What Is Love?

German songwriters Lünstedt and Eisenblätter set the bar for answering the question what is love exceedingly low when they pitched their answer to the world,

“Baby don’t hurt me.”

As one of the biggest-selling dance tracks of all time, the song resonated with millions of us, totalling over ten million copies sold worldwide. Today, it continues to be streamed on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, where plays far exceed a billion between these two platforms alone.

Why does this song resonate so widely with us? Is it because it reflects what so many of us have come to believe love is? Reflecting a bar that is set painfully, disgracefully low.

A bar that, rather than being about love, is actually representing just how much violence and neglect we have all collectively suffered.

So much so, that we are all just left weakly accepting love (the most incredible, vibrant and healing force in the known universe) to mean as little as

“don’t hurt me”

Is this what love is? Is not being hurt by someone enough to define love? If so, then by default, anyone who hasn’t hurt you - must love you.

I think we can all agree that this definition is nonsensical and far from truth.

Is Haddaway singing about love, or is he depicting unhealthy attachment and obsession as he moves into the verses?

In today’s society, we commonly confuse these for love. Television and movies certainly portray love as such. There are very, very few films or songs that depict love in it’s truth.

Longing, desperation, and sadness are the hallmarks of the ‘love’ songs and movies that have shaped many of our perceptions over the years.

American songwriters Petralia and Knight proposed something far stronger through Pat Benetar’s massive hit record that Love is a Battlefield.

Similarly, fellow American, Bryant, told us that Love Hurts. This song became a massive hit for multiple artists over the decades, including Cher, the Everly Brothers, Nazareth, and Emmylou Harris.

Even Shakespeare, one of the most influential writers in history, told us that to love is to suffer. He suggested that to avoid suffering is to avoid love.

I can point to a thousand more examples of how skewed our perception of love is, and has been, for as long as written records date to.

I recall being at the Taj Mahal and my tour guide informing of how the building was the greatest monument to love ever built.

He was speechless when I challenged this commonly repeated lie.

He had literally just shown me the red building beside the Taj Mahal; the harem - [where the Emperor’s many wives and concubines - essentially high class prostitute-slaves - lived] and in the next breath tried to tell me about this Emperor’s ‘love’ for his wife?!?!?!

LOVE?!?!

My heart remains dismayed at the lie of this. The use of the word love when there was so clearly no love in the man is outrageous. Men who love their wives don’t have other wives or sexual partners. They don’t lock up beautiful women in cages to be f*cked by them upon whim.

I digress slightly….but I felt it’s a point strongly worth making. The insanity of the world we live in and the way the word love is so commonly misused genuinely pains me.

So I pitch you this….. what if they are all wrong? All of these writers and poets and so called great men? What if love isn’t sacrifice or pain at all?

Actually, can I be more honest?

All of these writers and poets and so called great men ARE wrong.

Love itself—true love in its purest form—cannot be painful. Trauma and wounding are painful, but these are never caused by love.

Love is a force of healing and compassion. It is nurturing, supportive, and forgiving. It cannot be anything other than positive.

In all my years of working in healthcare, both mental and physical health, I never once came across a person who was so loved that they fell into disease or decay.

It is always the unloved who suffer. Unloved people become ill. Unloved people die.

Love—true love—whether in its emotional, practical, or spiritual forms, is the antidote to pain. It is not the cause of it.

Love is a vibrant energy we can hold within and choose to direct to and share with others. When we live in ways that nourish this energy, it becomes limitless.

When we live in ways that are not conducive to sustaining that energy, it becomes a finite resource.

We then begin to condition and ration our love (our compassion, kindness, empathy) - only giving it out where it is perceived by us to be ‘deserved’. We restrict and set conditions for our energy (love).

Most of us are part of that latter group. We are a collective society of highly narcissistic people who flow love to certain animals or people, but don’t extend it to others.

For some people they do this through racism or sexism… for others they can love a dog but sit with a cow carcass on their plate and think themselves loving…. I guarantee you won’t have to think too hard to find where the limits of your ‘love’ are.

What if love is actually like solar power —effortlessly abundant and ready to flow to us continuously when we stop corrupting it with our poor choices and negative behaviours?

The problem is that we have been deeply conditioned by our ancestors. Ancestors who have been burning coal and gas and oil for generations… doing things a certain way…. judging, hating, not forgiving, restricting love, living with skewed morality and fear….. and we couldn’t possibly admit they were ignorant or WRONG, could we?

Or could we….?!

Consider this: what if the harmful actions (which the Bible labels as sin) of lying, cheating, stealing, greed, gluttony etc —were the true causes of our depletion? What if, by removing these actions from our lives, we would be gifted with boundless energy (and therefore love), not just for ourselves, but for others?

True love is a limitless resource, for energy is a limitless…. yet many of us grasp onto it as if it’s something finite. We restrict it, thinking it must be rationed out to only those who “deserve” it.

But love isn’t a resource we have to hoard—it’s a state of being. When we allow ourselves to live in alignment with it, we find ourselves overflowing with energy to share.

Imagine for a moment that all this time, you’ve been treading water—trying to survive in deep waters, constantly swimming against the current. You do it because your parents did it. And their parents did it. And you are even proud of how good you are at it.

But one day, someone tells you that you don’t have to struggle anymore. You don’t need to become an expert at swimming or suffering. All you need to do is be still, roll over and trust and you can actually float on your back.

How many would refuse to try?

How many would be so attached to their pride about how well they learned to swim, wearing their suffering like an accolade of honour… and angrily refuse to believe that they could have been floating all along, had they known how?

Ever since Jesus began sharing the knowledge of how easy it is to allow the magic of love to flow into and through us, people have violently refuted the knowledge. For thousands of years people have instead chosen to suffer.

Even many of those who proclaim to believe in his teachings don’t actually embody them.

We are born ignorant and indoctrinated into systems which greatly harm us.

But in the light of knowledge, the darkness of ignorance can fade. The darkness of suffering can be eliminated.

If only we can choose love over ego.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle - the ONLY obstacle - is in fact our ego.

The process of choosing love over ego is excruciatingly painful, yes, but the pain is not love. The pain is the death of the false self.

That process is painful.

But the process is not love.

We commit to the path of the mountain we seek to climb, and on that path we will endure and suffer… but the path and the suffering we encounter on the path is not the mountain.

This is like love.

Love is abundant on the mountain peak. But many of us are starting out so far away that we can’t even see the mountain, let alone the top of the mountain.

And that right there is where faith comes in. Faith in the testimonies of those who came before you. Faith that love not only exists, but can be found at the top of the mountain that you can’t even see, and that no one around you has ever seen.

The more still you become, and the quieter you practice your mind to be, the more the faith becomes knowing. For planted deep within every single one of us is a knowing of true love.

That knowing is our homing beacon…. Our guide that will take us to the mountain top if we allow its soft voice to take command. If we allow that whisper to guide our our morality and actions, it will take us directly to that mountain.

But there will be obstacles. Many, many obstacles. The further away from the mountain you start out? The more arduous the journey will be. You will encounter far more demons you will encounter attempting to turn you around, to lead you back into low vibrational emotions like anger and envy, and fear.

Which is why many don’t start walking. Born to depletion and low vibration, surrounded by fear and echoes of trauma severely deplete a person. Some people will be born to places where they will have to drag their bodies inch by inch along that path to the mountain top if- should they choose to go there.

For many, the effort is too great and the faith or understanding of the reward is too little. This is why most people stay where they began and never journey forward. They become the demons on the path who will try to keep everyone around them in exactly the same place too.

Perhaps the question we really ought to be asking is not so much What is Love (sorry Haddaway), but rather -

Where Is Love?

We don’t need to be trying to imagine or debate what we will experience at the top of the mountain, we just need to keep stepping towards the mountain and refusing to be derailed on our journey to it.

And to me? That is anything which will, in the longterm, lower my vibration. I can’t get up that mountain without energy.

I can’t get up that mountain if I am distracted by others who aren’t heading that way. Others who just want to accept their suffering and party beside the burn out, dilapidated trailer they were born to.

A place where love does not and can never exist.

❤️

It’s been a long time since I had the energy to write an article like this… mostly because I feel like no one is there to read them! So if you got this far, please feel my sincere grattitide and appreciation for being here.