Most of us can name love when we experience it. It may feel like warmth, support, care, closeness, or safety. It may feel like unconditional acceptance from someone who allows us to safely share all facets of ourselves, including our fears, imperfections, and misdeeds. We may feel familial love and a sense of belonging with our parents, siblings, and close friends. We may feel romantic love with a partner, and we may feel love in the unexpected kindness of a stranger. We may also experience love in nature and among living creatures in the natural world.

We’ve also witnessed love through small and monumental acts of generosity, selflessness, and compassion in others: the loving care of someone attending to a sick or needy friend, the self-sacrifice of organ donors, and the efforts of volunteers responding to a need in their community. After the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we saw countless acts of generosity and loving-kindness as people opened their hearts, homes, and wallets in response to human suffering.

Clearly, giving and receiving love requires a vulnerability and openness that may seem risky in a world filled with violence, injustice, pain, fear, and intolerance. It takes great courage to love in the face of hostility, but that’s often where love is most needed and effective. This is why many spiritual leaders throughout time have advised humankind to cultivate and tap the collective power of loving hearts to transform our world when economic and political solutions fall short.

Whether romantic, platonic, or altruistic, we all know love when we experience it—an expansive openness, a flood of energy or glowing feeling, an unconditional acceptance, and the acknowledgment of a greater good in all of us. We each have our own stories of love to tell and in telling and hearing these stories, we can broaden our ideas about where love exists in our lives and where it may be missing. We can learn to see love in new ways and places, to use it as a resource for problem solving, and, perhaps, to begin viewing the people and events in our lives through a lens of love.

Download Conversations About Love, which includes essays and other conversation resources.

Love is good for your health!

Studies have shown that helping others contributes to longevity, better mental health, boosting the immune system, reducing stress, and diminishing the effects of physical maladies.