Love

Love is a flow rather than a feeling or a bond, which is the difference between this definition and every ordinary one. A connection has to exist and energy has to be moving through it, so love is what is happening rather than what is held, and it stops when the movement stops. Marsh's other formulations line up with this. Love is a desire to create or maintain euphoric bonds, love is the creation of a shared animus through balanced interaction and love represents not only connection but a flow of energy through that connection. Its opposite is hate, the experience of expending energy to create or defend an endosocial membrane, so the two are opposite operations on the same infrastructure. What the definition rules out is more interesting than what it includes. It rules out love as an attachment to a particular person independent of what passes between them, which is what Marsh has in mind when she says love is not what so many authoritative endo-ideals would have it, and when she rejects the Hegelian erasure of self as emblematic of an abusive relationship rather than a description of love. It rules out the endoself version entirely, since in an endoself love is replaced by lust. And it grounds the line she quotes from Anais Nin, that love never dies a natural death but dies because we do not know how to replenish its source, which is a statement about supply rather than about feeling.

Psychology has typologies rather than a definition, with Sternberg's triangular theory of intimacy, passion and commitment and Lee's love styles among the best known, and attachment theory treats adult love through early bonding patterns. Philosophy asks whether love is directed at properties or at a person, and the Greek distinction between eros, philia, storge and agape divides the territory by kind. Erich Fromm's argument that love is an activity and an art rather than a feeling that happens to a person is nearest to Marsh's framing. She goes further by specifying what the activity moves, which makes love measurable in principle and makes its object incidental, since the same definition covers love of a person, a place, a practice or a body of work.