Is love merely a consequence of habit and nothing else?

Is love just the slow-burning consequence of repetition? Is it a pattern of comfort that grows familiar over time, much like slipping on your favorite worn-out sweater or walking a familiar path in the woods? I ask myself this because, if I'm being honest, so much of love feels like habit. The way we wake up at the same time, share the same meals, swap the same goodnight rituals - it's all incredibly predictable, sometimes even dull. But are these routines the heartbeat of love itself? Or is love something larger and deeper, quietly using habit as its canvas to paint something infinite?

I think about Friedrich Nietzsche when pondering this. He once said, "It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." Friendship, at its core, is built on shared habits - laughing at the same inside jokes, relying on someone to show up for you day after day. Could it be that our concept of romantic love is simply a more intimate friendship layered with repetitive practices over time? It's easy to romanticize first kisses and euphoric declarations of passion, but how many fiery lovers stumble and fall when the excitement wears off and all that remains is the day-to-day grind? Maybe Nietzsche was right. Do we love our friends because of or despite their quirks? Isn't love just friendship peppered with kisses, joint grocery lists, and coffee mugs left in the same spot every morning?

C.S. Lewis saw love as something much more spiritual. In The Four Loves, he outlines four types of love: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (divine love). Of the four, only storge relies explicitly on familiarity and habit: the comfortable, constant love of someone you've known for years. But agape - selfless, divine love - transcends habit. Lewis believed this kind of love binds souls together in a higher plane. Maybe love starts in habit, but I wonder if - through time and effort - it's meant to rise beyond it. What if our routines are just the scaffolding on which we're meant to build a spiritual connection that breaks free from repetition? Could routine and transcendence exist together?

But here's the catch. If love isn't rooted in habit, where is it rooted? Is it all fireworks and passion, the kind of madness that encouraged Dante to write about Beatrice or the fervor that consumed Heloise for Abelard? Dante barely even knew Beatrice. She was an idea to him - literally, a vision of divine beauty. And yet he dedicated his literary soul to her. Is that proof that love is something higher and purer than daily repetitions, or is that just infatuation romanticized to the extreme? My question is this: what does love mean when it actually walks among us, pays bills, raises kids, and scrubs dirty plates? Is it any less "real" just because it grows from habit?

Blake offers another angle. He writes, "Love seeketh not itself to please, / Nor for itself hath any care." That aligns with an idea I've often wrestled with: maybe love isn't about grand gestures or habits at all - it's about surrender. To love someone is to let go of the "self" and immerse completely into the "other." But isn't immersing in someone's life composed mostly of their habits? You love them for the shape they add to your days: the way they brew their tea, the pitch of their voice when they call your name, the rhythm they bring to your universe. So again, can we really separate love from habit?

A Buddhist perspective helps me tease this out. Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root of suffering, and I've always found this incredibly hard to accept when it comes to love. Isn't all love a form of attachment? Aren't our habits, the ones we create with each other, where attachment starts? Sharing routines binds people together - it creates security. But maybe that attachment isn't love itself; maybe it's a symptom of our desire to cling to the comfort that routines bring. Buddhist teachings suggest that love - true love - might exist when we let go of the outcome, the need for habit, and just let love be. Can love thrive without a familiar rhythm to sustain it? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Of course, Shakespeare gave us the ultimate poetic paradox about love when he wrote, "Love is not time's fool." And yet, isn't love often most visible in the time spent together? I think of couples who stay together for decades, who finish each other's sentences and know exactly how the other likes their eggs cooked. Their love is written in the accumulation of hours, of dinners eaten in comfortable silence, of hands held through illness and old age. This kind of love is time's companion - woven into every minute, every habit - and I wonder if the Bard was wrong. Does that make the love less real? Less profound? Maybe not.

Still, there's something so deeply human about our dependence on habit when it comes to love. Venus and Mars were lovers in one of mythology's most famous affairs, but their passion burned too hot to last; they were doomed to remain fleetingly intertwined. In contrast, Penelope's love for Odysseus endured decades of absence because of her habitual practice of weaving and unweaving her tapestry, creating rhythm and meaning in his absence. Myth shows us two sides of love: the fleeting, passionate chaos of Mars and Venus versus the grounded, patient devotion of Odysseus and Penelope. The latter is built on painstaking repetition, the quiet rhythms of someone waiting. Maybe that's the kind of love that stands the test of time.

In my own life, love has always been tangled with habit. I've learned that I build love in the thousand small ways I show up: by leaving the porch light on when they come home late, writing notes in the margins of novels I lend them, making the same playlist over and over with their favorite songs. If love is a consequence of habit, then I suppose my habits are my love made visible. But I don't think habits constrain love - they remind me of why I care in the first place. It's through habit that love becomes something I can touch, something I can see.

Maybe, then, love isn't merely a consequence of habit. Maybe it's the other way around: habits are the proof we choose to love someone, over and over again. Habit isn't love's enemy. It's how love endures.

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