What is love?

And what do we seek to find through it?

As a young and earnest student of Philosophy I once wrote a paper on love, the conceit of which was — to love is to fly in the fear of human transience, and that philosophers make the best lovers because they see love as an end in itself, not the means to an ideal state. I was right about the first part.

It might come as no surprise that I am once again, thinking about love:
I’m home after a month of travel, London is (mostly) full of sunshine, and the darling buds of May are now enthusiastic thirst traps. Bumblebees have begun to stagger about the garden, love struck and nectar drunk. Love is in the air and apparently, also on Tiktok where ye olde tome, The Five Love Languages — The Secret to Love that Lasts by the Baptist minister Gary Chapman is trending once more with 500 million views.

If somehow, you haven’t heard of this book which has sold over ten million copies and spent eight years on the New York Times Bestseller list, allow me to give you a Tl;dr:

According to Chapman, all humans (yes, all) have a love language, in which they seek and express love: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service and physical touch. To love someone, the author suggests we observe the love language they speak in (ie. how they express love, for instance through acts of service) and what they complain about (eg. not receiving enough words of affirmation) and try to give them what they need: eg. do the laundry, also praise them for doing the laundry.

It’s a convenient little theory that does very little to encapsulate the messy, particularities of different kinds of love. Most of us do not experience, seek and express just one single type of love in our lifetimes, nor do we want people to speak one love language to us forever. I don’t want to be a hater but science agrees. This January, a group of psychologists studied Chapman’s theory and came to the conclusion that there was little empirical evidence to support Chapman’s theory of love languages.

What then is love, that ever fixed mark?

A summer gadfly met its end today in in the pages of an essay titled “From Sex Robots to Love Robots: Is Mutual Love with a Robot Possible?”. Authors Sven Nyholm and Lily Eva Frank wonder if loving, non-objectifying relationships could exist between humans and robots, a question I find fascinating given that people keep falling in love with ChatGPT and other forms of talking AI.

According to Nyholm and Frank, love comes down to being a good match for one another, valuing one another’s particularity and being able to conceive/imagine the possibility of a future where people are committed to being together in some way.

According to the authors, a good robot match theoretically, should not be hard to find (or make). A robot could be programmed to do and say what you like, look and smell the way you want, even “grow” with you, i.e. present one set of personality traits that change over time to mirror yours (or be completely different from yours). In this way, your match is made for you, although it might be harder to imagine that you were made for each other.

Particularity is harder to find. Even in a futuristic scenario where robots and humans socialize and meet in bars and on dating apps, the authors agree that the robot must be capable of choosing one human over everyone else, and cherishing the reasons they chose that human.

What would this mean? A robot sensitive and sophisticated enough to differentiate and identify a special something, a robot who knows what it likes and does not like, a robot willing to take a leap of faith with a stranger?

I offer you, once again, a philosopher. Michel de Montaigne, essayist and philosopher of the French Renaissance, when asked to describe his love for a friend said:

“If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.”

(Preach it on Tiktok, Michel, this might be the best use of language to describe love that I’ve ever encountered <3)

Nyholm and Frank agree that is the stuff that goes on inside, the thoughts and motivations of the person we love, the reasons why they choose to love us, that they love us of their own free will that makes love intoxicating. More so, as the fly who died in the pages of this essay reminded me, because our time together is brief, and summer even more so.

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A quick note to say that this is the TENTH issue of Now/Zen, and I want to explode from how special that feels! THANK YOU to every single one of you that has opened your email and read through these newsletters, engaged with them here and on my instagram , written to me to share how you felt about it.

This is still a free newsletter and if you’d like to tip me for my art + writing because you enjoyed it, you can buy me a coffee here.

If you’d like to commission art or writing from me, or know someone who might — write to me.

Finally, signing off with some of the sagest advice I’ve received on love from
a woman who ran a wildlife camp all by herself well into her eighties:
if you want to be loved, be loving.

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FRAGILE LOVE

Yo Yo Ma plays Bach's Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska:
"Our relationship to our birch relatives, our salmon relatives, and all the beings of Alaska are sacred. Our traditional stories tell us that at one point we all spoke the same language ... we still do. If we find the time to truly listen, we might recognize ourselves in the melting permafrost or the fallen birch, but we might also recognize ourselves in the songs of the birds or the freshness of the Arctic breeze. There is still hope when we experience life. We should all fall in love with the places we live and let this love drive our determination to protect the waters, the salmon, the caribou, and all our plant relatives so that future generations may also experience such joy and sustenance.”

CHATTY LOVE

This NYT story had one of the most iconic headlines in my opinion (I’m referring to “To fall in love with anyone, do this”) but since the piece is paywalled and I want you to find out if the clickbait’s promise is real, I’m linking the 36 questions here. Spoiler: I don’t think this leads to everlasting love but it is certainly one way to spend a summer evening learning about each other.


STRANGE LOVE
This fascinating story about why one man married a doll and believes in synthetic love. (Paywalled)