Love
If there’s one thing that’s clear about love, it’s that different people experience it differently. Love is one of the most powerful emotions, but we can’t agree about love, even with the people we love.
We don’t love what makes the most sense. Sometimes, it’s the things that don’t make sense that drive us to love. Sometimes, love is what drives us crazy.
In this episode, we hear stories of love from Harker Jones, from Ranelle Golden, from Rebecca Rose Vassy, from Nancy Perpall, from Betti Rooted Lionheart, from Kristen Donnelly, and from Robin Hafitz.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about emotion. My name is Jonathan Cook, and I’m a freelance researcher of emotion.
I’ve been researching emotions for decades now, and yet, when it comes down to working with each emotion individually, I’m finding that there’s still quite a work to be done. I’m feeling especially nervous about this week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity, because the topic is the emotion of love.
I feel as if I’m trying to fill out a profile on an online dating app, realizing that what I have to offer isn’t going to measure up to what this subject deserves. I feel unworthy to address this subject.
What do I have to offer here? What do I know about love?
In reaction to this initial feeling of anxiety, I pause for a moment, and remember that I’m not trying to offer an authoritative description of love. Instead, my goal is to defend a much more humble proposition: That love is a genuine emotion. I offer this episode as testimony for the simple claim that love exists.
It sounds like an obvious idea, but there are many people working in digital enterprises who advocate the opposite idea. They claim that, if love exists at all, it is really only a secondary manifestation of another basic emotion.
It’s time to talk about the Theory of Basic Emotions.
The Theory of Basic Emotions is frequently used by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are trying to sell software packages that they claim can use artificial intelligence to automatically detect people’s emotions from external biological signals such as heart rate, skin conductivity, body posture, and facial expressions.
A crucial piece of information that these digital businesses don’t include in their sales pitches is that the Theory of Basic Emotions is not a new framework based on cutting edge psychological research. On the contrary, the Theory of Basic Emotions was developed in the middle of the previous century, using flawed research methods. As a matter of science, the Theory of Basic Emotions been thoroughly debunked. A 2019 meta analysis found that the claims of the Theory of Basic Emotions are not supported by more recent academic research. The idea that external physical signals can be reliably interpreted as consistent representations of internal emotions just doesn’t hold water. Still, the Theory of Basic Emotions survives as a thread within Silicon Valley ideology, a faith among adherents of Techno Utopianism who believe that artificial intelligence will soon be able to measure, analyze, and replicate human consciousness, making humanity obsolete.
The core idea in the Theory of Basic Emotions is that there are a small handful of emotions that are universal to all of humanity. All other emotions, the theory proposed, are nothing more than variations of the universal basic emotions. What’s more, the theory claimed, these basic emotions can all be easily identified in the form of facial expression.
I’ll say once again to make it clear: Even though it remains as a sales pitch, the Theory of Basic Emotions is no longer regarded as scientifically valid. The reason I bring it up in this episode is because of what the Theory of Basic Emotions was missing. In its original format, the Theory of Basic Emotions held that there are just six basic universal emotions from which all other emotions are derived. They are:
Happy - Sad - Angry - Afraid - Surprise - Disgust
There are many feelings that are not included in this short list. One emotion, however, is especially conspicuous in its absence. Love is missing. That absence of the emotion of love in the Theory of Basic Emotions was one of its more obvious flaws.
I’m trying to avoid being judgmental as I do this podcast, but my feelings are pretty strong about this. If you’ve got a theory of emotion that doesn’t include love, I think that theory of emotion is a load of garbage.
For many people, love is the emotion of all emotions. It’s the only emotion that has a holiday dedicated to it. People say that love is all you need. People live for love. People die for love. People kill for love.
It sounds crazy, the idea of hurting people in the pursuit of love, but it happens all the time. Love can give us clarity, but it also can give us a feeling of false clarity. Love has the power to focus our attention and to delude us at the same time.
The truth of love is always up for question. Is it true love that we’re feeling? For whatever kind of love you say you feel, there’s someone who is going to declare that it isn’t true love, that real love is something else.
For the sake of this podcast, because it’s about emotion, the truth is beside the point. Emotional truth is always subjectively experienced, even when it’s objectively defined. There is no universal truth about love, because love is a concept that people have invented, a term to describe many kinds of feelings.
If there’s one thing that’s clear about love, it’s that different people experience it differently. Love is one of the most powerful emotions, but we can’t agree about love, even with the people with whom we share love.
Love brings people together, but also divides us. The most divisive political issues have to do with how people ought to love and how we should deal with the consequences of that love.
I’m not going to even try to say who’s right and who’s wrong about love, but I will say this confidently: Love is real. I believe that people feel love. Love is an emotion that is too big to ignore.
It’s impossible for me, in just one podcast episode, to complete even a rough sketch of all the different kinds of love that exist. I’m not going to try. Instead, I want to use this episode to plant a flag in the ground, to recognize that love exists and to listen to the voices of a few people who want to talk about love.
Let’s start out with a love that’s relatively easy to understand. I recently spoke with Harker Jones, the author of a bestselling novel about love.
Harker Jones:
I'm Harker Jones and I am an author and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. I grew up in Michigan, have been in L.A. for 20 years. I have a bestselling novel called Until September. It's a love story. The screenplays I write that I am still pitching to sell, still working on it, I focus on horror and comedy, not horror comedy, horror and comedy, two separate things. I am a member of the LA Drama Critics Circle and I am in Mensa. One of my bucket list items is to be a one hit wonder.
Jonathan Cook:
Harker could spin us a great yarn about romantic love, but for right now, let’s listen to what he has to say about love that comes in a smaller package.
Harker Jones:
We adopted her from a shelter, and we were looking at all these different cats, and she was just in the back in her little cage. I hate that they're in cages, but also, what else can be done? I don't know. She's just kind of sitting there. Other cats and dogs are like, you know, coming up and, you know, being playful, you know? She was just really self-contented. It's like, look at this one, come look at this one. And we chose her really quickly. And they warned us of like someone adopted her and brought her back like, oh, okay, let's get to know this important information. Then we got her home, and we realized we think we know why: Because she was batshit crazy.
Jonathan Cook:
Here’s the twist in this story: Harker hasn’t gotten rid of that cat. He didn’t return her to the shelter like the person who previously tried to adopt her. Harker has kept that cat and come to love her. Why would he do that? Why would anyone love a batshit crazy cat?
Love is not the satisfaction of a list of desired attributes. We don’t love what makes the most sense. Sometimes, it’s the things that don’t make sense that drive us to love. Sometimes, we love the things that drive us crazy.
Harker Jones:
She's just crazy, but she loves me. I'm surprised that on me right now. I don’t know where she is. Usually she's on me. My partner pointed it out. They pointed it out at some point. She really follows you around a lot. I think because she's not my first cat and they've all adored me as much as I've adored them, it's not like I just expected it. I just didn't seem unusual to me. So, then I sort of thinking about like, you're right, she is following me. Like, there are times I'll be coming up the stairs. I'll stop and turn around to see if she's coming and I don't see her. That's because she's at my feet and I don't know it. She's already there. She sleeps in my arms at night.
It's just a bond. I don't think it's just person to cat. I think it's just a bond that you could have again with a gerbil or I feel like any mammal. I don't think you can have it the same with the snake.
There's just a bond, like human to human. And there's something about like with a pet where in some ways they always remain a child, where your child becomes an adult. When your dog becomes an adult, it's still a child. It still comes to you when it's hurt. It's a comes to you when it's sad.
Jonathan Cook:
Harker refers to a bond of love, a bond that can exist even across species, a bond that in the case of cats can literally get underfoot. Love is a feeling that sticks with you, almost as if it’s tied to you, glued to you, or attached to you in some way. Psychologists even refer to love as attachment, as if the bodies of people in love become linked with what they love.
We don’t just become physically connected to what we love, of course. Attachment is also a kind of conceptual connection, a fixation on an idea of something that remains consistent for us even as we move through the day and its changing circumstances.
In this way, love gives us a sense of direction, an orientation in a universe that can otherwise feel chaotic. Love is a feeling that creates a reference point, a center of coherence that gives our lives purpose. So it is that we can fall in love not just with other people, or other animals, but also with activities. When we love what we do, what we do begins to feel like part of who we are.
One person who has found this kind of love is screenwriter Ranelle Golden. Ranelle found screenwriting after an illness that caused her to temporarily lose her eyesight, forcing her to close her successful school of performing arts and find a new narrative for her life.
Rannelle Golden:
I just started everything over and I became a screenwriter. From there, I had to study it, learn it. Then I became a director. I had to study it. I keep learning. I'm a sponge and I've been in it since 2009 or 2010. I've done a miraculous thing and I've taken on many, many clients, many telling their true stories, which, you know, is something I never dreamed I'd do. It has its own impact on me because I'm very emotional and telling their stories, you know, at times it takes a lot out of you.
My process for writing is I literally become all of those characters in the story, whether it's my story or someone else's. So, I become very bizarre during the writing process. I literally have to put my head down and get it out of me, if that makes sense. I have to, you know, I just keep going until it's released. I've had the opportunity to really tell some really cool stories lately. One that I'm working on right now and we'll be heading to Chicago for a big event for in May is called Bullet-Proof.
If you want to be something in life, believe in yourself and go out and do it. You don't have to achieve it the way that everybody says you do.
Jonathan Cook:
Ranelle’s love of screenwriting became a way for her to connect with other people. This gift of connection led her to share this beloved activity with the people she loved.
Rannelle Golden:
Loving screenwriting is kind of like loving myself. It's who I am. By loving it, it means I'm always doing it, even when I'm not. I'm telling stories in my head. I am. It's crucial to who I am. Love is an interesting word because it's something like I always believe if you're in love with someone there with you, even when they're not with you. You feel them. You know, you're in their heart. You know, they care about you. You know, it's a part of you. I feel that way with screenwriting, like it's with me even when I'm not sitting down writing, I am always thinking of stories and storylines.
It’s very interesting because my son has grown up to be he's my business partner. We write together now on many, many projects, not everything that I do, but many. And when he was about 15, he started becoming my mentor in a weird way because he's my kid. But we would bounce storylines off each other and all this interesting stuff. And right before the pandemic, he started writing with me and I don't know how to explain it, but it's definitely it is. It's just love. It's who I am.
I love what I can do with screenwriting. I can scare you. I can make you cry. I can make you feel like, Oh, my God, that's my story. That's something I went through. I understand that. I relate to that.
I love telling stories. I love it as not, okay, I would pick my kid over a story, right? But there are a lot of things I would give up just to be able to write a story.
Jonathan Cook:
Ranelle’s love of stories and storytelling shows how love spreads through shared activities to build bonds between people. Ranelle loves screenwriting, and she loves her son. She loves screenwriting with her son, and they love their ability to share their emotions with the audiences of their works.
Rebecca Rose Vassy shares Ranelle’s love of storytelling, although she has explored it in a different medium. Rebecca talked to me about her love of theater.
Rebecca Rose Vassy:
I started it out as a theater actress right out of high school and moved away from theater after a while, for a number of reasons, left New York and came down to the D.C. area. And I have I started in the burlesque scene. I still do theater from time to time, and it's still a great love of mine, but I'm a burlesque producer and performer.
Jonathan Cook:
If you’ve listened to other installments of this podcast, you may remember Rebecca from the second episode, the one about compersion, the feeling of joy that a person can feel when someone that they love falls in love with somebody else. Compersion is a dramatic feeling in which a person becomes willing to involve themselves in a love story with more dimensions than monogamy allows for.
So it is that Rebecca’s love of theater and dramatic sense of love are braided together in her life, as she performs on stage in the arena of burlesque, a kind of theater that presents a stylized display of sexuality. Rebecca also works as an advocate for polyamory, a purposefully-chosen lifestyle in which people embrace the possibility of having more than one loving relationship at a time. All of this came into Rebecca’s life after her first love, an intense monogamous relationship that couldn’t last.
Rebecca Rose Vassy:
I've always been a person for whom my emotional connections, my friends and especially my partners are very, very central to the things that I value in life. I love very deeply. I put a lot of work and effort into my relationships, and I find it very fulfilling to love and be loved. So, our relationship in and of itself was not bad. We had a lot of great connections. We had a lot of fun together. It wasn't perfect, but I mean, we're so young also. Had it, you know, given time, like because I didn't really have a framework for understanding there was another way but monogamy, had our relationship continued, I could see a point where I might have reached a level, been like, okay, I'm ready to get married and start a family or whatever. But like, I just really wasn't there, you know, at the age of eighteen.
But I did, I loved him completely. He was my first sexual partner and he was wonderful at that, and very caring and gentle and loving. He did do a lot of things right. I think at the end of the day, the biggest reason that he left was because he was discouraged that I wasn't on the marriage train as fast as he was. It was hurtful to lose something that I cared about so much and somebody that I cared about so much, you know, with the sense of but I wasn't on your timetable, you know, like that was the biggest difference. Losing anything is really, you know, it's painful. The grief process is very normal and natural, even in relationships where, you know, something's not a match or when something is actively bad for you, there's likely to be a grief process afterwards, even if the thing that you're grieving is what I wish this could have been.
Jonathan Cook:
Listening to Rebecca, I hear in the back of my mind the voice of Billie Holiday, singing a jazz standard written by Don Raye and Gene DePaul:
You don’t know what love is until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues,
until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose…
Until you’ve flipped your heart and you have lost, you don’t know what love is…
Until you’ve faced each dawn with sleepless eyes, you don’t know what love is.
Love looks different depending on the direction you’re looking at it from. When it’s fresh and new, love can seem all-powerful, undeniable, and enriching. It seems like an achievement that can never be taken away. Looking from the perspective of the end of a romance, however, it feels doomed, and sour, and impossibly broken. Love is almost always about loss, eventually. You don’t fully understand what it means to feel love until you experience the consequences of its failure.
So, Rebecca moved on from her all-or-nothing monogamous relationship into polyamory, in which love becomes a feeling that isn’t exclusively devoted to a single person, and so cannot be destroyed when any single relationship ends.
Rebecca Rose Vassy:
You can love more than one person in an intimate, romantic way, and it isn't diminished with somebody else. So like one of the other common polyamory things that gets said. Love is not a pie. Like sometimes people say love is pie. Love is like pi, P-I pi. Love is not a pie. So you don't get like a slice of somebody's love, you know, like it's kind of this unending string of numbers. That is an amazing feeling to realize what capacity our hearts have and what potential. I think that that's something that we can offer to the world of monogamy. It's like, if you want, you know, monogamy is how you're wired and that's what you want. Like, that's great, but let our experiences show you like the full range of what kind of love is possible.
Jonathan Cook:
What is love, if it isn’t depleted when it is divided? From Rebecca’s point of view, love is the feeling of delight and support given to another person, even when that gift is not exclusive.
Rebecca Rose Vassy:
I think the core of it is, there's a lot of stuff at the core that's very much the same. I want to, I care about their happiness. I want to make sure that they are cared for, that I'm actively demonstrating love like I want to. We're going to laugh together. Being silly and laughing is a huge part of my love relationships. There's physical affection. There's a sense of safety and comfort and that experience of being very deeply known and also very deeply knowing them and loving all of it and feeling like I'm not asking you to change. I know you're going to grow and evolve and whatever, just over the course of a relationship. I want to support that. I want to support you being your best you. What you are, everything that you are right now is enough, and even your flaws and your shortcomings and the things you struggle with and the things you hate about yourself, I love those parts of you because it's part of who you are.
Jonathan Cook:
Nancy Perpall’s understanding of love is different from Rebecca’s. Nancy doesn’t believe that all love is the same. On the contrary, she works with an understanding of different kinds of love, with different kinds of expectations. She articulates these different kinds of love as the author of upcoming book about how to get a marriage out of a slump.
Nancy Perpall:
It's called The Malnourished Marriage: Five Essential Emotional Nutrients for a Healthy Relationship. I use a different lexicon to enable people who are in stuck relationships, I call them malnourished relationships because they're not feeding the relationship the healthy essentials that it needs.
I give people little tips and jumping off points about how to start the discussion with your spouse or partner when you're in that sort of stuck, you feel like they're not paying attention to you, it's very difficult to communicate, they're not getting your ideas, they're not understanding you.
Jonathan Cook:
Nancy isn’t just an author who writes about love and marriage. She’s got many years of experience dealing with the cost of love gone wrong. She’s a divorce lawyer who has been divorced twice herself.
Nancy Perpall:
I'm the relationship expert divorce lawyer for over thirty years, and I've been married three times and I'm one of seven children, and I was a critical care nurse before I became a lawyer. I've seen what not being in a good relationship can do to you physically.
I got married, I'm 75 years old. My first husband went to Vietnam. I was a virgin Catholic girl, and you weren't going to have sex with me unless we were married. He didn't want to go over there and get killed in a rice paddy and think I wasn't back here waiting for him. I felt like it was my patriotic duty in those times. So anyway, but he was a very nice man. He's the father of my two children, and unfortunately, there was no spark. Do you know what I mean? You can't make somebody love you.
Jonathan Cook:
In the confusion of youth in a time of war, Nancy married a man without feeling a spark for him. What is that spark that was missing for her? Nancy identifies three different stages of love, which she associates with specific biochemical foundations.
Nancy Perpall:
The spark is really more of a sexual spark, you know, feeling like you're completely one with somebody, albeit for a few minutes, but there's almost a very well, it's biological, because I've really studied and researched the subject and the dopamine that is excreted in your body that triggers the same area of the brain as the cocaine. Dopamine and cocaine. Dopamine triggers the same area of your brain as dope, as cocaine, so you feel very high. Do you know what I mean? If that passion is not there. You don't get that triggered high. Do you know what I mean? It's more of a duty as opposed to really something that you really are enjoying. The book that is coming out, hopefully late fall. The Malnourished Marriage talks about dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin and how it fits into the three stages of love.
The first stage is dopamine. Physiologically, we're meant to make, we were created to survive and to keep going and to have children and to keep the species going.
That high that you feel when you're first in love and you're obsessing of this person. This person is wonderful. The dopamine is what blocks you from seeing or really understanding cognitively the things that you see about this person that are red flags. It causes you to ignore the red flags.
The second stage of love is like the serotonin kind of stage where you're settling in to really start to bond with this person. You know, it's the stage before you really have children or really a lot of arguments. It's sort of like that 18 month to 24 month period after you get married or, you know, decide you're going to live together or really make a serious commitment to this person.
Now, the third stage is oxytocin, and the oxytocin is the bonding. Oxytocin is what you felt when you saw your son and daughter for the first time. Oxytocin is that feeling that is secreted in your brain that makes you want to take care of this person. You would die for this person. You're all consumed with this person. When i's a child, those engagements, when they're growing up and they're absolutely adorable, and you could just eat them up. That's what reinforces the serotonin, reinforces it.
Jonathan Cook:
Scientifically, there’s good evidence that dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin are involved in the creation and maintenance of the emotion of love. Love is more than just the presence of these chemicals, however. Love is something we feel about someone or something specific, something outside of ourselves that comes about as the result of a history of interactions with it. What that love feels like can’t be reduced to a mere secretion in the brain. It’s something that’s within us but also between us and what we love. It’s an emotion of relationship, even when love is not returned.
Because love is built over time, it’s also an emotion that can endure dramatic changes. In the case of Nancy, her love persists despite the transformation of her current husband as a result of his degenerative illness.
Nancy Perpall:
I really was never really in love until my third husband.
I was never going to get married again. A friend of ours begged me to meet him, and I did, and it really was love at, I mean, I don't believe in love at first sight, but after you've had, when you're young, but after you've had so many experiences, I mean, he's the love of my life. If I had married him first go around, we would be married 50, 60 years now.
If you really are in love with somebody, you compromise. You know, no one's perfect. I mean, he has Parkinson's now and his cognitive issues are really starting to be an issue for us. But, you know, like he flooded the bathroom a week ago, literally because he turned on the water and forgot and walked away. Literally, it was like an inch or two in the master bathroom and the master closet. I mean, it was a complete and total mess. I wasn't home. I was somewhere. I can't remember where I was. I mean, we had a very expensive Oriental carpet in the hallway that leads to the master bedroom, and that's totally ruined. I just rolled it up. I didn't say a word. I mean, what are you going to do? He didn't intend it. It's not like he was negligent. He just can't remember things.
When we said our vows. I thought in sickness and in health mean that he would get a cold or the flu. Never did I think he would get a disease like this. When you really love somebody and you've lived with them and been through things with them, we work through all of that. If you love somebody and somebody says your husband has Parkinson's disease, it doesn't just happen to him. It happens to the couple.
Jonathan Cook:
For Nancy, love isn’t just about the pleasure you find in another person. It’s also about compromising yourself, and suffering along with the suffering of the person you love. When love is shared, it builds something between people, so that when one person in the relationship is in pain, the other feels the pain too.
Betti Rooted Lionheart expands this idea even further, to talk about a mutual love she feels not with another person, but with the land beneath her feet. Betti is a shamanic practitioner we first met last week, as she talked about the feeling of deep listening. She associates that kind of deep listening not just with the people she encounters, but also to the non-human living things around her, and to the earth itself, as she works on her hundred-and-five-acre plot of land in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
I own it in the white colonizer way, and I like to acknowledge that. That allows me to protect the land. But I prefer to think of myself as stewarding and loving the land, and it's really important to me that I'm not holding this land just for myself. The purpose is to hold and protect this land for the good of all, the good of all who choose to come here. The land itself is kind of what was considered the least valuable of a larger chunk of property. All the parcels that had road access that could be made into five acre home lots were parceled off. So, this has a very narrow road frontage, a long driveway, and then it opens out. The reason this land spoke to my heart and my soul when we found it is because it wasn't, you know, a flat forty acres that you could stand in the middle of and see all the corners. There's forest. There's meadow. There's a wetland valley. There's water flowing through it. It's hilly.
The land loves you back unconditionally. The earth loves us unconditionally, despite what we're doing to her. What's coming up to say is that for me loving this piece of land, it's also about loving myself, because in relationship with this land I have come to do much of my healing work. I don't mean that to say that I've done most of my healing work. I just mean that the healing work that I've done thus far, because it's a lifelong thing, has been done in relation to this land. I've gotten to know myself and I've gotten to understand the importance of living as a being in connection with a particular place.
Trees are here to give us love. And not just as humans, but all of creation. Their purpose is to give us love, and they do that by connecting, rooting into the earth, and by reaching up into the sky and pulling love energy from both places, from the earth and from the cosmos, and bringing it here for our benefit.
Jonathan Cook:
Most people can agree upon the idea of romantic love between two people, but that agreement breaks down when we look at romantic love on a case-by-case basis. Rebecca’s polyamorous love isn’t something that everyone can identify with. Nancy’s first two marriages were monogamous, but involved love that wasn’t mutual.
Now Betti tells us about an unconditional love she feels with the land where she lives. If that’s love, and Harker’s relationship with a cat is love, and Nancy’s three marriages are love, what is love?
Maybe there’s something about love that is inherently difficult for people to agree on. Listening to all of these stories, I’m hearing about people’s passionate feeling of attachment to something. The thing is, different people feel passionately about different things. So, even if we’re talking about human relationships, love can look remarkably dissimilar from person to person, because it’s about how their individual passion finds its counterpart out there in the world somehow.
So, maybe you don’t believe that the earth loves anything, much less giving unconditional love to people. Do trees love us? Do they pull love energy from the sky? I don’t know, but Betti feels that way. That’s her passion speaking. That’s how she knows love, and if love is about how our individual passion finds a match in something else, then how can anyone else deny that what she’s feeling is true love?
I can’t put myself in the position of judging what love is real, and what love isn’t. I’m not going to tell you who can love what, or what can love who. My purpose in this episode of the podcast is to observe a small sample of the diversity of the ways that people experience the emotion of love.
Kristen Donnelly expands the concept of love even further to the idea that an organization can express love. Kristen runs a collection of family-owned businesses, including Abbey Research. We first met Kristen as she was discussing the feeling of curiosity that drives her work. She also describes how a sense of love defines the way her organization does business.
Kristen Donnelly:
Love is an active entity. For me, it's a verb that is a motivating verb. So, if I love somebody, I don't love somebody passively. I don't love somebody ethereally. I love somebody through my actions towards them, through my opinion towards them. So love, therefore, is an animating feature of my life. It is a verb that drives me to do things. To love somebody is an active thing.
You just have to remember that the person in front of you is a person, and also understand that love is not just romantic feelings, and love is not you know, love is not sexual harassment in the work room. Harassment is not loving, actually. So what I mean by letting love be an animating feature, is not meant to be touchy feely or like an Instagram graphic or a Pinterest board. It's meant to say that if you love humans, if you love actively, this will lead you to respect them. This will lead you to keeping them in mind when you make decisions. This will lead you to remembering that different people are different, and that that's a good thing, and it makes your organization stronger, because when people are in an organization where they feel respected and valued, those are words that come with love for me and how I understand love, then they thrive and then you thrive, and it becomes this beautiful symbiosis of cohesive, thriving. Whereas if you work in an organization where you treat people like interchangeable cogs in a profit machine, everything withers, including your profits.
Jonathan Cook:
Kristen proposes that love is something that’s demonstrated through action, not just through abstract feeling. From her perspective, love is something a business can authentically express through actions that reflect the recognition of people’s individual value as something more than just a source of profit.
How many businesses actually achieve something like this loving respect? I also heard about the idea of love as a way of doing business from Robin Hafitz, the CEO of a research firm in New York City.
Robin Hafitz:
I'm Robin Hafitz, Robin Danielson Hafitz. I'm coming to you today from Willow, New York, which is near Woodstock. But I spend about half my time in New York City, and I'm the CEO of a company called Open Mind Strategy, LLC. Open Mind Strategy is essentially an insights company. We do mostly hybrid research, quantitative research like surveys and trackers, and also qualitative research like focus groups and ideas. I'm also an ordained interfaith minister and I have recently been credentialed as a spiritual counselor. So, I hope to be doing some more of that kind of professional listening as well as the listening that I do as a researcher.
Jonathan Cook:
Robin talks about love as something her business feels for its clients and the people it interviews. What’s more, she finds love between consumers and commercial brands.
Robin Hafitz:
We love our clients. A big part of the reason that we do love our clients is that they give us the opportunity usually to learn about their customers, their target audience, and that gives us the opportunity to talk to women who need large bra sizes, and people who are decision makers in buying industrial lubricants, and folks who want to know more about their neighbors and people who stream content, and students at private schools and a whole range of things. And, you know, in talking to people about the things that they choose to buy or to participate in or to subscribe to, we're talking to them about their lives. You know, we're learning about them as people. We're learning about their values. We're learning about what they care about.
Our business, Open Mind Strategy, my business, you know, my primary thing that I really try to impress upon the people who work for me is that there's a lot of research that's done out there that's about trying to figure out how to turn somebody into a sucker. That's about trying to figure out how to sell somebody something. And we are, in fact, often trying to figure out how to sell somebody something. But we pride ourselves on, I think part of why we're so good at what we do is because we bring to the table an attitude of respect for respondents and affection for people as people.
So, that starts to verge on love, and sometimes we even talk to people about love. You know, what do they love? You know, what brands do they love? Not just what people do they love. But yeah, that verges on love, or at least or at least fondness. You know, our goal is not to make the world a worse place with understanding into people, but rather to make it a better place by providing insights that can actually let people meet people where they are.
Jonathan Cook:
You may dismiss the idea that a market research firm could fall in love with its clients, or with the people it interviews for those clients, but deeply attentive listening and love have been linked to the cultivation of feelings of love, even in highly contrived circumstances.
Psychologist Arthur Aron famously conducted a study in which pairs of participants were told to ask and answer a set of thirty-six questions of each other in a clinical setting while looking each other in the eye. The questions slowly escalated from relatively trivial subjects to deeply personal matters. At the end of the process, the pairs of participants seemed to share a greater degree of mutually-positive emotions for each other than they had at the beginning. Two study participants actually fell in love and later got married. The study eventually resulted in the popularization of 36 Questions That Lead To Love as a dating activity for people looking for a way to bond quickly.
How does it work? Both asking and answering personal questions requires vulnerability. Looking someone in the eyes while they answer a question encourages active listening. Spending a long amount of time in a state of mutual vulnerability mixed with focused listening is one way that people can form relationships of mutual affection.
Market researchers are professional questioners and listeners. Of course, not just any sort of questions and answers can lead to intimacy. However, an in-depth, open-ended method of interviewing that focuses on issues of emotional intimacy could lead to a feeling of bonding between interviewer and respondent. Client team members listening to a series of such emotionally intimate conversations over the course of several days could come to feel a new sense of emotional attachment to their customers as well.
Is that love? Most people would use different words to describe the kinds of feelings that can come up in these professional contexts. But then, love is taboo in most professional settings. It’s regarded as inappropriate to fall in love at work, even with people who have been colleagues for years. Professional environments such as businesses involve relationships of power that can make expressions of love feel abusive. An employee who feels pressured to share love with someone holding management authority may feel more coerced than anything. What marketers may hopefully interpret as love for their brands may be more of a matter of habit.
On the other hand, it would be ridiculous to assert that genuine mutual love can’t emerge in a professional environment. If Harker Jones can love his cat and Rebecca Rose Vassy can love theater, who is to say that someone else might not feel some form of love for a commercial product or experience?
This feels like a stretch of the emotion of love, if we come from the perspective of romantic love first, but if we look at the ways that people talk about feelings of love, we hear them use the word love to describe a huge range of experiences and relationships. People love Coca Cola. They also love their children. They also love their romantic partners in a way that they would never love their children.
Love feels like an emotion that adapts in intensity and in the rules of its expression to match the dynamics of many kinds of relationships and other interactions. What is love, if people can feel love for so many different things in so many different ways? How can all of these kinds of love still be love, and still be so unlike each other?
Robin Hafitz shared some thoughts about this.
Robin Hafitz:
I think we use the same words for lots of different things, right? Then we also have more vocabulary beyond that. You know, and I love my husband very deeply and love my dogs. And it's not quite the same. I love my mother, you know, and I love my sister and brother. And those are all so different. I mean, I think I think one thing with love is that because it's. You know, because of what it is. Anything that we love, we love someone differently, right, because to love something is to care about it as it is as it is as an individual person or place or book or dog or thing. So they're all going to be different. I think for the love for clients is really largely a feeling of gratitude. You know, that that they are offering us the opportunity not just to earn money, but to earn money doing something that feels like a service in the world. I mean, certainly we work with lots of different kinds of companies. But again, that sort of underlying desire that we have to look at research as a way of understanding people in an affectionate and approving way and of celebrating consumers. We talk a lot with our clients about consumer empathy. It what tends to separate us from other research companies, and what you get with an approach that sort of gives you, you know, with a going in of wanting to come out with consumer empathy. It leads to deeper conversations, it leads to more trust between us as researchers and our respondents. So, we get deeper, better answers when we're when we're talking to people who are serving them.
It's partly hardwired for us as part of an evolutionary benefit that to release chemicals in our interactions with others that make us feel good and make them feel good, creates social bonds that allow us to function as groups as opposed to just as individuals. I would probably, I mean, having dogs, I would say that, you know, I mean, I know that we consider human beings to be the pinnacle of everything. Perhaps we are and perhaps we're also just the ruin of it all, but, you know, I mean, there's love there. You know, there's love with, you know, our pets are giving us love. They're not just they're not just loving us because we feed them. They're letting us because we're part of their pack. You know, we're part of their world. I mean, you know, we're bonded very early to that first face that we see, which is usually our mother. There’s a whole chemical cascade that happens with, with that bond, and that mother is bonded to us, usually in a way that allows us to be protected and cared for because we're pretty weak creatures for a while.
Jonathan Cook:
Part of what I hear Robin Hafitz saying is that human beings are biologically adapted to have a propensity for forming affectionate attachments to other people and things. We are a highly social species. Our success depends upon feeling connected, loyal, and even loving not just to our family and friends, but to organizations we belong to, places we live in, activities we’re involved with, and the objects related to these things.
Businesses are in some sense machines that are constructed to gather wealth to their owners and investors. They are also, however, creations of humanity. They are cultural organizations. Encouraging feelings of belonging and attachment is part of what businesses do to be successful in motivating their workers and their customers. Many kinds of businesses successfully use the social and psychological dynamics of love to improve their profitability. Whether this kind of strategy seems like a genuine loving relationship or an instance of crass exploitation will depend upon your perspective. For many, the use of the word “love” in the context of business is going too far. For others, referring to love in business is a way to encourage a more humane attitude from commercial organizations.
For the purpose of this podcast, I’m not taking sides in this disagreement. I’m simply observing that the emotion of love is something that comes up in business. People don’t turn off their feelings when they enter the marketplace. Emotions are a powerful tool in business, and love is one of the most powerful emotions there is.
We can also observe, however, a disturbing trend of the growing lack of love in people’s lives. Rising numbers of people of all ages are living without close loving relationships. It’s not just that people are lacking the romantic relationships they seek, although that’s true for many people. Many people are struggling to find caring relationships of friendship, or even consistent acquaintance. Networks of social attachment are wearing thin.
It’s not just human-to-human love that’s missing. More and more people can’t enjoy the love of land that enables Betti Rooted Lionheart to feel that she’s thriving. In business, human connection has grown threadbare as increasing numbers of people can go through an entire day of shopping and working without ever meeting another human being face-to-face.
In recent weeks, opportunists have seized upon the idea that chatbots could replace conversations between doctors and patients. They say that a caring bedside manner is simply too expensive to maintain. For elderly people, it’s been proposed that robots should provide care and company, because nurses cost too much.
These developments reflect an unloving attitude that regards human affection as an expensive inconvenience. Digital entrepreneurs looking for a new opportunity to a big return on investment seek to replace affection with efficiency. In an economy controlled by venture capitalists intent on cutting corners at every opportunity, love is being redefined as an extravagant, old-fashioned luxury.
Actual love requires work. It requires presence. Love is often not the easiest choice. During the pandemic, I took care of my mother, day in and day out, when she couldn’t be visited by other people, out of fear of the spread of deadly infection. My mother had dementia then, and it’s gotten worse since. It’s terrifying for me to see her decline in this way.
These days, my mother doesn’t remember my name. She doesn’t remember who I am anymore. When I tell her that I love her, though, she doesn’t hesitate in her response for even a moment. She says that she loves me too. After almost all of the scraps of her former life are gone, that love is one of the last parts of her that remains intact.
Sometimes, you hear people saying that love is the answer to all of our problems. I don’t know about that. Sometimes, love hurts.
What is clear to me is that love, and the desire to be loved, is an emotional motivation behind a huge amount of what we do.
Love often isn’t simple. At the same time that it compels us into action, love is difficult to comprehend even when we’re standing right in the middle of it. Love comes at us and through us from so many different directions at multiple levels all at once that it’s impossible to condense down to just one easy definition.
Love is certainly not the kind of thing any person, or any computer, can read just by scanning a facial expression.
Love can’t be objectively measured. Nonetheless, love is real. Love is the most powerful, most expansive emotion we have, and it’s also a tiny, throw-away word we use to describe our superficial fancies. Love is also an expression of every level of affection to be found in between these extremes.
Sometimes, it’s hard to know the difference between the many kinds of love. Even when given that simple declaration, “I love you,” we can’t be sure what kind of love it is that we’re receiving. Within that ambiguity is born the bulk of our hopes and the overwhelming burden of our despair.
Even as I say this, I’m feeling my efforts to make the emotion of love comprehensible fall apart.
Love refuses to fall in line and follow along with a consistent theme. Maybe what love is really all about is the ability to avoid reasonable boundaries, to break rules in the pursuit of a passion that doesn’t make sense but we long for nonetheless.
It’s frustrating to try to explain and explore the emotion of love. It feels like trying to shake hands with an octopus. There’s more going on with love than I can say.
So, although there is much more to say about love, I can’t bring myself to say another word about it. I give up.
In next week’s episode of this podcast I’ll explore that emotion further. The subject of next week’s episode will be the feeling of surrender.
Until then, thanks for listening.