Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics 02.4: What's Love?

I heard a fascinating TED Talk podcast a while back, describing how thoughts of love actually manifest in the human brain. It turns out there are three completely separate systems that have almost nothing to do with each other.

• Sexual desire. This part of your brain makes you want to have babies.
• Romance. This part of your brain picks one person and makes you emphasize their positive qualities while overlooking their flaws. (In other words, this part of your brain lies to the rest of your brain.) It wants you to pick one person to have babies with.
• Attachment. This part of your brain makes you stay with the people you're most familiar with. It wants you to stick around and raise the babies.
  

Most people are going to feel all three of these at different points in their lives, for different people, in varying intensities on different days. This is perfectly normal.

But where does love enter into that picture?

American culture (and presumably many others) have this story we tell ourselves, about being in love. People who are in love have some certain high level of feelings for each other. It's difficult to quantify, so we need songs and poets and movies and about half of extant media to talk about it. It's clearly very important to us.

But it's difficult to quantify specifically because there's no in love button in your brain. Being in love, as we often use the term, is not an objective phenomenon. It's a story our culture tells, and sometimes it's a story we choose to tell about ourselves. This does not make being in love fake, or wrong, or unreal. Sometimes real things only exist subjectively, and that's okay! But it does mean that we can't use being "in love" as a standard of behavior, because it's different for every person, every couple.

Remember, when we're talking about love in this virtue context, we're not talking about anything romantic or sexual. We're talking about the willingness to put someone else's needs before your own. As we'll discus soon, that kind of love isn't something you grow into, or a finish line beyond which some levels of intimacy are hidden. This love is fundamentally necessary for any virtuous, functioning relationship.