Love: the Misplaced Importance in Relationships

You feel love, but do you truly understand it?

Since we read or hear this word in umpteen romance novels, movies, psychology texts, and social articles that talk about it or promote ways in which one can find or restore a lost love; I think it best to begin with an understanding of the word itself.

Looking in the Encarta online dictionary we find eleven different definitions as a noun and of which only one comes close. So, let's look at one that I think will serve us well. We can generally define love as a high degree of affection — or Affinity — for someone or something. The greater the affection, the more willing a person is to be in close proximity to that person or thing that is loved. When we add “sexual attraction” to that, we now have the definition of love as it pertains to interpersonal relationships.

Other types of love

There are actually two other kinds of love: the love or affection that men and women have for mankind (brotherly love) and the enforced or obsessive desire to be with another. It is the latter that we find most prevalent in society and which contributes directly to the crazy and destructive relationships that we see around us with their attendant failure and high divorce statistics.

Let us look at the second definition — a high degree of affection accompanied by sexual attraction for the opposite sex. This love does not stand alone in its importance to interpersonal relationships, though one would think so from all the songs and novels that have been written about it. It is in fact very dependent on two other closely associated factors.

The factors of love

The first of those factors is Reality — simply the degree of agreement that exists between two or more persons. In a relationship, one might find that both agree that musicals are a fabulous form of entertainment. The second factor and by far the senior is Communication — basically an interchange of ideas between two or more people. Right now I am in communication with you, the reader.

These three factors — Affinity, Reality and Communication — are interdependent upon one another; as one improves the other two follow, and conversely as one deteriorates so do the other two. For example, you may well recall a time when you were in a conversation with another person and as that conversation continued more and more common realities were discovered and so went up the affection or affinity between the two of you. Conversely if you're talking to someone and that someone expresses a disagreement with you on something that you consider important, you will experience a lessening of your liking or affinity for that person and an unwillingness to communicate with them to a greater or lesser degree.

The key factor

Communication is by far the senior factor because without it or with a poor ability in it, one is hard-pressed to improve one's affection or to find common realities with another. So the emphasis on love in interpersonal relationships is misplaced and should be put on communication.

Of course, there is much more to know about communication, but that is a subject for another article.