the cultural trends that social critics have been describing for many decades.