Love? Now there's a subject that has made humans sigh!
We sigh because we lack love, we sigh because love shakes us up and turns our lives upside down.
And it's not just humans who sigh over love, there are also columnists and commentators: what more and better can be said about love than what has already been said or written 1000 times?
Love is like happiness: a real, universal feeling; but complicated to define, because it has so many faces, because it can be so different from one person to another, and even in the same person, from one moment in life to another.
And then, love and happiness are also ideals, often treacherous and confusing: "Am I truly happy right now?", "Is this love really true love?"
It's so discouraging that some prefer to give up, and say that happiness and love are illusions.
Listen to Houellebecq: "Don't be afraid of happiness, it doesn't exist."
Listen to La Rochefoucauld: "There are people who would never have been in love if they had never heard of love."
So, love is ultimately just a conceptual, cultural construct that we apply to a wide variety of feelings? Feelings like attachment to others, the pleasure of being together, sexual desire…
That's debatable. But what's certain is that every culture influences our vision of love. In the West, the literature of courtly love and then romantic love shaped us for centuries with its dream couples: Tristan and Isolde, Paul and Virginia…
And when I say shaped , I should really say conditioned .
Listen to what Alfred de Musset wrote in his two-act comedy, What Young Girls Dream Of : "Life is a sleep, love is its dream, and you will have lived if you have loved..." The implication being: if you have never loved, you will not have lived, or just a sub-life.
And after literature, there was cinema, the great love stories that have marked generation after generation: Doctor Zhivago, Love Story, The Bridges of Madison County, Titanic… For me personally, it's Out of Africa …
How could you not want to fall in love after all that? And how could you not think: "Well, it's simple, true love exists, it will fulfill all my desires, it will last forever, it will bring me eternal happiness..."
Well, obviously, in real life, it's more complicated…
Fortunately, alongside the culture that makes us dream, there is science, which makes us think.
The most recent and convincing studies tell us that love is a state of pleasant emotional resonance between two people, with an altruistic dimension (we want the best for the other person). It's simple: love exists when we rejoice in being in the presence of another human being, for whom we wish well.
This is the basis of all possible faces of love: friendship, affection, romance, tenderness, brotherhood and sisterhood, benevolence towards humankind…
On this basis, other ingredients are of course added: sexual desire, and there you have eroticism; the longing for the other as soon as he is no longer there, and that is passion; possessiveness and jealousy, and… that is the beginning of trouble! And that is also the end of love.
Because the most important thing in love is the desire to do good for the other, the ability to rejoice that the other exists and is happy; with us if possible, without us if necessary.
So, here's an exercise for the week, it's called "Back to the Basics of Love": think about all the people you love, whether it's marital, familial, or friendly love; examine each of these bonds of love; and ask yourself this: are you able to simply and sincerely rejoice that they exist and that they are happy, with or without you?
Think about it, and if necessary, get to work to love better…
Illustration: The famous musician Marin Marais, king of the viola da gamba, composing (perhaps) a love song… (Workshop of André Bouys, Portrait of Marin Marais with a viola da gamba, 1704, Musée de la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris).
PS: This article is based on my column from June 17, 2025, which you can listen to here; it was on the France Inter program, Grand Bien Vous Fasse.