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Love is not a feeling. Love is as love does. ~ Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Enough with words of love!
Enough with expressions of feelings of love!
Enough with romanticized and transient fallings in love!
Let’s stop the falling!
Love is not words. It is not feelings. It is not becoming obsessed with an object of love.
Love is as love does.
Love is action. It is conscious striving for the beloved. It is willful thoughtfulness properly planned and executed.
Love is what is expressed in acts of love. It is volitional, not emotional. He or she who loves is engaged in works of love.
When you love somebody, ask yourself, “What acts of love have I done for him?” When somebody tells you he loves you, try to see beyond his words: are there any acts in the foreground – or even in the background?
Love is not a feeling that sits; it is a force that acts.
Words of love, feelings of love, and fallings in love are not necessarily bad or empty, provided they are followed by relevant action.
“Loving” is not even a “state of being,” like, say, sleeping or thinking. It is a “state of doing.”
Photo by Linda Hannum
There are feelings that stand alone and need nothing beyond themselves to establish their reality: the feeling of awe or fear, the feeling of accomplishment, of restful contentment, of artistic or spiritual contemplation. Yet love belongs to another category of entities that are not quite stand-alone feelings. Just as “feeling daring” may result in acts of bravery, loving is irrevocably connected to the visible expression of loving acts. Stand-alone “feelings of love” are as meaningless as the courage of a supposedly brave man who simply talks about the brave deeds he intended to do, but never did! Love, just as bravery, is not static. “Loving” is not even a “state of being,” like, say, sleeping or thinking. It is a “state of doing,” such as working in your office, or on the construction site, or fetching the wood for the fireplace. Consequently, loving is identical with love’s self-expression in real life. Loving is not an invisible entity. It is not ethereal, up there in the sky, nor hidden somewhere in the deepest recesses of our soul, nor sitting idly in some poet’s mind waiting to be written down. Rather, it can be seen in the outside world via the actions that emanate from it; it is revealed through the words and movements and actions of our body or mind that express our loving soul; and it becomes a poem of love only after the poet becomes engaged in loving acts – not before.
Furthermore, since loving is an act dependent on our own actions, it is independent of other peoples’ actions – including those of the beloved. In this sense, and unlike what common wisdom holds true, love is one-directional and need not even be reciprocated. One of the best expressions of this relinquishing of the need for reciprocation was given 2,000 years ago by Seneca in one of his letters to Lucilius in which he spoke about friendship:
“The wise man, I say, self-sufficient though he be, nevertheless desires friends if only for the purpose of practicing friendship, in order that his noble qualities may not lie dormant. Not, however, for the purpose mentioned by Epicurus…‘That there may be someone to sit by him when he is ill, to help him when he is in prison or in want’; but that he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, someone a prisoner in hostile hands whom he himself may set free.”
By practicing friendship we do not only do good to our friends, but to ourselves!
Photo by Anuvat Intarachune
In other words, we do not need a friend in order for him to do things for us, but so that we may have the opportunity to do something for him. We “need” him so that we may act for him. This type of “need” springs from our inner being outwards and becomes loving work. This loving service is simultaneously a way of practicing our own already-cultivated noble qualities, which will atrophy if they “lie dormant.” Paradoxically, as Seneca so ingeniously put it, by practicing friendship we do not only do good to our friends, but to ourselves!
In recent times, the psychiatrist Scott Peck distinguished between cathexis and love, or rather the “emotion of love” that is often misunderstood as love itself. Cathexis, put simply, is attraction with dependency: we cathect somebody (or something) when we want to own him or her, when we want to “get something from the person,” or even when we need the other person to nurture our own development with little or no regard for the other person’s well-being. Cathexis (in which he also classifies the state of “falling in love”) is needy and self-centered, and should not be confused with real love.
Through this Eastern ideal of work, we may expand the concept of “love-as-action” to encompass not just love for other people but for the whole animal kingdom and also for inanimate objects or even ideas…we work to maintain or enrich or defend them, respectively.
The concept of love as action directed towards the beloved without any thought of reciprocation and without any feelings of attachment or dependency is actually identical to the ideal of Karma Yoga, in which work is done for work’s sake and not for the rewards it may entail. Through this Eastern ideal of work, we may expand the concept of “love-as-action” to encompass not just love for other people but for the whole animal kingdom and also for inanimate objects or even ideas: We love animals when we do something for them (or at least leave them on their own without exploiting them); we love our plants and garden when we take good care of them, when we serve them; and, of course, we love our car, our art collection, our ideas when we work to maintain or enrich or defend them, respectively.
Photo by Linda Hannum
And just as the quality of every work is proportional to the passion with which it is done, the quality of love is related to the passion with which love generates acts of love. Going a step further, we may identify the quality of love with the quality of the loving work: Just as good work requires diligence, discipline, and thoughtfulness, “good love” is the product of wise action, not of blind instinct. As one needs to spend time and energy to learn one’s work or to master one’s craft, similarly, one must take up the responsibility of love by learning to love. And the first step towards this education is to unlearn the false and ubiquitously held notion that love is a feeling or something that resides invisibly outside this world.
But how do we learn to love? Well, the analogy of mastering a craft continues to serve us well here: Just as we become better at our craft by practicing it, we become better at love by practicing acts of love. When we meditate on the subject, we will discover that our very first understanding of love – which is also probably the deepest – was obtained through our observing and experiencing our parents’ loving acts towards us. Consequently, our first acts of love were the ones in which we strove to emulate our parents’ loving behavior. Through imitation, we cultivated our skill, our ability, our power to love through and by our loving acts. The extent to which our practice has been continuing ever since is the measure of our current and future ability to love through action.
Real love is conscious, thoughtful, and guided by the human will.
Some may be offended when they hear that loving can be taught or that love requires conscious effort, discipline, and more in order to be worthy of the name. After all, is not parental love instinctive, is not romantic love spontaneous, is not spiritual contemplation or love towards the Divine something that flows (or ought to flow) effortlessly from our own being irrespective of whether we do anything? Well, actually, when examined carefully, none of these are so: Parental love becomes beneficial love only when it is thoughtful and guided by wise decisions, not when it is purely “instinctive”; romantic love may or may not become true love only after the initial spontaneous honeymoon phase of cathexis subsides; and spiritual contemplation, rather than being idle, to quote Brother David Steindl-Rast, is “contemplation in action,” which he defines as “a way of coming to know God’s love from within by acting it out,” or as “that contemplation in which we realize God by acting in love.” Real love is conscious, thoughtful, and guided by the human will.
Photo by Anh Nhi Do Lê
Because love is work, and therefore identical with conscious loving deeds, we may use what we know of the nature of work to shed light on one final aspect of love-as-work that is often misunderstood: self-sacrifice. The highest expression of any work is some form of self-sacrifice (in its more ordinary and everyday meaning). In our job, this self-sacrifice, whenever it happens, is identical to the absolute self-forgetfulness in the job we do – we “sacrifice” our sense of self when we completely merge, so to speak, with our work, existing only in the work we do. As parents, we sacrifice our time, energy, money, and more for the benefit of our children. In friendship, we immerse ourselves in our friends’ worlds and are ready to sacrifice whatever we deem necessary in order to be of service to them. In its more extreme and rarer expression, self-sacrifice may mean literally giving one’s own life for the beloved. Thus we have Socrates gladly welcoming death in order to both defend his highest ideals and give the most perfect example of ethical conduct in history to his beloved students; and Jesus suffering and being crucified for the sake of his beloved humanity, thereby becoming the very embodiment, the paragon of the teaching Love is Action.
Although neither self-sacrifice nor suffering need be an integral part of loving action, still, it is by being prepared to gladly sacrifice one’s well-being, comforts, wealth, and peace of mind – and, if necessary, to welcome suffering too – that one may be said to have embarked on the Path of Love: a path that has nothing to do with feelings, and everything to do with deeds.
Nicos Hadjicostis is a writer, world-traveler, and former media executive. His award-winning book, Destination Earth – A New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler, is the result of a six-and-a-half-year around-the-world journey during which he treated the world as if it were one huge country, a single destination. To read more, and subscribe to his bi-weekly Tuesday Letters, visit his website.
Due to a traumatic past, I arrived in adulthood without some key emotions. One of them was loving feelings. My husband would describe to me his feelings of love, and I had to say to him, “I know I love you. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. But I don’t have those feelings.” He accepted that (bless him), but I did feel incomplete. My mother, on the other hand, did all kinds of good things for us kids for our well-being, but was full of rage and was the one who lashed out with beatings. For my sister and me, that rage wiped out any sense of being loved despite the deeds. So I believe there is a heart attitude needed to back up the deeds or love is incomplete.
Yes, of course, there must be a heart attitude with actions/deeds of love. It is the totality of one’s behavior that counts towards love, not just bits and pieces and certainly not actions of abuse. My heart aches for your childhood experience with your mother but it seems that you more than made it up it with your loving and supportive husband.
Although I agree with most of the essay, I still think that feelings of love are very important. As a mother whose now young sons have left home, I think that the feelings of love are what sustain this motherly love. I understand that what I did for them in the end counts more than any feelings I now feel at a distance, but these feelings are real to me and are part of what I count as love. I cannot feel the same for every other person. They are my sons. I understand the point the author is making, but I think feelings are also important.
THANK YOU! Sue ( and to all who are brave enough to step up and say “What! Hold on here ! )
I was hoping someone would step up to the “love plate” and share their “taste” of Love and Life.
There is way too must Moral Grandstanding going on in the cyber space communications around the topic Love. And it is potentially dangerous!
1) The subject of Love and Life must be addressed with 1)m FULL and OBJECTIVE understanding that there are TWO over all categories of Love.
1) Divine Love ( anther name for God / Source of ALL, manifest and Un-manifest ) and
2) Reflected Love ( specifically, Eros, Phylos, Agape )
But, always, holding in ones consciousness awareness that 1) Divine Love IS IN all the 2) kinds of 2) Reflected love. Always, no matter what!
Your example, Phylos Love, can only be understood by mothers , it is specific to the Divine Law’s creation of motherhood. To brush that off ( as if it could be done even intellectually ) would be a catastrophe for mankind!
Thanks for your reply Ed, but I actually very much liked Nicos’s idea about love as action. I only wanted to make the point that feelings too are important, but as I now see, Nicos has addressed this point below by responding to Kopita, who has made the same point as I did. I think in his reply he addressed our point quite well actually. He does not deny the feelings of love, but rather says that if they are TRUE feelings then they always lead to some form of action – in my case, that of my acts as a mother. I can actually relate to that.
Sue
and in the comment I made above I pointed to Agape Love ( Love between Mother and offspring ) is alway TRUE ..and again Agape Love is beyond duality. Of course it is action, action beyond intellectual comprehension …Any mother can and will demonstrate enormous strength ( a direct injection of Holy Spirit strength ) to protect her offspring. Again Agape is a classification of “Non-reflected” Love, the type of love more commonly called “Unconditional” in new are Spiritualism but due to miss use the word Unconditional carries an underlying tone of dependency with it….were as, “Non-refeleted” stays right to the point. It is fully contained in “Ones-ness” and complete Self-sufficiency.
The idea of love is so often associated with feelings that we forget that actions really do count much more. Without positive actions between two people who love one another, feelings don’t really matter that much. I really enjoyed this well-developed essay and its focus on love as action.
Loved reading this at Valentines! Much food for thought. Thank you.
The perfect essay for the perfect time of year!
I liked this essay, but I have a question: If “love is as love does”, how does it come about that so many great poems, paintings, music, and more, are the result of “feelings of love”? Seems to me that feelings of love are also powerful. Just thinking aloud here…
Good question. I indirectly address it when I write, “it (the poem) becomes a poem of love only after the poet becomes engaged in loving acts – not before.” The feelings become “something” after they are expressed in real life. In the case of the poet, the feelings become the actual poem that the feelings generated. So the poem itself is an act, an expression of love. But it is not only this: In order for the actual feelings to generate a true poem of love, they must have somehow been “dipped” in some experience of loving action that the poet must have already had in the past. As I write a few paragraphs later, love is being taught to us during our upbringing through and by the loving acts of others toward us. So a true feeling of love as we learn to experience it, just like the “contemplation in action” of Brother David, is “feeling through the urge to act.” So, to continue with the example of the poet: The force that gives rise to the feeling of love that forms the inspiration for the poem, as well as the act of writing the poem itself are both immersed in action. In other words, the feeling that gives rise to a poem is not a Feeling that sits but a Force that acts!
Consider this as a short addendum to the essay. ?
An amazing essay – one of the best I have read. It inspires me to get out and do something, everything I can, in this wonderful world of ours.
Well, it’s Valentine’s day today, Elizabeth, so you have a great excuse to DO lots of things! 🙂
This is a beautiful essay. To love is to act in love with everything you do.
Love – is what love does – that is it
Love is not a feeling that sits; it is a force that acts. …resonated deeply with me!
I really enjoyed how Nicos analyzes love in terms of action. Love is indeed only action. For our loved ones we can move mountains and part seas.
A thought-provoking essay that reminded me of the responsibility we each have to nurture our relationships. It is through our daily actions – big and small – that we truly give and receive the blessings of love, not only to and from our close friends and family, but also with regards to everybody
After all learning to love is really what life is all about and when one is torn within, it is a signal that a master class is being called into session. Thanks for the heads up!