What is Love?

"Baby don't hurt me..." Just kidding.

They asked us that in priesthood last week. I thought it was a good question.

Of course we got some upper level, nice sounding answers in church. "Love is caring about someone else's well-being." It sounds right, but if you think about it, caring about someone else is a result of love, an effect, not a definition. I wanted to know what it is, not what we do when we love someone.

So what is it? What causes us to preoccupy ourselves with the well-being of another? Why are there certain people that we love more than others?

Obviously, it has something to do with personality. We typically love people with similar or admirable personalities easier than others. But we can love anyone.

When we find someone that we can love easily, we typically refer to it as "connecting". This term is likely coined from the idea of the "bonds of love", the metaphor of links. I wonder if this idea is actually less a metaphor and a lot closer to truth than we realize.

Have you ever felt something was wrong with someone even though they were miles away? Or have you ever randomly wondered about a close friend you haven't heard from in a while only to come home and find an email from that same friend?

I wonder if there isn't an actual link between sentient beings, a network between intelligences, that allows for the spiritual and/or emotional communication between intelligences. Love would then be a direct link between 2 intelligences, where they would be able to have relatively open spiritual and emotional communication between each other. I say relatively because there is apparently a "bandwidth" that comes with these love links. The stronger the love, the more you understand each other. People who've been happily married for years (note "happily") can think each other's thoughts.

We can build these connections ourselves. We can build them with service. Sharing an emotional experience creates an emotional link, and thuse greater understanding. We don't have to wait for these emotional experiences to happen. We create them when we serve each other.

We can also build them by getting to know others. In Ender's Game, the main character, Ender, would study his enemies completely, get to know how they think and why so that he could defeat them. But when he defeated them, he would become emotionally distraught. It is explained that it is impossible to truly know someone, who they are, how they came to be that way, etc. and not love them. I believe that is true.

Who knows what these connections consist of, but it's an interesting thought.