There are many different types of love, romantic love, parental love, sibling love, it is the glue that holds us all together and makes life worth living. Love is also about being loved so receiving love and giving it back. Love is deemed by everyone to be one of the most important things in life and so happiness is hugely linked to being both loved and the lover.
But what are the actual reasons why love is so powerful and important to human life, we take a look at some of the most fundamental.
1. The Love Drug
Love is powerful, as strong as medication in its effect on the human brain. Scientists have monitored the effect of love on the brain patterns of smitten individuals using imagery of their loved ones. The results showed that the part of the brain that responds is the same area as that which reacts to powerful drug addiction. “…you start to crave the person you’re in love with like a drug.” Love stimulates the brain in exactly the same way as powerful painkillers or drugs like cocaine. But there is a lot of interesting interrelationship between the feelings of love and the feelings of pain. This is because love and cocaine target the same ‘feel-good’ chemical in the brain called dopamine and this is also highly influential in the management of pain. So love really does hurt!
2. Primitive Rising
Love and the need to be loved is a very basic and primal human instincts. Add to this the evolutionary wiring which insists that we look for a mate in order to multiply and survive and you have something deeply elemental, hard-wired into the human psyche. The area of the brain which creates the intense addictive feelings of overwhelming passion and desire is known as ‘the pleasure center’ and is also inextricably linked to man’s basic instinct to survive. It works on the simple premise that we recognize when something feels good and we want to repeat it so satisfying hunger, becoming warm after being cold.
3. Endless Love
Love remains critically important throughout human existence but it changes from those early, heady days of passion and almost drug-induced intensity to something more enduring and long-lasting. Love is powerful because it transforms and evolves throughout the course of relationships and the journey of human life. Early passionate love cannot last at that frenetic level of desire and intensity. It gives way to a more solid and durable state which can cement a relationship between two people together throughout the slings and arrows of life’s difficulties.
Love develops from the early passion and desire between two people into a more unified force which may then extend through the arrival of children, into familial love, a shared love for a child or children which also creates a further bond between the couple. In this context, love become multi-faceted and can manifest itself in myriad different ways making it one of the most diverse and complex of human emotions. It can be as in your face as the biggest of grand gestures or as subtle and meaningful as a glance across a room or a smile or the touch of a hand. With real deep and meaningful love, so often less is most definitely more.
4. Labyrinthine Love
Love is powerful because it can morph into different states, transform itself into alternative shapes so rather like a virus, it can adapt and adjust to survive. The frenetic and intense love of early relationships will subside, usually after an average of a year, into something that becomes less hectic and obsessive but yet deeper and in some ways, even more powerful. Think of that love progressing on the journey of a relationship and then, after some time, children arrive, hopefully cementing the bond even further and introducing a new type of love, familial love. This early love has begun as a seed germinating and growing from one vigorous shoot into the branches of a complex and established tree. It is strong because the trunk is broad and the branches are wide and high.
Love that can develop and metamorphoses is the strongest and most powerful because of its variety and extent. Love is clever, it knows that romantic love will burn out and is not sustainable over time.
This is one of the reasons why love is so difficult to define, it is because it is constantly changing. Most people can give tangible examples of love but they struggle to actually define it in a few words. Hence, the reason why the word, ‘love’ is used out of context and abused too. ‘I love chocolate’ is not in quite the same league as a 25-year marriage although ironically, there might be some common ground in the addictive effects which chocolate can also have on the human brain.
5. Love is Life
All our lives as human beings, love is never far from us. Hopefully, we begin our journey conceived in love. We are nurtured through parental love before growing up and finding our own romantic love and life partner or maybe multiple partners. We may then create our own family so experiencing parental love as the caregiver and nurturer and thus the cycle endlessly perpetuates itself. We still have the enduring love of our parents whilst they remain alive and other family members such as siblings and grandparents. Love is at every turn.
The proliferation of online dating sites indicates that those who are minus love in a romantic context feel hard done by and lonely. It seems that parental and sibling love and even the love of friends is not enough. The quest to find that one life partner, ‘the special one’ shows there are gradations of love and this one appears to be the most valuable. Immortalized in poetry, prose, songs and other media such as television and film, the journey to that one true love is as important now as it has ever been.
True love, romantic love, real love, call it what you will is definitely the ultimate prize. And it is from this premier love, this optimal emotion, this love to end all loves, that everything else cascades down as it is this love that begets human life and propagates the human race giving rise to sibling love, parental love, and more distant family love. It is the spring of life and therein lies its inherent power and importance.
7. Love is Not Guaranteed
Love is not guaranteed, it doesn’t come with a hallmark of quality, integrity, and longevity if only it did. The innate insecurity of love, rather perversely, is what makes it so desirable and the subject of such focus, and this is one of the reasons why it is so powerful. Not every fairytale encounter leads to a happy ending sadly. Taking something for granted can devalue its importance in our life, we all do it and it is only when it is denied us or taken away that we really appreciate the true value of what we had. Take our health as one example, unappreciated probably until it is challenged or something as simple as a good job or a lovely home and especially, a relationship.
In the early days of a new relationship, passionate love is insecure, not certain, not guaranteed. There is always that wonder, that question, does he or she feel the same way about me and, to the same degree? That’s the problem with addictive feelings (and substances). We are out of control to some degree and want a guarantee that we can have our next fix. But those initial romantic feelings are vulnerable and delicate, intense and compelling but never guaranteed.
When something is not a dead cert in our lives, when we know we can’t take it for granted, human nature is thus that it evaluates the importance of that commodity; often its value becomes directly related to its availability. Something that is ultimate to us as human beings but is not guaranteed is attributed a worth beyond all worths. And there is something to be said for the scarcity value of real true love.
8. Scarcity Value
Real true and enduring love is rare, isn’t it? Many people spend their entire lives on a quest for it. It is the one thing money can’t buy and sadly some people never do seem to stumble upon it whereas others manage to locate the source of the holy grail and have long happy and loving relationships.
Anything that is rare and beautiful will always have mysticism and lure. It is human instinct to want to reach out for the unattainable but it is important to be careful not to muddle up wanting a particular person with wanting the actual status and condition of love itself. The more desirable that person is as well, the more people say how amazing he or she is, the more the kudos increase.
Real love is a scarce commodity and so its value and power and importance are seriously highlighted by this fact.
Final Words
Listing the number of reasons why love is so important and powerful to human life, is probably just as challenging as trying to define love in its entirety. Almost anyone you ask will have a different opinion and create a unique list and yet everyone’s list will be correct and valid because, in truth, the reasons why love is so important and powerful to human life are almost too numerous to mention.
One thing that remains indisputable however is that love is integral to human life, it is both powerful and important. List your reasons and then share this article with your friends and see what they think.
Article Credit: https://hernorm.com/why-is-love-important-powerful/
Building & Empowering Communities 