We all desire to be loved. We only fully flourish when we are loved. Being loved affirms our goodness as human persons. Our search for love shapes so many of our actions and pursuits. Some have even suggested that all of our reasons for action arise from love, and that all of our various emotions and passions are ultimately grounded in love.
In spite of this universal desire for love, the topic is strangely absent from most academic work, and certainly largely absent from any discussions of social policy. There is a discrepancy between the centrality of love in our personal lives and its comparative absence in our public discourse. If we are to promote human flourishing adequately, we should seek to close this divide and to better promote love.
Understanding Love
At the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, we recently published an article on love and human flourishing, trying precisely to make this case. We discuss the very notion of love, the centrality of love within the world’s religious traditions, and the sweeping claims sometimes made about love in disciplines ranging from philosophy to sociology, psychology, and even business management.
We review various streams of empirical evidence that suggest that love plays a powerful role in the promotion of human flourishing, and we put forward potentially radical proposals for how love might play a central role in social policy. We ultimately argue that love has tremendous underutilized potential to enhance human flourishing.
As we’ve noted previously, love might be understood as having both a unitive and a contributory component. The unitive component of love seeks union with the beloved person or object. The contributory component seeks the good of the beloved for its own sake.
When we use the word “love” in ordinary language, either one or the other or both of these unitive or contributory components is present. In human relationships, however, we almost always desire both.
That experience of being loved, and of loving, helps us to feel our value as persons. That someone wants to be with us, and that someone cares about our good, helps affirm who we are. Whether that love occurs in romantic relationships, in parent-child bonds, in friendship, or in our everyday interactions, love fulfills a fundamental part of who we are as persons.
Love and Flourishing
Being loved and loving are rightly desired for their own sake. However, love contributes to our flourishing in numerous other ways as well.
While rigorous empirical studies of love are still comparatively rare, several streams of evidence, closely related to love, suggest powerful effects of love on human flourishing. Longitudinal studies on parenting, for instance, indicate that parental warmth or love over time helps develop greater psychological, emotional, and social well-being among children and reduces the likelihood of subsequent depression and drug use. Studies of marriage and relational quality within marriage indicate powerful, long-term, beneficial effects on health and well-being for both spouses.
Studies of forgiveness, which might be viewed as a restoration of love—a replacement of ill-will with goodwill—following an offense, indicate important effects on lowering depression and anxiety, increasing hope, and improving flourishing. Randomized trials of compassion interventions likewise suggest powerful effects on well-being.
And numerous longitudinal studies and even randomized trials of acts of kindness or volunteering, which can manifest love, similarly indicate important effects on health and well-being. While we are arguably in need of a more rigorous empirical study of love (an “epidemiology of love”), there is a lot that already suggests that love is critical for human flourishing.
Relationships Essential Reads
Love and Social Policy
Given the powerful effects of love on human flourishing, love should be given a more prominent place in social policy as well. Given how many spheres of life potentially manifest love, the opportunities for fostering it are essentially limitless, whether this is within the context of close relationships or even our day-to-day interactions with others, through a “love of neighbor.”
It is perhaps because of the very ubiquity of the opportunities to promote love that we neglect to do so. But that neglect ultimately hinders our own flourishing. More needs to be done.
We need to regularly reinforce the importance of love in parent-child relationships; indeed, it may be the most important factor in successful parenting. We should promote love and acts of kindness within schools, and a universal respect for or love of one’s neighbor, to facilitate learning, formation, and lives of love. We should promote love within workplaces, both among employees and among business leaders, encouraging them to genuinely care for those they manage and to create a caring climate.
We should promote love within medicine, which is not only about the provision of services, but also the provision of loving care. We should promote love within religious communities, where often there is a powerful formation in love of neighbor, which can then lead to important contributions to the common good of society as a whole. We should promote forgiveness within society, which helps to restore love and further promotes individual and social flourishing.
We need to promote love—a love of neighbor and even love of enemy—in our communities and political life if we are to avoid increasing polarization and discord. We should arguably even ground our economic relations in what will allow for love and adequate time with one another in order to love.
We need a more robust academic study of love to understand its distribution and determinants and to promote it. And we need to have our news media and social media interactions governed by love, pointing towards what is good, and not contributing to societal discord. All of this is needed if we are to promote love and to promote flourishing. The opportunities are almost endless, but so often is their neglect.
Love of Neighbor Initiative
Given the importance of love in our lives, in our society, and in our flourishing, we at the Human Flourishing Program are in the process of launching a new Love of Neighbor Initiative aimed at promoting love throughout society. We hope to build this initiative over the course of the next year to:
- promote love in all different types of relationships—from parenting to schools to friendship to religious communities and beyond
- begin nationally representative tracking of love of neighbor and love of enemy assessments to see how these are distributed throughout society and how they may be changing over time
- encourage the promotion of love within public policy, and the recognition of love as a social determinant of health from institutions ranging from the World Health Organization to the American Psychiatric Association and the DSM, and elsewhere
- support campaigns promoting a universal love of neighbor
If you are interested in joining this work or supporting it financially, we would be delighted to hear from you. For a fuller human flourishing, we need to be striving towards love and towards what some have called a “civilization of love.” The research is compelling, and the policy and promotion opportunities are numerous. Let us seek together to better love one another.
