What is love

“I love you” is a declaration, a headline, a headline without the article, a piece of language that points toward a reality but it does not create it.

It is a prior, not a posterior. It is "cheap talk" in the game theory sense, it costs almost nothing to utter, and for that reason it can never carry the full freight of love. Love is an economy of attention and sacrifice, a repeated game in uncertainty, a long series of choices that are observable and therefore falsifiable. The words are a promise of future evidence, the question is whether the evidence shows up, especially when it is expensive, inconvenient, or dull.

Time exposes everything. In the first weeks, novelty subsidizes sincerity, the signal is noisy, the variance is high, everyone is on their best behavior. Over months and years the stochastic becomes deterministic, the run rate of your care either compounds or decays. Love that lasts is not an event, it is maintenance, which is why the feeling of being loved correlates less with the drama and more with the reliability. Reliability has a physics to it. Momentum resists small shocks, consistency lowers latency in the nervous system, the body relaxes when predictions match outcomes. The person you love is running a predictive model of you at all times, a soft Bayesian machine, and your micro actions are data points. Do you do what you say you will do. Do you repair after you fail. Do you create an environment where their nervous system can idle at a lower frequency, where vigilance is not required. Safety is not a mood, it is a measurable property of repeated interactions.

To love is to allocate scarce attention with intention. Modern life is an attention market, everything bids, almost everything pays in dopamine and residue, and love loses if it is forced to compete at auction every day. You make someone feel loved when your attention is where your feet are, when you remember details without turning memory into leverage, when you ask a second question instead of switching topics back to yourself. Curiosity is love with patience attached. To study a person is a choice, to keep studying them after you believe you already know them is a deeper choice, that is where love matures. The mind changes over time, the private myths evolve, grief arrives and rearranges the furniture, and you either update or you clutch yesterday’s model and call the other person inconsistent. “I love you” that is unwilling to update is attachment to a story, not devotion to a human.

There is a side to love that rarely gets named because it sounds unromantic. Agreements are the scaffolding of trust. What is in bounds and what is not, what happens when we are tired, how we handle money, how we fight, how we repair, what we do when one of us is in a tunnel and cannot see out. A couple without agreements uses faith where explicit would serve better. Warmth cannot accumulate in chaos, it dissipates.

Love is also an ethics of attention to pain. People do not feel loved because you never hurt them, that is impossible, they feel loved because when you hurt them you stop, you notice, you take responsibility without a defense brief, you make a specific amends, and you change a behavior in a way that can be seen. An apology is not a performative collapse, it is a directional statement that predicts a traceable difference in the next ten interactions. The nervous system watches for differences, not speeches. When repair is consistent, trust becomes a low friction surface, and joy rides more easily on top of it. Without repair, “I love you” becomes a paper phrase, a stamp placed on unpaid invoices.

To love is to honor boundaries as much as needs. If I cannot say no to you, my yes to you is meaningless, it is theater under duress. People confuse merging with intimacy, but intimacy is the opposite, intimacy requires two intact selves with permeability that is chosen, not enforced. Merging feels flattering for a season, then becomes suffocation. Love that lasts builds a home for autonomy, it allows for private rooms in the shared house, it respects that the other person has a right to mystery. You cannot be curious if you already claim omniscience, and you cannot be respectful if you believe access is the same as care.

There is the body. Love is not just mind, it is logistics and chores, it is food that appears when someone is depleted, it is the blanket adjusted at 3 a.m., it is the calendar protected so that the real conversations can happen without a clock choking them out. People feel loved when the mundane is not beneath you. Many speak eloquently about devotion, fewer take out the trash without being asked.

Attention has a qualitative aspect. There is clinical attention, which solves problems and moves on, and there is contemplative attention, which witnesses without trying to fix. The first says, let me handle it. The second says, I see you while you handle it. Healthy love alternates, it knows when solutions are needed and when presence is the solution. People do not feel loved when they are treated only as projects, they feel loved when they are treated as landscapes worth standing in, even when the weather is not great.

The work is to keep desire alive without letting fantasy take command. Desire thrives when the other remains other, when you admire them as a sovereign mind and not as a mirror. Fantasy collapses difference, it manufactures certainty, it refuses to be surprised. Long term love needs surprise, not as chaos, as renewal. You learn a new corner of them, you let them change you, you become interesting to each other because you are both still in motion.

All of this runs on honesty that is not cruel and kindness that is not dishonest. Honesty without kindness is aggression in moral dress, kindness without honesty is sugar that rots the structure. You tell the truth about what you need, you hear the truth about your impact, you refrain from litigating tone when the content is the part that matters, and you extend to each other the assumption of good faith until evidence says otherwise. When evidence says otherwise, you do not ignore it, because love without reality testing becomes narcissism times two.

There is a humility required. You will fail at this work, you will say the wrong thing at the wrong time, you will disappear into yourself when the other needed you available, you will under deliver and over explain. The humility is to adjust rather than justify. The dignity is to keep choosing the person while you grow the skills that make your choosing believable. You hold the morning check in, you keep date night on the calendar even when you are bored, because you understand that intimacy has the same physics as strength training, consistency beats intensity.

You make someone feel loved when their nervous system predicts that you will not make them pay for their vulnerability. That prediction emerges from your pattern of behavior under stress. Do you escalate, do you disappear, do you retaliate, or can you stay. Not perfectly, consistently enough that the model trends toward safety. Over time the words “I love you” regain meaning, they are not currency devalued by inflation, they are a receipt for a thousand small transfers of attention, a record of payments made in advance of demand.

The work of love is the continuity of care, the daily capital allocation of attention, the agreements that govern the rough weather, the repairs that follow the breaks, the curiosity that refuses to close the case, the humility that chooses reality over fantasy. People feel loved when love is observable, when it is something they can point to without explanation. Over a sustained period of time, that is the only version that survives.

Everything else is a story you tell yourself to avoid the labor,

and labor is the point.