The Elementary Particles of Love

My good friend and spiritual brother, Paul Saltzman asked me about the meaning of love. My reply was like most people: love is an elusive quality we search for in our own lives as we bond with others. A mother’s love is one thing. The love of ice hockey another. The love of country, of friends, and of comfort, wealth, status and power. Once you start down the road of love, you soon discover it is attached to a range of events, objects and people. The feeling we experience comes to us in many forms — in films, music, photographs, paintings, or literature. Is love the same feeling in all of these cases?

A metaphor to examine love can be taken from physics. All observable matter is composed of three elements: up quarks, down quarks and electrons.

What we call love is formed from more fundamental elements. Adapting the three elementary particles for physics, we can view love as an emergent property. Love is the result of deeper states that when combined create the felt emotional state. Instead of quarks and electrons, when I observe love, I find the presence of three elementary states: caring, kindness and joy.

Each one carries part of the fuel that combines with the others for love to lift off and to stay in orbit around your life. In fundamental physics if you exclude, for example, the Up Quark, matter cannot form. In love the same holds true: exclude one of these states and love is impossible.

Caring

Caring about another person takes time and energy along with an empathy to understand that each of us wishes to be cared for. We do that by recognizing their dignity, their troubles, their suffering and misfortune. Life is more difficult than most people realize. Part of that difficulty is too many people think no one cares about them and they reciprocate by not caring about others. The way to diffuse anger, fear and hate is to care about what a person is experiencing and to assure them that despite what has happened to them or what they’ve done, they are still valued. They matter. If you make someone else feel they matter to you, they respond with what most people call love. It’s a rare quality. The wide the circle of inclusion in who we care about, the more we run the risk of depleting this resource we put out to make the world a better place. But to whom, when and where we expand our caring defines us. It is much easier to have narrow boundary markers about who we care about. When we expanded that boundary just a little bit, you’ve turned on the light of humanity in another person.

I prefer to be in the company of caring people. Caring comes so naturally to some people but in modern society, it can be replaced with indifference, inattention and thoughtlessness. If you see the suffering of others, you ignore it. You don’t register the pain. It may be those who need the most caring are those who never experienced what it was like to be cared for as a child. That absence is a lifelong malady. Anyone, though, has the capacity to care. It’s a muscle. It needs daily exercise. Like meditation, caring expels indifference as part of your world. You are more likely to experience a feeling of a sense community and belongingness. Caring is the handyman’s Caulking Gun. A handyman’s tool box is another useful metaphor when examining what is needed to construct love.

Kindness

One of the things living in Thailand has taught me is how important it is for a culture to value kindness. The Thais are kind to each other and often to strangers. Nam jai or “Water Heart” is a Thai saying that means someone who does one of those small acts of kindness that makes someone else’s life slightly easier, more convenient, enhanced in quality. Something as small as offering someone on public transportation with packages and a child a seat. I see these small gestures happening many times a day in going around Bangkok. Sometimes it is a smile. To be kind is to take steps to ease another person’s struggles or problems. It is also acts done for no other reason but to acknowledge that person is special. The opposite is someone who is mean, petty, or cruel. The profile of an unkind person is similar to the uncaring person; these characteristics are often found in the same person. To be selfish as an alternative to caring and kindness closes off the path to love. Can you truly love a petty, mean person? Can such a person love you?

We repay the importance of another person in our life not with money but acts of kindness. If kindness is the currency of a relationship, the couple will be forever wealthy. Without kindness, status and money are a poor substitute. They won’t draw people to you in the way kindness does. Try keeping track of small acts of kindness you’ve bestowed on others each day, and that others have bestowed on you. At the end of the week, go over the list and by doing so you will find a measure of how and who you love, and who return that love. If caring is the Caulking Gun, Kindness is the step ladder that reaches the hard to get places where people like a treed cat needs help to climb down to the ground.

Joy

Most of us have seen a small child’s face as her mother or father admires his/her latest drawing. Joy is one of the most underrated emotions. When you walk into the room and your partner doesn’t look at you with a sense of joy, something is missing. Some essential part of the human connection is the delight in the presence of another person. No one can be joyful all of the time. We are, after all, human, and we have moods that drive joy into the corner. The key is to maintain joy as the default. You always come back from whatever black dog day or week you’ve had to find joy in the company of another. Intimacy deepens the sense of joy. What keeps the joy alive between people who’ve known each other for years is to grow together over time.

The joy of discovery only ends when someone loses the sense of adventure or fails to push ahead with new paths of exploration, learning about the world, oneself and others. The flip side of joy is disdain. Whatever love is or isn’t, disdain murders love. If you are in the presence of someone whose eye-roll when you express an opinion, you experience no joy. Instead you withdraw and the scaffolding of love collapses.

Love arises when are in the company of a person who is caring, kind and joyful. That is a person who will never abandon you. We don’t abandon people we value and who nurture us and forgive our weakness.

Audit yourself. Do you possess these qualities? Are they a natural part of your day? Do the people around you have these qualities? The best relationships are equal ones. In this case the equality is in the measure of care, kindness and joy. If those are the bedrock of your relationship, you can weather any storm. And importantly, you will have experienced what people call love. Joy is like duct tape that binds us through fun, laughter and delight.

The Loveless

For many people, their toolbox doesn’t include these tools. If you are born and raised in a culture that devalues these fundamental elements, love becomes rare. Instead love becomes another brand, a slogan to sell you a product. The same part is when love is limited to notions of romance, it becomes unstable and collapses into narcissistic self-love.

When elements of love are assigned an important cultural value, the impact can be found in a general feeling of respect and dignity in the population. Ignore the elementary physics of love, and an emotional vacuum opens. What emerges is a hostile landscape populated by dysfunctional people who react with grievance, anger, and hate. Such an environment is vulnerable to a power play by a populist demagogue who assigns blame for their feelings of abandonment.

The challenge of our time is to reforest that desolate landscape, physically and emotionally, so that love can be replanted and we rewild our forests with seeds of caring, kindness and joy.