Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 2Love

That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special.

—Alexander McCall Smith

Love Defined

There are so many definitions of love. Just about every song I grew up with in the '80s was about love, including one of my favorites from Tina Turner, who asked, “What's love got to do with it?” Like most girls raised on princesses before we knew better, I thought I would know love when I found my own prince charming to save me from my unworthiness and make me feel loved.

Twelve years of Catholic schooling taught me that God was love. God loved every hair on my head. I could learn what it meant to love God, and this God would love me back. It was a reciprocal equation, like I learned in junior high pre-algebra. But it also meant that I didn't have to do the hard work of learning what it meant to love myself. That was the job of Prince Charming, or of God. Neither seemed very real to teenaged me.

In the introduction to her book A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman points out that we use the word “love” in such a sloppy way that it can mean absolutely nothing, or almost everything. I flinch whenever I hear the word love tossed carelessly into a sentence: “I love avocado” or “I love this show.” I often wonder, how is it that an avocado, or a mini-series, is loveable, but I am not? How can we be so casual about something as important as love in our personal lives but feel less free to use the word love in the workplace?

I remember ...