What is Love?
Love is helping someone become more themselves.
This doesn't mean helping someone become "better" or "living up to their potential."
Love is knowing someone well enough to know what makes them uniquely themselves in this universe and helping bring more of that into the world. It means understanding what brings someone joy, what brings them peace, what they're meant to bring into this world, and helping them do that.
If your spouse is meant to help young men find purpose, love is helping them do that. Love, in this context can be, making sure they don't lose sight of their purpose, or doing things that free up their time.
If your friend finds immense joy organizing things, love is giving them the opportunity to do that for you, or teach you how.
The most loving relationships are when people do this for each other.
Love is not crushing someone’s spirit
It's common wisdom that listening to people makes them feel loved. The reason for this is that when you listen to someone, they're sharing parts of themselves with you. If you can be trusted (in practice) to hold those parts of them without crushing them or belittling them, you create a bond.
Listening well encourages people to share even more of themselves (the good and the bad), bringing more of themselves into the world. That's helping them become more themself. That's love.
Bonds like that lift people's sprits, and the web of all those bonds (big and small) are the barrier that keeps people from descending into dark mental places.
A well loved person is optimistic. A pessimistic person lacks the robust web of connections to prove to them that the world is meant to be a good place and full of human flourishing.
A pessimistic person needs more loving connections, and they need to be capable of loving to attract the right kinds of people.
Love is contextual
Sometimes love looks like protection. There are tender, young parts of people that were shoved down by someone in their past. They require extreme feelings of safety to be brought back out.
Sometimes love is confrontational. When you have a deep enough relationship with someone and you see them acting “out of character” or cutting off the parts of themselves that bring joy, confrontation is the right response.
Sometimes love looks like mirroring the other person. Many people have had their feelings so consistently invalided that they need someone to act happy when they’re happy, or mad when they’re mad, so that they can feel understood. Then they'll be able to confidently be themselves in other contexts.
Sometimes love is listening to someone as they share their most horrible, uncharitable thoughts (that they don’t really believe deep down) to exorcise those demons.
Often love is just listening.
Doing this work is worth it because people who are fully themselves are happier, healthier, and breaks the cycle of hurt people hurting people.
Community of love
No one person can perfectly love another. Everyone needs a collection of friends and family to draw out and resonate with different parts of them.
Many people expect a partner or spouse to be their everything, this cannot work and will lead to unhappiness and eventually bitterness.
By this definition, though, you can love anyone you ever meet. Pay attention to strangers or acquaintances, people always give clues about what they care about. You can ask them about what you notice and see them light up.
When in doubt just ask them how their day is going and ask questions and listen. You’ll create a bond, even if you never see them again.
You cannot love people you don't know
Loving someone deeply requires understanding them, their needs, their dreams, their culture, etc.
You're not all-knowing, so it's ok to focus on loving the people around you.
In fact it's far more effective to advocate for yourself and people you actually know instead of people you don't know.
Everyone’s truest self is a good person
People who do bad things aren’t being themselves. They’re meant to be good; there are just many layers of bad behavior and bad habits in the way.
The more you learn about people the more you learn that evil from people comes from evil done to them. That never excuses bad behavior and the effects they have on other people, but there are no people that are meant to be evil.
Love in the context of dealing with bad behavior is setting boundaries, so they cannot take advantage of you or hurt you anymore. It's even more loving to communicate where they went wrong, and leaving the door open for them to make amends (even if the relationship can never be repaired).
Loving people well, changes them. They become more themselves and they have the capacity and drive to love others well. Your work to love others will spread and improve the world.
Love conquers all
If you dig underneath all problems in the world, it comes down to not enough love.
Problems may seem to come from mistakes, scarcity, or bad policy, but those are layers on top of what we call "human nature", we let fear, lack of trust, or selfishness keep us from building heaven on earth.
If everyone woke up with perfect love for the people in their lives, utopia wouldn't come about immediately (there's not enough quality food, quality housing, quality healthcare produced on Earth yet), but we would quickly get there.
No amount of technology or policy will ever perfectly solve the problems that come from the human heart. We can get much closer to utopia without addressing the problem of love, but a change in heart is the only real, final, complete solution to the cause of all our problems.
This is why the Bible (both Old and New Testament) don't have a section on housing policy or a prescription on how fast new technology should be implemented. God has made it clear that people need "a new heart" for Heaven to come to Earth.
So if you want to truly change the world, focus on love more than politics.