No Feeling Is More Important Than Love
No feeling is more important than love. It illuminates everything. With the love you express, you validate others and they validate you. You form alliances with these people and help and care for them. In fact, everything that surrounds you can be conjugated with the verb to love, even though you don’t always realize it.
To understand better, imagine you’re leaving home to go to work. Before doing so, you’ll most likely say goodbye to someone: your partner, your children, your parents, or even your pet. Love is in all of these behaviors. Then, you go down the street and you see a poster, the kind whose marketing strategy arouses feelings of love within you. Perhaps it’s an image of someone giving their loved one a bottle of perfume.
Then, you go on to work. To a job that you love. In fact, dedicating yourself to something in this way comforts you and gives meaning to your existence. Sometime later, you receive a message from your best friend, your companion through all the good and the bad times. They’re writing to ask you how everything is going.
Love underpins all these situations. It’s a feeling that enriches you more than any other and brings out the best in you. Although it’s often said that the brain is a purely social organ, one thing is clear: the brain speaks the language of emotions and its main language is none other than love.
No feeling is more important than love
Saying that there’s no feeling more important than love may sound a bit over the top. It also tends to imply that we’re talking about the romantic kind of love. However, to assume that love has only one side couldn’t be further from the truth.
Friendship, family, passions, self-love, admiration… All of these are covered by the all-encompassing feeling of love. It has a tremendous impact on your thoughts, emotions, and behavior. In fact, loving is a subjective experience.
When you become aware that love can give a greater meaning to your life, you realize that it’s something you should put into practice.
Love is an art and must be understood and practiced
It was Erich Fromm who, in 1956, explained in his book The Art of Loving, that love should be seen as an art form. Perceiving it in this way, people have two obligations. The first is to understand the theory, to recognize its essence, meaning and purpose.
Secondly, and no less important, you have to know how to love. For this, you need practice, good work, and goodwill. Once again, we’re not just talking about romantic love here.
There’s no feeling more important than love. That’s because it permeates and transcends everything. In fact, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset said, it means complete fulfilment.
The word love expresses multiple feelings
Love is generally associated with affection for someone. It also describes tastes and passions. For instance, you love music, you love reading, you love walking in the summer rain. These feelings are all rooted in love and show the richness of this multi-faceted sentiment.
Interestingly, different languages give some of the most wonderful examples of the myriad meanings of love. Here are some examples.
- Forelsket. A Nordic term that describes the euphoria you feel when you first fall in love.
- Retrouvailles. A French word that expresses the happiness you feel when seeing someone you love again, be it a friend, family member, or partner.
- Radljost. Icelandic term that describes your ability to find light in the darkness when, at last, you love yourself enough to trust your own abilities.
Love is action
The verb to love isn’t conjugated in the passive voice. It’s not made to be meditated on alone or in the loneliness of your thoughts. As a matter of fact, there’s no feeling more important than love because it only acquires meaning through action. It’ll invite you to take up those activities that inspire you. They might be a job, a goal, or a hobby.
Affection is shown by action. In order for the love for your partner, family, and friends to have genuine meaning, you need to exhibit behaviors that demonstrate it in a sincere manner.
Self-esteem requires courageous behavior that allows you to behave according to your values, principles, and desires, giving yourself what you need and deserve.
It makes you a better person
In an interesting book, entitled The New Psychology of Love, edited by Robert and Karin Sternberg, in Chapter Two, Aron and Tomlinson describe love as a highly significant mechanism through which you define your identity. Not only that: it invites you to be a better person.
After all, love facilitates connection, interest in another, and the desire to generate good. When you love, you commit yourself to something or someone. This offers you a wonderful incentive for your existence.
Finally, you should always try and understand your own reality through the filter of love. Activating it costs nothing and the change it’ll make in you will be extremely enriching.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Campbell Kelly (2020) The New Psychology of Love. Journal of family.06 March 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12356