Late on a Saturday night of St. Laurent bar-hopping, you walk into the dingy bathroom of Bar Bifteck to find a college-aged stranger kneeling over the toilet. They appear to be alone. You go over and ask if they are okay, offering to hold their hair back or to get them some water. Eventually, they recover, and before you part ways with your stranger, you say, “I love you, get home safe!” But what does ‘love’ mean in this context?
Love is traditionally defined as a strong feeling of affection and attachment towards something or someone. Even when used as a verb, ‘to love’ is to experience those feelings of affection and attachment, not to communicate some action taken on behalf of the lover. Furthermore, love tends to be reserved for someone (or something) with whom we are intimately familiar—not necessarily romantically, but in the sense that we are presumed to be deeply connected to them.
Under this definition, then, telling your bar stranger that you love them hardly feels justified, for how could you develop such feelings for someone with whom you were only briefly acquainted? It would almost appear to depreciate the value of the word itself, or to misrepresent our socially venerated definition.
It is in situations such as the sick solo stranger where our restrictive definition of love fails us. Love should not be defined as merely a feeling that we experience ourselves, but as an action which we can perform, one which demonstrates the unrestricted kindness and care that we carry within us. ‘Love’ functions as a verb in the same way that ‘help’ or ‘listen’ does, in that there must be some recipient: To help someone, to listen to someone, to love someone. The closest equivalent to using ‘love’ in this way is to see it as performing an act of kindness—doing something for someone, whether they are your closest friend or a stranger you stumble across, just for the sake of doing a kind thing. By expanding our definition of love, we realize our limitless capacity to pour our hearts into the world.
This alternative definition is not unrelated to the mainstream understanding of love. I believe that our capacity to love as a verb—as I have described it—may be ultimately rooted in love as a feeling. But the action of love is important for precisely this reason: It is through the action of love that we are able to express the feeling of love within us, to share it with the world around us. Of course, there are moments when it is only possible to feel love for someone from afar, without your feelings ever actually reaching the person they are directed towards. However, when the opportunity to act on love presents itself, we must seize it if we want the people who surround us—regardless of our emotional proximity to them—to feel our love as well.
This is especially true in an era when anti-empathy campaigns run rampant; it feels as though every day I come across yet another self-assured vlogger purporting that we do not owe each other anything, despite our immense ability—and responsibility—to look out for our peers. When loving someone is depicted as a burden, or a duty unfairly shoved upon us, it only becomes more important to love in every sense of the word.
So, yes: When you hold that stranger’s hair back, you are, in fact, loving them. Whether it is love that you are experiencing as warmth inside your heart, love that you are doing as an act of kindness, or some wonderful combination of the two, you are exercising your capacity to care. When you write a thoughtful card, when you hold the door open for someone behind you, when you cook for your friends and family, when you give someone a good, long hug—these are all means by which we demonstrate the true beauty and openness of our souls and how capable we really are of supporting one another. These are all ways in which we love. I implore you to act on the love in your heart, in the things you do, in every little corner of your life.
