Here is the definition, plainly. Love is a state in which positive feelings, born of passion, are extremely present in a life over an extended time, lifting the person out of content into a child-like, care-free bliss. Each word is load-bearing — *passion*, *extended*, *extreme*, *out of content*. Drop one and you are describing something smaller that only borrows the name.
By "passion" I mean a process outside reasoning. The feelings of love are not logic-based and not reason-based. This is the exact line between love and serenity: serenity is feeling under the command of choice; love is feeling that has slipped command entirely. Passion is just the proper name for feeling that does not answer to thought.
Depression is love's opposite, built to the same shape inverted: an extreme presence of unwanted feelings, *not* born of passion, over an extended time, dropping the person out of content into emptiness and meaninglessness. Love is a state where passion is the engine. Depression is a state with the passion taken out.
What separates either from content is two conditions met together — extreme presence *and* extended time. Miss either and you have not left content; you have only had a strong afternoon. Content is a balanced scale. Feeling can press on either pan, but until it presses hard and long, the balance holds and you are still home.
"Positive" is not fixed across people. It is fixed only to the one feeling it. A masochist's love includes pain and suffering — and that is not a paradox, it is the definition working correctly. Love is the state of *what is desired*, whatever that is. Read another person's love by their wants, never by yours.
Notice how loosely the word is used. Most often "I love you" is only a dressed-up "I like you a lot." If that is all it meant, the hopeless romantics would be crushed to learn it. The honest phrasing is stranger and truer: not "I love you," but "you put me in a state of love." No one says "I anguish you." Love is the only state we pretend to *do* to another.
"He loves her." "They love each other." Both drift off true. The first projects love onto her as if it were a thing he aims; the second makes love a separate object floating between two people — and so a thing that does not exist. Love is neither aimed nor shared like an object. It is a state each is *in*. Mind the grammar; it is hiding the mistake.
Then is love something two people can truly share? It is the hardest question the state raises. There is a fault line between being in love *with* someone and being in love *because* of someone. In-love-because means the other person is the maker of your state — which means they hold the controls of you. That is real love by the definition, but it is not shared love. It is dependency wearing love's coat.
Shared love demands equality, and equality cannot be had by two people controlling each other. The only true version: both in a state of love *because of the relationship itself* — desiring the thing the two of them make together, not each other as possessions. It is the connection that must be wanted. Love that aims at the person is greed. Love that aims at the bond is rare, and is the only love I would call true.
Start from the smallest true thing I know: a life is a series of connections. You are always connected to something — a sound, a sight, a feeling, or, most of all, a thought. There is no bare moment with nothing on the other end of you. To be is to be connected. That is the ground the whole theory stands on.
First I thought there was one connection at a time. I was wrong, and I will show my correction rather than hide it. There are four, always, in every moment: one for the body, one for the mind, one for the soul/self, and one for time-and-space. Not one. Four — and exactly four.
The rule is one connection *per type*, not one connection total. You hold four at once, but only one of each kind. You are connected through the body to one thing, through the mind to one thing, through the self to one thing, through time-and-space to one thing — four lines out, no more, no fewer, at any instant.
"But what if I sense nothing, think nothing, feel nothing?" Then the nothing is the connection. Nothing is something. An absence of sense or thought or emotion is still a connection of that type — a line running out to empty. You cannot drop a connection. You can only connect it to void, and the void counts.
Now the keystone. A moment lasts exactly as long as its four connections hold unchanged. Change one — a thought turns over, a feeling arrives, the body shifts its sense — and the moment is over and a new one has begun. A moment is not a tick of a clock. It is a configuration. It endures until one of its four lines moves.
The four connections are not equal in kind. Three are *inner* — body, mind, self. One is *outer* — time-and-space, the ticker. And we live by the inner ones. Time and space change the moment constantly, but quietly. When an inner connection turns, the change is felt far more. This is the whole reason "time flies": you were lodged so deep in an inner moment that the outer ones passed unnoticed.
Time is not the clock. We built clocks to track dates; the clock is a tool, not the thing. Time is only what we can perceive. Stare at a second hand and your thoughts turn with each tick — you are making moments by watching. Stop watching and an inner sense of time runs instead, and it does not keep the clock's pace. The hour is not out there. It is in the perceiving.
And space is not merely where the body stands. Space is also a mindset, a feeling. You can sit in one room and be, in every way that counts, somewhere else. The "where" of a person is not settled by their coordinates. Time and space go together like latitude and longitude — but both are read off the inside, not just the map.
I owe a proof I have not paid. I claim only one connection per type at a time — never two thoughts, never two senses, truly simultaneous. I have asserted it; I have not proven it. I mark it here as a debt, not a fact: *that* there is one per type, I believe; *why* it must be so, I still have to show.
Time and space I have also left half-built, and I will not paper over it. I have said what they are *not* — not the clock, not the coordinate — and gestured at what they are: perception, mindset. But a full definition I keep deferring. The *When* of this system is real and unfinished. I would rather hand you an honest hole than a tidy lie.
Now the hard turn: I reject cause and effect as the shape of experience. Not because causes never seem to push effects, but because the chain never closes. M leads to N, but L led to M, and something led to L, back without end — an infinite wormhole. We are not causes and we are not effects. We are moments. To call us links in a chain is to lose what a moment is.
For cause and effect to be real you would need a *true* effect — something caused that itself causes nothing further, a place the chain stops. There is no such place. Every effect turns around and causes again. And if the chain ever did close into one cause and one effect, you would not have physics — you would have a creator, a destiny, every choice in a life already made. I see no true effect. So I see no chain.
What makes a moment, then, if not a cause? A thought, an emotion, a feeling — that is the whole of it. The moment is not the output of the moment before it. It simply *is*, configured by what it connects to. I held this rougher and surer in the early notebook than I do now; later I reopened the whole question of cause and called it the worst topic and the best. That reopening stands beside this, unresolved on purpose.
To learn love I had to go through Nietzsche, because no one forces the word harder. Begin where he begins, in the Gay Science: love compared to greed. The same instinct named twice. Disparaged by those who already have and now fear to lose it; glorified as "good" by the thirsty who do not. Lust, craving, and a hidden egoism live inside both. Love is not the opposite of self-interest. It is one of its disguises.
But Nietzsche does not leave love at greed. He turns it: somewhere on earth two people's greedy desire for each other gives way to a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them both. Its true name, he says, is friendship. Not the weak word we use for acquaintances — a continuation of love that has dropped the grasping and reached past the two who feel it.
Third, and strangest: love is the spiritualization of sensuality. To spiritualize is to wed the spirit of what you would otherwise merely crave — a pure and noble process, Nietzsche's great triumph over the Christianity that would have killed the craving outright. Sensuality is the fulfilling of desire. Spiritualized, it becomes love. Hold this one. It is the hinge the whole redefinition will turn on.
He says, too, that in love a man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The power of illusion at its peak. In love a man endures more, bears everything. Rose-colored is too gentle a phrase — it is a blindness that lets you carry weight you could not otherwise lift, and walk past truths you could not otherwise survive. The blindness is not a flaw of love. It is part of the equipment.
And there is madness in it. "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." We love life, Nietzsche says, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. So love is no side-dish of existence — it is near the center of why we stay. And it carries, built in, an element no individual fully controls.
One warning he gives I take to heart: lean too hard on satisfying your desires and the roots of love stay weak and tear up easily. Sensuality can rush love's growth and ruin it. The greedy, the merely hungry, never reach the shared continuation — the friendship. Want too crudely and you guarantee you will never have the thing worth wanting.
Now I weigh his three comparisons against my own definition, and I do not simply nod along. Greed first. Greed is not learned; if anything we learn *not* to have it. Love can be learned. So though love wears greed's lust and craving and egoism, the two are not the same thing — greed merely shows up *inside* love, often, and uncontrollably, because love's madness lets it. Against Nietzsche on this point: love is not greed.
Friendship next. A friendship is only a connection between two people — natural, unforced, no madness, no passion driving it, and not a controlling state. The rare shared love Nietzsche calls friendship is real, but it is not the *same* as friendship. He has compared the specific to the general and let the names touch. Against him again, gently: when love is shared, it is still not friendship.
Sensuality last — and here he is right. Spiritualized sensuality is a state of favorable feeling, born of passion and desire, bliss-like, blind with madness and stupidity. That is love, almost exactly. One difference only: duration. Spiritualized sensuality happens the instant its terms are met and need last no time at all. Love is those same terms held over an extended period. So I can now say it more simply than before.
Here is the definition refined to its hardest form: **love is a prolonged state of spiritualized sensuality.** This holds for person-to-person love. Strip the duration and you have a flash of spiritualized sensuality, gone as fast as it came. Add the duration and the flash becomes the state you live inside. Every earlier word survives — passion, blindness, bliss, the lift out of content — but now they are carried by one clean sentence.