LOVE · A PROPOSAL
On a claim that is mine rather than any tradition’s, what would count against it, and the vocabulary of every environment that has ever harmed anyone.
A group finishes something long together that did not go the way they wanted. They pack up in a car park. Somebody makes a joke that is not funny and everybody laughs anyway.
What is in that car park is not satisfaction and it is not consolation. It is not about the result, which was bad. Most people who have been in it describe it later in a slightly embarrassed way and change the subject.
There is a word for it, and the reluctance to use the word is doing a lot of work.
Here is the claim this collection is making, and I want it stated plainly rather than implied, because implied claims cannot be disagreed with.
The softening of the boundary described in the previous nine essays, and the thing people call love, are the same event under two vocabularies. The undividedness that shows up in absorbed work, in a coupled group, in the moment at the end of a hard contest — and the undividedness people mean when they say they love somebody — are not two phenomena that resemble each other.
That is a large claim. It is not established, it is not what any of the traditions in this collection say, and it is not something the research is about. It is my reading of what the reports have in common, offered as a reading.
And a reading that cannot be wrong is not worth much, so here is what would settle it.
If these are one event, they should come apart in the same places. Not just a shared description — a shared profile: the same conditions producing both, the same conditions blocking both, and the same signature of attention, which is loss of self-monitoring, distorted time, and attention on the thing rather than on yourself. On that account, somebody deeply absorbed in solitary, impersonal work ought to report something with the structure of love toward the material, rather than merely enjoying it. A good many people do say exactly that, which is where the claim came from.
If instead they are two things that resemble each other, you should be able to find one reliably without the other. High absorption, repeatedly, with nothing relational in it at all, and no amount of the first ever shading into the second.
And there is a case against part of it in this collection already. The eleventh essay describes depersonalization: the boundary between a person and their own experience going soft, distressingly, with nothing relational about it whatever. That is enough to rule out the loosest version of the claim — a softened boundary, on its own, is not love.
It does not settle more than that, and I should not pretend it does. Depersonalization is not necessarily absorption; it is a different condition that happens to involve a softened sense of self, and it can occur in company as easily as alone. So it tells against “any boundary softening is love” and leaves the narrower question — about absorbed work and the relational quality specifically — where it was.
So here is where the essay actually lands. A softened boundary alone cannot define love. Some absorbed and some relational experiences may well share an attentional pattern — that is what the test above would look for — but this collection has not shown that they are one event, and I am not going to write as though it has.
The traditions have their own versions and they are not this one. Prema, agapē, mettā, ren and fanā are technical terms in incompatible systems, and stacking them up as evidence would be the perennialism the closing essay refuses.
There is a short exchange in the Pāli canon that is worth knowing. Ananda says to the Buddha that good friendship is half of the holy life.
The reply corrects him: it is not half. It is the whole of it.
I use it because it is a genuine instance of a tradition putting relationship at the centre rather than at the edge — and because it is one instance, in one tradition, which is how it should be cited rather than as a chorus.
The sturdiest finding in the area is the relationship between social connection and health: Holt-Lunstad and colleagues found weak social relationships associated with mortality risk comparable in size to well-established risk factors, across a large meta-analysis.4 That has held up for two decades.
Below that the evidence thins quickly. Coan’s hand-holding study — reduced threat-related neural response when holding a partner’s hand — is clean, small, and routinely over-extended.5 The neuroscience of self-other overlap rests heavily on reverse inference and does not support what popular accounts claim from it.
And none of it bears on the claim above. That the presence of trusted people changes physiology is not evidence that absorption and love are one event. I am not going to pretend the research supports my claim when it is about something else.
The objection is not that the claim is unverified. It is what the word does.
The case against
Groups that describe themselves as families are not, empirically, safer. The language raises the cost of leaving, converts complaint into betrayal, and supplies a reason why ordinary protections are unnecessary among people who care about each other. This is the same finding the Desert collection reached from the opposite direction.
It runs in one direction, like patience and gratitude and joy in the Mussar collection. Nobody is ever told that the love in the room means the person in charge owes them something.
The protection is not the word and cannot be. It is whether the group can be interrupted — whether somebody junior can raise an inconvenient thing and have it land. A group that uses the word and cannot be interrupted has the vocabulary and none of the structure.
Nothing here generates it, and any practice claiming to is selling something.
What is available is naming. Use the accurate word for what happened rather than the comfortable one, at least to yourself. Most people who have been in that car park have never once said what was in it.
Say one true thing to one person about what they made possible. Specific, not warm. This is essay five’s instruction and it is the same instruction.
And run the interruptibility test on any group that uses the language. Who wanted something awkward from this group at a bad moment, and what happened? That is the only measure here I would trust.
Most of this is not an exercise.
I started this essay wanting to say that the boundary softening and the thing people call love are one event. Setting out what would distinguish that from a resemblance, and then remembering what the eleventh essay already describes, does not let me keep it in that form.
Where it lands instead: a softened boundary alone cannot define love. Some absorbed and some relational experiences may share an attentional pattern, and the section above says what would show it — but this collection has not shown it, and the honest report is that the question is open rather than answered in my favour.
Stating the test is what did that. A claim that cannot be wrong sounds stronger and is worth less, and this one got smaller the moment I asked what would count against it — which is the correct direction for a claim to move.
And whatever is true of the claim, the word is dangerous in groups. The protection is the interruptibility test rather than the vocabulary, and that part I would defend without qualification.
Name one occasion you have never named, privately and accurately. Then say one specific true thing to one person about what they made possible.
And run the interruptibility test on any group that uses this language: can somebody junior raise an awkward thing and have it land?
Terms are given in the language of the tradition they come from and are not treated as synonyms. Modern research is cited by author and publication.