Does True Love Exist?
A close friend of mine recently forwarded me this article: “We don't always end up with the loves of our lives (and that's okay).” It’s beautifully written. The author has had “Big Love.” The kind, she refers to ‘I can’t believe this exists in the physical realm of this planet’ kind of love.” The love of your life, kind of love. Except, she posits, it doesn’t always stay that way. In fact, for most it may not. Another article cites that according to differing studies, around 60–75% of us do not end up with the person we would classify as or consider to have been the “great love” of our life.
I’d like to posit the exact opposite. That true love — real love — never ceases. The relationship can end, but your love for someone does not. That by very definition if it was love, it is forever. And I’d like to offer the best proof I have for this.
Love in the present — the now — like just about all things we do (and I’ll get to the one exception which is part of my ontology here) has evolutionary hardwiring and benefit. When you love someone, or something as many who have had pets would include them here too, your brain releases hormones (oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline, testosterone, estrogen, and vasopressin) that create a mix of feelings: euphoria, pleasure or bonding. Oxytocin is the most powerful of these — think of the first time you felt in love. Everything seemed sharper. That person was a part of you. The world was attached and permanent. That’s love and back to the evolutionary benefit, it allows us to care for others. Caring for others does two things evolutionarily. It keeps them alive, which helps us pass on our genes. The most visited article on this entire website talks about this is terms of defining when civilization started here. Caring for others was the start of civilization. And it also keeps us alive. People care for us. We too, then, pass on our genes. Just like our earliest ancestors finding a patch of fresh fruit released dopamine in their brains so they would be motivated to go back to that patch the next day, to eat and survive, love releases chemicals that have kept us alive.
Simple enough.We receive benefit from being in love.
What about ways, though, when the relationship ends. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic for individuals (and perhaps there are some who are incapable of feeling love because of different genetic hardwiring), but I can at least speak from personal experience, I am incapable of unloving once I have loved. I know this beyond anything else I am sure of. The love changes, of course, I don’t love the person I first fell in love with romantically. In fact I take great joy in her being in love with someone else. Because that makes her happy. Which makes me, happy. But I do know that 30 years after I would still do anything for her. And we’ve probably seen each other at most 4 times in the last 30 years. And yet I have zero diminishment of that one aspect; that if she asked for me to be there for her and her family I would. Without hesitation I would stop what I am doing and help out. There’s still an attachment that makes me want to provide support. Care. Whatever you want to call it. And not just that one person, because I’ve been blessed to be truly in love more than once. Big Love, as it were. So what I just said multiplied by twofold exists for me.
Which still, admittedly, likely carries some evolutionary foundation. You’ve possibly seen this video of the person who raised a baby lion, then released it to live in a refugee, and then many months later came back to find it. If you haven’t, or don’t watch it, just trust me. That’s love eternal for the living. Which, perhaps, if you are reunited with your pack after being lost for months, at least for 300,000 years of homo sapien existence, you needed them to still love you. To accept you back into the pack and care for you. So the cynic would say that I can’t “unlove” simply because I need that backup layer of protection, just in case. Just in case years later — 30 years later — I need a pack and my brain subconsciously retains this knowledge. Perhaps.
But what about this? The oxymoronic exception I suggested earlier. The crux of it all. We love people (and pets!) that are dead. That we know are gone forever. Here’s the thing, then: there is zero evolutionary benefit to that. In fact, it is an evolutionary disadvantageous. Loving someone who can’t provide you with anything is biologically a detriment. Yet, love them all the same we do. I’ve shed tears for my dead dog and hiked in a white out blizzard up an entire mountain (not very evolutionary beneficial) just to put my hand on the rock under which her ashes are buried. No survival mechanisms called upon me to do that. Just the permanence of love. I’ve shed tears for my deceased father long since he has passed away. I’ve seen elderly people cry for their deceased children who died 40 years prior.
Back to the original premise, then. Is true love real? “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space” says Anne Hathaway in this scene in the movie Interstellar. I can, and I have, flipped this coin of a question and it always comes up heads. It is the only thing that does. Love is the only real thing that is permanent. It knows no bounds of physics or biology or evolution. So know that true love does exist. In fact, it is the one thing I know of that exists forever.
-Mike Spivey 1/08/2022
We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.