Love.

The four-letter word to rule them all.  Love. A multifaceted psychological and physiological state of being. Summarised by this vastly inadequate, and cripplingly sweet four-letter word. Love.  

This tiny word speaks to the most intense feelings of affection, attachment and desire we can feel as humans. It speaks to a frenzy of activity in our brains’ greedy little reward centres. It speaks to dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin. To swiping right and walks of shame. To BFFs and bad tattoos. To “Yes” and “I do” and “Never again”. To “Rule, Britannia”. To Love Island fixations. To football violence and donkey sanctuaries. 

Love has inspired countless sonnets, and more than a 100 million songs - in fact almost 70% of songs making the top 40 charts in the UK are love songs. Love even, through the ages, prompted a war or two. 

In 1907, against the backdrop of a devastated Austro-Hungarian Empire, General Franz Conrad von Hoetzendorf’s romantic obsession with a married Italian aristocrat, Virginia von Reininghaus, may well have fuelled the flames of war. In his book The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark states: ‘It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this relationship; it was at the centre of Conrad’s life throughout the years from 1907 to the outbreak of the war, eclipsing all other concerns, including the military and political questions that came to his desk.’

Conrad’s misplaced and troubled love affair sparked his prewar determination of launching a pre-emptive and premature war against Italy and Serbia, and it’s widely believed that it ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. All in the name of love.

Whether you choose to make sense of love for yourself focusing on its more complex and sobering neurochemical aspects, or on its rather involved (but rather dull) cognitive processes, love remains powerful and unfathomable.  

For you, as for me, love may however simply be our saving grace. It may just be that for you, as for me, our biggest struggle have been self-love. Until you hear the story of Creation. Of Eden and Adam and The Fall. And finally you may understand the greatest love story ever told. Of God and man. It remains the thing that makes the world go round and life worth living. At least for me.

It’s the glue that binds our fragile and flawed human souls into couples; into families and into friendships. Without love there won’t be homes, or parties or weddings or funerals. No teams or clubs or causes or callings. No dog walks or bouquets, or dreams or arguments or hobbies or hurt. So very many other four-letter words start with just that - love.  
 
Hope. Heal. Care. Pray. Need. Stay. Chat. Soar. Safe. Meet. Rest. Home. Life. Live.