What Is Love?

Key takeaways:

The feeling of love is not a feeling, but an action.

The main way to create love is to give what you want to get.

When one person in a relationship starts to give less, the other person will take the ladder down until they are giving what they want to get.

Transcript:

Speaker 2

Definitely had to kind of come to terms with that thing, which is that I associate the feeling of love with the feeling of yearning and try to redefine that. The woman in Israel that I met who I found really fascinating, who I write about is this Hasidic woman. Her job was working as a sex and marriage therapist in Jerusalem. And one of the things that she was talking about when I asked her about getting married is that Hasidic Jews think of love as not a feeling, but an action. It's a verb, something that you do. And as you love someone, which is taking care of them and doing for them, that is what creates love. And that if you think of love as a feeling, feelings are ephemeral, they come and go. And so what happens when that feeling goes. And I found that in my own life where I find myself in some relationship where it's become clear that we're on a competition to do less than the other, like some something is off and somebody Feels like somebody is not giving enough. And so they start giving less. And then that other person is like, wow, I'm not getting as much as I'm going to give less. And then you just, you take this little ladder down until nobody is giving anything. And I remember one time in one of those relationships going, what if I just give what I want to get? And then I did. And it was like seconds before everything was transformed and I got back what I needed to give.

Not Lost • Not Lost Chat — How Do You Say “Love”?