What is Love?

I recently started tutoring at a centre, where I work with some very bright teens. It's been very rewarding and has reconnected me with parts of myself I had long forgotten. Getting back in touch with the artsy, introverted, dilettante teen with a penchant for magical thinking I used to be  has helped me relax and given me a lot of perspective of life. Since one of my students' families is facing a divorce, however, it has also dug up some old questions.

When asked if divorced parents still love each other, it brought on a flashback of decades of inquiry. My parents divorced when I was seven-the perfect age to reflect on theoretical ideas about limits and transitions, like 'when does the fridge door light turn on, exactly?' And 'at what point does food become vomit?'- and I couldn't help but wonder when and how love stopped being love, and what love is anyway. I thought perhaps I could understand it by seeing it come into being, but love of the parental variety was a love I had been thrown into since before I could remember, and the formation of love of the romantic variety remained cryptic, with Disney movies offering little (and often inaccurate!) information through third-party observation.

Liking was easy: when someone has character traits you admired, you liked them. I understood what affection was: it was a phenomenon you could easily point out. And of course there were social norms surrounding love. I knew I loved my mom because that was how children are supposed to feel about their parents, and when my step-dad came into the picture it was implied that that was how I was supposed to feel about him. I knew I was supposed to fall in love with Mr. Right but I would only know when because I 'felt it'.

So I stumbled through my teen years trying to understand the feeling and making lots of mistakes along the way (what else are teen years for?), until in university I finally met 'Mr. Right'. Needless to say it was less than reassuring for him to hear that despite knowing I loved him, I didn't know what love was.

At my cousin's wedding ceremony vows I finally heard an answer that I felt was acceptable. Perhaps I accepted it because it seemed convincing, or perhaps I accepted it because my questioning was hurting others around me (a common problem for philosophical types, I think) the answer was that love is a decision we make. Love was a commitment to act towards others in a certain way. This matched my experiences: I made commitments to the people in my life that I loved, and when my parents divorced, they decided that commitment wasn't something they could do or wanted to do anymore.

Except one thing: a retort that was painfully obvious in the face of this student. If love was just a decision we made, some kind of commitment we choose to participate in or not, then how was it possible to find ourselves at the mercy of incredible heartbreak when things fell apart? Love is something that grabs us and has control over us, it can't simply be opted into and out of. And when our relationships fall apart, what's left behind is a kind of emotional cognitive dissonance, where our hearts simply cannot catch up to reality.

I still don't understand what love is. Perhaps it is something beyond mere intellectualization, but I still want to understand it. I'm not happy with vague accounts that say 'when it happens you'll know', but on the other hand perhaps it is something that can only be understood through experience. Even if sometimes that experience can be incredibly painful.