What Is Love? A Journey Through Science, Culture, and Psychology

If you’re going to spend a year exploring love and fear, you should probably understand what love actually is. So I looked it up. Merriam-Webster calls it “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.”

That felt like describing an ocean by holding up a single drop of water.

So I kept digging. What I found was that love isn’t just an emotion. Neuroscientists like Helen Fisher spent decades proving that love is a drive, like hunger or thirst. When you’re in love, a part of your brain called the ventral tegmental area floods your system with dopamine. And here’s the part that changed things for me: love actually quiets the amygdala. Your brain’s fear center. It literally chooses connection over protection.

That’s not poetry. That’s brain science.

But the research was only one layer. The ancient Greeks had eight different words for love because they understood that one word can’t hold all of it. The Sanskrit traditions saw love as a journey from desire to universal connection. Ubuntu, the southern African philosophy, says “I am because we are.” Modern neuroscience keeps confirming what these cultures knew centuries ago.

What struck me most was attachment theory. The way you were loved as a baby creates a template for every relationship that follows. Consistent care builds secure attachment. Inconsistent love trains the brain to stay on alert. That means fear doesn’t just compete with love. It gets wired into us before we have words for either one.

This was the first deep dive of the Heart-Strong Adventure, and it rewired how I think about everything that followed.

Read the full piece on Substack

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org