Is Love An Action or a Feeling?

We can’t choose who we love any more than we can choose who we are sexually attracted to

A few years ago I got into a discussion with a friend about the nature of love. He believed that love was primarily a set of things that you do to be of service to someone else. While I can certainly understand behaving in a loving way to be one expression of love, I think that’s a really limiting construct with a lot of holes in it. You can behave kindly or in a way that is of service to someone you despise. You can also love someone who you never see or have no current relationship with — and therefore no opportunity to demonstrate your love through actions.

To try to demystify love and codify it into a series of behaviors is to discount emotions and to rob them of the richness and the power that they have. It’s often said that love is the most powerful force in the Universe — the actions that demonstrate love, but even more importantly, simply the emotion and energy itself. By some people’s estimation, this is what God actually is — the all-encompassing power of the feeling and not just what is made possible when we act upon it. This is not only a part of the Christian tradition but a part of contemporary spiritual thought as well.

I don’t think commitment or behavior has anything at all to do with love. Sure it’s important to not just say how you feel but to also find concrete ways to demonstrate that, but if you were laid up in the hospital in a coma for a month and didn’t do any of that, would it erase the feelings you have for those you love? Would it mean that you didn’t actually love them that month? Of course not! And nobody thinks that, so why would they believe that not being in a coma would be any different?

Love is an emotion, an energy, one that can be experienced regardless of concrete actions or acts of service. It just is. I can still remember when my polyamorous partner Nat and I were first beginning to understand the depth of our feelings for each other. It wasn’t something that we had planned on or expected and so we were all kind of getting used to it. My other partner James, the one I stood up in a church and pledged to spend my life with, the one I have a child and an everyday life with, was a little bit hurt and confused at first.

“But how can you love him as much as me? You’ve only known him for a few months and I’ve spent years trying to be good to you and make you happy.”

“Because that isn’t how love works,” I told him. “I don’t love you because you’ve earned it, although I certainly appreciate all the things you do to demonstrate how you feel. But love is bigger and more mysterious than that. I love you for who you Be, not just what you do.”

Eventually, James fell in love with someone else as well and began to truly understand how it had nothing to do with our relationship or his feelings for me. Love isn’t a pie, where when you give a slice to one person it leaves less for someone else. At this juncture, James is very comfortable with me loving Nat and with me referring to him as my other life partner. He feels and understands the potential expansiveness of love and doesn’t feel cheated out of anything. That was just old patriarchal programming in play, which is what I think this “love is an action” idea is as well. It’s constructed as a type of interpersonal contract rather than a simple experience of emotion, something which is viewed as feminine and therefore weak and undesirable.

When set free to find its own path, love can manifest in all sorts of ways. I still love my mother, even though she has passed from this world a few months ago. I still love my friend Bethany even though she broke my trust in such a way that I no longer want her in my life. Every now and then I do something really nice for a stranger, who I don’t even know, much less love. Love is not an action word; it’s a state-of-being word. Sure, you can and probably should demonstrate love through actions, but that’s just a way of showing how you feel. The actions without the love energy would not amount to the same thing.

We’ve all done unloving things to people who are very dear to us. Does that mean that we don’t really love them? Of course not, because love is an emotion, not a set of quantifiable metrics that can be assessed and measured. There are parents who have abandoned their children because they thought it was what would be best for them, and they did that out of love. Even hurtful and destructive actions can be done from a place of deep feeling.

I’ve even heard some people say that love is a choice, which is really one of the silliest things I think I’ve ever heard. At first, I really didn’t want to love Nat and he didn’t want to love me. It initially put a big strain on all of our lives to love each other until we finally figured out how to make it work. But the fact of the matter was, I couldn’t help but love him. I had absolutely no choice in the matter, and even when I broke it off with him for a while, because it was such an intense connection that was so overwhelming for all of us, we still couldn’t stop loving each other. Ultimately this was good because it helped us find our way back and encouraged us to figure out how to repair our relationship and stay together.

But I had no choice at all about loving Nat any more than I have a choice about loving James or my son or anyone else I love. If we could just turn love off, many people would do that when a loved one died or some other big test of how hard love can be showed up. Just as we can’t choose who we’re sexually attracted to (or not sexually attracted to), we can’t choose who we love — which is incidentally, the plot of many books and movies, because it can be quite inconvenient.

One can certainly debate the vibrancy or health of a love that rarely demonstrates itself, or that treats the subject of affection badly on an ongoing basis, but that’s not exactly the same thing as love primarily being an action and not a feeling. Love is an emotion and an energy — one that is big and expansive enough to never be depleted no matter how much of it is given. It fills our souls and enriches our lives; it is the essence of the Divine. If you don’t understand that, I feel a bit sorry because you are missing out on so much.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2021 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.

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