What is Love?

Society often constructs certain rules and markers in order to maintain some form of order in that specific society. If we travel back in time, to man without the complications of society, and still early on in the stages of language, we also see the lack of present-day emotions. The cavemen, the first of our kind, developed clans or groups to which they would protect each other, but marriage, and monogamy was never an issue. Does this, therefore, support that language, helped mold the emotions of which we feel? At that point in time, the only purpose of life was survival of the fittest, and humans were still rather instinctual in nature. There was no one man, one woman deal, that society has recently constructed and dubbed ‘marriage’. But, we still feel this emotion that we now know to be love. The question is now, what is love? Is it desire, lust, both? Is it shared, or is it individual? Nobody knows, and with recent misuse of the word, love has becomes even more ambiguous than before. The word love is a convergence of multiple words, all that mean ‘desire.’ But where did this idea of ‘love’ come from then? Love, although most usually associated with couples, is also prevalent in families. Once again, when a mother gives birth to child, does she truly love that child? Or is she just trying to say that I desire your survival so that my genes can be passed on? Or is it just that the baby is so aesthetically pleasing that she thinks that he/she is beautiful? How, then, do we see so many instances in which men and women are able to tolerate each other for life? Is there love, does love truly exist?

In chemical terms, love, the emotion, does exist. The Economist recently published an article discussing the prevalence of other sociable animals which mate and stay together for life. One such creature being the prairie vole. Albeit, it takes them approximately 24 hours to ‘plant their seed’, the partners remain so until either die. Recent findings show that the prairie voles are similar to humans in the sense that they share the ability to make vasopressin and oxytocin, two chemicals, of which play an important role in social recognition. Without these two chemicals, we cannot recognize the mate in which we underwent sexual reproduction, and therefore will find different ones. So, now, this suggests that prairie voles, like ourselves, only love because of recognition, comfort and understanding. Is this what love is then, two chemicals that allows for us to recognize people? If this is so, it also serves to exemplify that cavemen would have most likely felt an earlier rendition of this emotion, the true emotion itself. This therefore serves to prove that modern-day love is a social construct, a product of language, which we also see in the prospect of arranged marriage. Apparently, love grows with marriage. Therefore exemplifying that mutual recognition plays a fundamental role in the prospect of ‘love’, and further illustrating the role of language in the evolution of this emotion. Then there’s the case of many people, all of whom are in ‘love’ engagements, meaning they found their own partners. This just means that they have achieved mutual recognition earlier then expected. So, if this is what love is, than what is grief? Grief, the word, means deep mental anguish, compliments of dictionary.com. For the purposes of this presentation, grief will only be discussed in relation to loss of love, but in reality, grief is caused by several different occurrences, and events. Grief, like love, is a social construct that one MUST feel, after loss of something that one loves. So, in the case of Mersault, the lack of crying, or the social construct that we consider grief, during his mother’s weeding, renders him variable of society, and leads to his ultimate downfall.


Although emotions are actual chemicals, society exaggerates them to fit it to their own prospectus, such as that of love in marriage, and grief in funerals. Although this is true, interestingly, most religions preach to detach oneself from the world, therefore mourning prevents forgetting the loss, and moving on. Therefore, does society play a role in preventing enlightenment? Never mind, that’s a different topic, for a different day. Language itself plays a fundamental role in the evolution of emotion. In the beginning, love was just a sense of mutual recognition, and today, its definitions and connotations extend beyond the reaches of our minds, and language, once again, prevents us from looking at the world with clean eyes.