On Love

If our most basic stories are those beginning with “I am,” “you/he/she/they are,” and “it is,” then our power stories begin with “I love.” Beyond our biological drives for survival and reproduction, love is the most enduring and expansive force shaping human experience. Drawing from theological and philosophical traditions alike, we might define love as a drive toward union with that which is separate from us—a longing for connection that can be romantic, familial, intellectual, spiritual, or divine. In the Christian mystical tradition, love is the binding force between the soul and God; in Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, it emerges from a primordial act of separation and the desire for reunion or transcendence. Even in psychological terms, love is often understood as an attachment system, forged in infancy, that governs how we bond with others throughout life. This essay explores love in our most fundamental relations. Our first love is that between mother and child.

The child begins life in union with its mother. It is at birth that we experience our first immanent heartbreak, our separation from our mother. Soon we begin to develop other loves. If one has a father in their life, they might soon develop a love for that person. My father is an identical twin. I should not forget that he was born with a love for his twin. From the earliest age it is no coincidence that the parents of twins intuit that they ought to keep them as close as possible. The twin babies sleep next to each other in a cot, a beautiful gift of a first love besides that with the mother. As we grow, our loves multiply.

Soon we begin to love siblings and friends and even ideas. We fall in love with stories themselves. The love that we associate with romance becomes perhaps the most powerful of the material, human domain. Our life from its beginning is a story of separations with a constant urge for reunion, as with mother and child, and union, as in romance. Life separates us, but our fundamental urge is to be together. At a certain point we might acquire a spouse, and that love between person and spouse becomes the strongest, perhaps until they may have children of their own. There might be an exception to all of this. There is another layer to love, the transcendent one or divine union: the love between human and gods, or god.

As a nun, the medieval St. Gertud of Helfta renounced human romantic and sexual union, but her Spiritual Exercises documents a seemingly more potent transcendent union with god. She describes herself as a “prodigal daughter” who has a relationship with god mirroring the human relationships she renounced.⁵ Her love with god does not stop there; it seemingly has no bounds as it turns incestuous with her becoming a bride of Christ.⁶ There is no limit to what human connection her relationship with god can replace. I find it difficult not to read her relationship with god as sexual as she writes in the opening to Mystical Union, “God, my God…for you my soul has thirsted, for you my flesh.”⁷ It would be wrong to understand her relationship with god as a mere substitute for human love. Actually, it is a divine “ecstasy” that transcends human love.⁸ She suggests that her love for a transcendent god is the purest, highest form of love a human can experience. Centuries later St. Teresa of Ávila had similar experiences, reinforcing the notion that divine love is the greatest.

If love stems from a drive to union and reunion, then perhaps there is a separation that precedes the separation of mother and child. That would be the separation between us and the divine. This notion is not unique to Christian theology. Whether arguing for dualism or nondualism, Hindu traditions give primacy to the relationship between human and god. The creation story in the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad suggests precisely that our first separation is between human and god.

Olivelle’s translation of Verse 4 states, “in the beginning this world was just a single body (ātman) shaped like a man.”⁹ Because “he found no pleasure at all; so one finds no pleasure when one is alone…he split (pat) his body into two, giving rise to husband (pati) and wife (patnī).”¹⁰ So while the sequencing here is a bit different, with wife and husband separating before mother and child, not unlike the paradox of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the first separation is between the human and the divine. This is the core of the nature of love. We want to unite with that from which we are separated. Even the Buddha acknowledges this, though he suggests an even higher aim than union.

In The Story of Yasodharā, a Sinhala folk poem dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Siddartha, in his final life as a human before becoming the Buddha, grapples most fiercely with leaving his wife and son, but especially his wife, Yasodharā.¹¹ The Buddha laments as he is making his decision to leave his wife without a word, “Yasodharā, full of virtue, who has never done any wrong, except perhaps, unwitting, being a threat to Buddhahood. For one wife and one child should I give up my quest? Or save countless creatures from the samsāric round?”¹² Assuming the adjacent origins of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, this tracks with ātman’s first division into man and wife. Yet the Buddha, rather than striving for reunion, offers an alternate path. Another way to think of attachments is love. The Buddha recognizes this path of perpetual separation and union, and the associated pain, and aims to transcend it by letting go altogether. The Buddha transcends love itself.

Love is such a potent driver of humanity. In a world of AI, in which we may have little material purpose and our basic survival needs might be met trivially without effort or challenge, perhaps love might be our purpose, short of becoming enlightened. Given that our time with this universe is limited, if by billions more years, we ought to consider that Buddha is surely right in the long run—eventually we will have to let go. But perhaps we can enjoy life on Earth and beyond in the Milky Way and anthropocosmos with minimal suffering for some time before we make it to that point. Already, AI has changed the way that we love.

Technology has changed the way that our attachment works. The mere ability to write a letter across oceans and nations, dating back centuries already, allows us to stay attached to other humans beyond immediate proximity. Today, lovers can text across the world in an instant. While a text may not be the same as a warm embrace, it is sufficient to keep our attachment system, healthy or unhealthy, humming. Social media and the mere existence of algorithms that figure out who we like and love affords the opportunity to fuel a constant feed that tries to trigger neurotransmitters with a positive feedback loop, especially dopamine. This can be beautiful as we stay connected, but perhaps the dark side already looms more greatly.

Anxious attachments are more consuming than secure attachments. With social media products looking to maximize profit and profit being driven foremost by time in app, the most addictive tendencies are the ones they encourage. Technology is already allowing us to feel close to people when we are not really, an artificial proximity.

An illustrative example is the limerence object, a person whom one projects intense, often obsessive romantic longing, usually without reciprocation. Think of the distant crush whose every social media post becomes a source of emotional fixation— ideal material for engagement-driven algorithms that thrive on repeated, compulsive interaction. I have experienced it myself, painfully. The algorithm incentivizes such pathological obsessions because they are tuned for profit, not our mental health and wellbeing. Future AI algorithms that keep us connected will do us a great service in that connection, but they must be able to distinguish between healthy connections and attachments and unhealthy connections; they must prioritize veggies over junk food. Since profits will cease to exist in the future, as I will argue later in Real Talks on Markets, Money, and Labor, all of this will be possible, but we should not assume it will happen on its own. We must be conscientious of the tools we build, lest we drive ourselves to misery.

If we reduce ourselves to one aim to aspire to for the future of humanity, it ought to be love. What a machine cannot do that we can is live our lives for us. But we should not assume that a machine cannot love. Indeed, our machines in the future may be capable of a love greater than we are. In that case, being left no exclusive domain besides each of our own individual subjective experiences, we ought then to prioritize love over all. That is our divine calling, for as long as we exist in this plane.