What Love Looks Like

Among people I know, there are a few who appear to be particularly magnetic.

Most people, regardless of age, gender or sexual orientation, are attracted to these particularly magnetic people. Not always in a romantic context, but their magnetism does attract more romantic potential—if only because the quantity of people attracted to them, generally speaking, is high.

What is at the core of this very general attraction? What draws one person to another—not just for the sake of reproducing, for the sake of having a soulmate, or for the sake of having someone?

I’ve named this project “What Love Looks Like,” but I haven’t yet specified the exact variant of love that it examines. Nor do I want to.

In my pursuit of understanding what love is—in books, online, in my life and in others’—I’ve been repeatedly directed back to one overarching theme: happiness*. Where it comes from. How to get it. How to give it.

The confines of humanity’s relationships limit its individuals’ capacity to make each other happy. Or to be happy. A parent or romantic partner might want to make their loved one happy, but fail to achieve that end simply because they are acting in accordance to how they think a parent or romantic partner should act.

They equate happiness—or lack thereof—with that particular context, when the potential for either is much, much larger. They have to love a loved one as a person first—in the general sense, and thoroughly—before loving them as a child or partner.

Love doesn’t have to be blind.

Also, I wrote this very long caption because my mom told me she was tired of reading my posts and not understanding them.

*And by that default: faith-based systems and organized religion.