Love Is All You Need

Growing up, my parents always preached to my siblings and me that we need to love our family unconditionally — after hearing this repeated thousands of times, it became instilled in me. But what does loving someone or something actually mean?

Let’s take a formal approach, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has many meanings for love but I’ll only cherry-pick the first two.

It is defined as:

a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties

and

an attraction based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers

The first definition applies to friends and family. If you “love” your friends and family then, by definition, it means you have a strong affection for them. Okay, now to dissect this. Say I have a friend named Joe. Joe and I have been friends for a while — I like Joe. At what point, if ever, does my affection towards Joe transition from like to love? If it does transition then that must mean there is a cause for the transition; but what could be a cause of the transition? A cop-out answer is to say time… let’s use this anyway.

Consider I create a computer program that observes time, once the time crosses a certain threshold — friendship changes from like to love. For this example, the time threshold was passed therefore friendship type is set to love; what is different aside from the label? I…