In my sophomore year at Brown, I wrote a 20-page proposal for an independent concentration that I never submitted. It was called “The Principles of Love,” and my goal was to determine — once and for all — what love actually is.
In those days, I believed in absolutes. I obsessed over patterns, I relished in consistency and I believed, subconsciously at least, that human beings were governed by discernable laws. I thought that growing old was about learning these laws, and then living in accordance with them.
I used to think love functioned in the same way — that there was some objective definition, some binary, that distinguished what love was and what it wasn’t. And, in the wake of a devastating heartbreak and an even more devastating obsession with someone new, I didn’t just want to understand love. I had to.
I’ve written about love before. More accurately, I’ve explored the topic in poetry, song lyrics and self-serving hate letters. I desperately sought answers to my abundant questions.
While I never pursued the independent concentration (my excuse: Brown doesn’t have enough classes on love), I found an alternative. I declared sociology, and I am now writing my thesis on romantic love.
Over the last two years, I’ve immersed myself in the research, reading everything academia has to offer on love. And after enthralling myself in the field, conducting a study, analyzing the results and thinking about love more than most sane people ever should — I’ve come to only one conclusion: Love is undefinable. In other words, in spending all this time trying to define love, I found that in reality, love defines us.
If you’re single this Valentine’s Day, I hope that brings you some peace. If you’re not, humor me anyway.
Love is inherently intangible. It’s ultimately unknowable. It’s a concept more than a reality and a construct that we collectively uphold despite no one being able to agree on a definition.
Your boyfriend might say he loves you, but do you really know what that means? Is it lust, attachment, possessiveness or a mixture of the three brewing inside him? Or he might refuse to say he loves you, which may have nothing to do with whether he does or does not, and everything to do with what he thinks love means.
We are obsessed with these distinctions — who we love and who we don’t — all because “I love you” feels like the most powerful phrase in existence. We want love to quiet the chaos inside us, to prove our own worth and to heal, or at least temporarily obscure everything that’s broken internally.
When we say “I love you,” we say it as if we’ve crossed some defined threshold, a clear line in the sand. But there is no line. There is no threshold.
Whatever your definition of love is, I know this much: It’s made up. These definitions vary across space and time, across individuals and cultures. The thought “I’m in love” is exactly that — a thought. There is no objective basis, no foundation in reality. There are no absolutes.
Since coming to this conclusion, I’ve pondered at length why we find so much comfort in our constructed definitions of love. I study love because I want it, desperately. I have no desire to understand love but every desire in the world to have love, and I’m only realizing now, to my frustration, that those are very, very different things. I’m lonely, as most people my age are.
Yet in studying love, I’ve forgotten how to love. So here’s my advice, to you and to myself: Stop obsessing over what love is. Start actually experimenting with it.
Start small, and be patient — opening your heart takes time. Hold eye contact for a second longer. Smile at a stranger. Hug someone. Start loving the things that feel easy to love: pets, your bed, a favorite movie. Let it grow from there. When the flutter in your chest appears, don’t analyze it — just let it happen. If nothing else, stop chasing it.
And though love is unknowable, paradoxically, love is right in front of you. More accurately, love is within you, and you are the only one who can access it.
Love is conditional, but you are the only condition. Love doesn’t need to be found, nor does it need to be chased. It just needs to be activated.
Mason Scurry ’25 can be reached at mason_scurry@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
