What is Love? - The Search for What We Already Are

What is love?

Most people would probably answer, I can’t explain it, but I know it when I feel it.

For something so central to the human experience, love is surprisingly difficult to define. We write songs about it, search for it, celebrate it, mourn its loss, and spend much of our lives hoping to find it or hold onto it. Yet ask ten people what love is, and you’ll likely receive ten different answers.

Some describe love as an emotion. Others call it an attachment, a commitment, a sacrifice, or a choice. We speak of romantic love, parental love, compassionate love, unconditional love, and even “loving to hate.” We say we love our spouses, our children, our country, music, coffee, sunsets, and old photographs. Clearly, we’re using one word to describe many different experiences.

Before we try to understand love, it helps to ask a simpler question: What exactly are we calling love?

Most of the time, we assume that love comes from the object we love. We believe a particular person makes us feel loved. A favorite place fills us with peace. A piece of music moves us. A pet brings us joy. If those experiences disappear, we naturally conclude that love has disappeared with them.

At first glance, this seems obvious. After all, how could we love something if it weren’t there? Yet everyday life tells a more complicated story. The object that once captivated us often loses its appeal. A new car eventually becomes just transportation. The song we couldn’t stop listening to slowly disappears from our playlist. The hobby that once consumed every weekend gathers dust in the garage. Even our closest relationships change with time.

The objects may remain largely the same, yet our experience of them changes dramatically. If love truly belonged to the object, shouldn’t it remain as long as the object remains?

Perhaps what changes isn’t love at all.

Perhaps it’s attachment.

Although we often use the two words interchangeably, Vedanta makes a careful distinction between them. Attachment is rooted in the belief that another person or object is necessary for my happiness. Love, on the other hand, seeks the well-being of another without demanding that they complete me. One is based on taking; the other on giving. One is born of dependence; the other of freedom.

This distinction explains why what we often call love can change so quickly. If I depend upon a person, possession, or circumstance to make me feel whole, then my affection is only as stable as the object upon which it depends. When my expectations are no longer met, disappointment begins to replace affection. The object itself may not have changed very much, but my relationship to it certainly has. This raises an interesting question. If people and objects can awaken love but cannot reliably sustain it, perhaps they were never its source in the first place.

More than two thousand years ago, the sage Yajnavalkya made an observation that still sounds surprising today. Speaking to his wife, he said:

“It is not for the sake of the husband that the husband is loved, but for the sake of the Self. It is not for the sake of the wife that the wife is loved, but for the sake of the Self.”

At first glance, his words seem almost cynical, as though every relationship were ultimately selfish. Yet that isn’t what he meant. He wasn’t reducing love to self-interest. He was pointing toward something much deeper.

Everything we seek is ultimately sought because we believe it will make us feel complete. Whether we pursue wealth, recognition, companionship, or romance, what we truly long for is not the object itself but the happiness we expect to experience through it. The object is only the apparent means. The sense of wholeness is the real goal.

This explains why every object eventually disappoints us. It isn’t because the object is defective, nor because there is something wrong with our capacity to love. Rather, we mistakenly attribute to the object something that never belonged to it. The world can reveal love, but it cannot manufacture it.

Think of those rare moments when life seems to become effortlessly complete. Perhaps you’re standing before a magnificent mountain range at sunrise. You’re listening to a piece of music that leaves you speechless. You’re holding your newborn child for the first time, or sitting quietly beside someone you care about without needing to say a word.

In moments like these, the mind temporarily stops searching. For a brief time there is no feeling that something is missing, no longing for a different experience, no comparison with what might have been. There is simply a quiet sense of fullness.

Naturally, we assume the mountain, the music, or the other person created that experience. But if they were truly its source, they should produce exactly the same experience every time. They don’t. The same mountain can be ignored when we’re preoccupied. The same song can become ordinary through repetition. Even those we love most can leave us frustrated on another day.

What changed? Perhaps the object did not create love at all. Perhaps, for a brief moment, it quieted the restless search that normally obscures it.

Vedanta offers precisely this explanation. Love is not something we acquire from the world but something revealed when the sense of incompleteness temporarily falls away. Objects and relationships become occasions through which our own fullness is recognized. The mistake is believing they are the source.

This understanding changes our relationships in subtle but profound ways. When we no longer expect another person to complete us, we are finally free to appreciate them for who they are rather than for what they provide. Love becomes less about possession and more about freedom. It no longer asks, “What can I get from you?” but quietly wonders, “How may I contribute to your well-being?”

This is why Vedanta does not ask us to become more loving.

It asks us to understand ourselves.

As Self-knowledge removes the sense of lack, the fear, possessiveness, and attachment that accompany it gradually lose their grip. What remains is not emotional indifference but an openness that expresses itself as compassion, generosity, understanding, and friendship. These qualities are no longer moral ideals that must be practiced. They become the natural expression of a heart no longer bound by dependence.

Perhaps this is one of the most overlooked implications of Vedanta. It is often presented as a path of knowledge, and rightly so, because knowledge removes ignorance. Yet the culmination of that knowledge is not merely an intellect that understands non-duality. Knowledge culminates in freedom, and the natural expression of that freedom is love.

This does not mean that everyone who loves is enlightened, nor that enlightenment is simply an emotional state. Human love is often mixed with attachment, fear, dependency, expectation, and projection. It is genuine, but it is rarely free. Vedanta does not diminish that love; it explains it. As ignorance gives way to understanding, love gradually becomes less possessive, less fearful, and less dependent. It becomes freer because the one who loves is freer.

So what is love?

From the standpoint of Vedanta, love is not something we manufacture, cultivate, or obtain from others. It is what naturally shines when the need to complete oneself through the world comes to an end. In other words, love is the natural expression of wholeness.

We often imagine that the purpose of spiritual inquiry is to become something extraordinary. Vedanta suggests something far simpler. It invites us to discover that what we have been seeking through every relationship, every accomplishment, and every cherished experience has never been absent. Love was never hidden in the world waiting to be found. It was quietly waiting to be recognized as our own nature.