Well, clearly there is various levels of love.
Oxytocin is the feeling of love that your brain is engineered to create in order to maximize evolutionary fitness. That's what being in love means and why it's so ephemeral. It's designed to last just long enough to make one baby every five years.
That is love, the feeling.
To love, the verb, can reflect that - but in our society, especially in the Christian sense, it reflects a far more powerful imperative that we all behave altruistically towards each other. Love thy neighbor and so forth. The economically logical answer to the canonical prisoner's dilemma is to take the Faustian bargain rather than cooperate. Only a high level of trust can overcome that incentive, and a culture that endorses altruism/love of strangers can generate more socially optimal outcomes. A society that fosters cooperation outside of the clan will have a powerful competitive advantage over societies that don't. The Anglo-Saxon world vs. Southern Italy and the Middle East being famous examples.
Oxytocin is the feeling of love that your brain is engineered to create in order to maximize evolutionary fitness. That's what being in love means and why it's so ephemeral. It's designed to last just long enough to make one baby every five years.
That is love, the feeling.
To love, the verb, can reflect that - but in our society, especially in the Christian sense, it reflects a far more powerful imperative that we all behave altruistically towards each other. Love thy neighbor and so forth. The economically logical answer to the canonical prisoner's dilemma is to take the Faustian bargain rather than cooperate. Only a high level of trust can overcome that incentive, and a culture that endorses altruism/love of strangers can generate more socially optimal outcomes. A society that fosters cooperation outside of the clan will have a powerful competitive advantage over societies that don't. The Anglo-Saxon world vs. Southern Italy and the Middle East being famous examples.
A year from now you'll wish you started today