Love is "Parks and Recreation." Love is working really hard to improve in your track event and getting your personal record. Love is ramen and pizza. Love is funny memes. Love is spoken word poetry that makes you laugh and cry all at once. Love is '80s music. Love is the "New York Times."
These are all things I love... But do the things we love define what love is?
Love is not tangible. Love has no labels and it cannot be expressed in a string of letters or a few verses of a song. It is not flowers or romantic cards or saying, “I love you” out loud. Those are words and sounds that leave our mouths or pens like the automatic actions of a robot, without awareness of the implications of its own motion. More accurately, love is the actions we take regarding others and ourselves.
Love is not merely an emotion-- it is a verb and a decision we make.
Love is not sentences threaded together and said aloud, not the emojis you text, or the song lyrics you sing. My twelve-year-old brother taught me that love is expressed not in words, but in the actions we take. Every time I tell him, “I love you” the reply I get is nothing more than an insipid “Okay” or “Yes." This led a younger me to believe my brother did not love me back. It hurt, and although I tried to understand that it was really something about him, not me, that prevented him from returning my love out loud. I could not understand why my parents told me to just forget about it, that his responses were futile. I began to think I was futile to him. It was only then that I grasped perhaps love is more complex than the language that leaves our mouths.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the many heights of this concept in his sermon of September 16, 1962, “Levels of Love." Dr. King mused that while the word love is often used, “… it is one of the most misunderstood words. In a sense, it is an ambiguous term.” King revealed his understanding of different levels of love: utilitarian love, romantic love, mother’s love, friendship love, humanitarian love and divine (or Christian) love. The lowest level, utilitarian love, is marked by its selfishness, that you “love another for their usefulness…” The highest level, divine love, is explained by King as when “you love every man, not for your sake but for his sake.” I love my brother, not because his words or infrequent hugs make me feel good but because he needs “my gift” of love, as described by King. Once I considered this change in perspective, I could see my brother has demonstrated, if not expressed aloud, his love in return. He has never been a talker and our relationship may be atypical, but that does not mean he does not love me.
It was shown through his quiet creeping into my room at night after a bad dream when he sought my comfort. It is as simple as him coming to me to borrow a book or to help him reach a sweatshirt in his closet. It is in his careful arrangement of drinks and straws at the dinner table, putting the coveted iced tea at my place, not his. It is him emailing and printing news articles for me. It is in his smile when I come home and in his gentle hand feeding my turtle when I forget. Love is action, not words.
Love is the sacrifice made, in the film"Pocahontas," when John Smith is about to be beaten by Pocahontas’ father. She lies on top of Smith and says, “If you kill him, you will have to kill me too.” It is when Shang, from the movie "Mulan II," releases his grip on Mulan’s hand and falls into a canyon so she can pull herself up and live. It is when Katniss Everdeen volunteers to compete in The Hunger Games in place of her sister, knowing she had a 1 in 24 chance of surviving. Love is a sacrifice.
It is putting yourself behind someone you care about for their benefit. Sometimes, real love is giving up a relationship because it is holding the other person back. In the television show "Parenthood," protagonist Haddie Braverman is in a relationship with a boy named Alex during her junior year of high school. While they are what they believe to be “very much in love,” they are also very different. She is seventeen and a student, while Alex is in nineteen and working in a soup kitchen. Haddie is middle class and very focused on her academics unlike Alex, who dropped out of high school, recently ran away from his abusive household and is a recovering alcoholic. Alex believed that he was distracting Haddie from school, leading her onto his dark path. He didn’t want to be the boundary between her and the life she deserved. Alex doesn’t want Haddie to end up like him, and so he breaks up with her because he loved her so much. Months later, though heartbroken, she gets into Cornell, her dream school. Love is sacrificing yourself or something important to you for someone else. Love is putting someone you care about first for their own good, even if it hurts you.
The things we love do not define love. Love isn’t our favorite shows, the feeling you get after reaching a goal or your favorite food. Love isn’t something you laugh at or cry at or listen to. Love isn’t a newspaper. Love is so much more. Love is showing somebody you care. Love is putting someone before you. Love is trusting somebody and love is giving someone space while being there for them.
Love is less telling and more doing.
