Is Love Learned or Born in Us?

Reflections on Leo Buscaglia’s book “Love”

Is love something we learn, like riding a bike or speaking a language? Or is it already wired into us from the moment we’re born, waiting to be set free?

I’ve been sitting with this question ever since I finished reading Leo Buscaglia’s book “Love.” And I’m not sure I have an answer. But I think the question itself might be one of the most important ones we can explore.

A Chance Meeting

A couple months ago, I attended the Returning Citizens Luncheon in Norfolk, Virginia. I met a man named Briddge Orius. We had maybe ten minutes together, but the conversation went deep immediately.

At some point I asked him, “Do you know Ziggy Marley?”

He smiled. “Of course. Love is my religion.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” I told him.

Before we parted, Briddge recommended a book. “Love” by Leo Buscaglia. He told me it was the book that taught him the importance of loving himself.

I recently finished the book. And it’s stirred up more questions than answers, which feels exactly right for where I am in my Heart-Strong Adventure.

Who Was Leo Buscaglia?

Leo Buscaglia was a professor at the University of Southern California who became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his courses and books on love. Students called his class “Love 1A.” He didn’t teach romance. He taught the bigger question of what it means to be a loving human being.

He was known for hugging everyone he met. He gave passionate, emotional lectures that filled auditoriums. He believed love was the answer to most of what ails us, individually and collectively. And he spent his life trying to help people understand how to love better.

He died in 1998, but his work continues to resonate with people like Briddge, who found in his writing a pathway to self-love and connection.

What the Book Argues

“Love” is Buscaglia’s exploration of how we come to understand and express love. His central premise runs throughout the book.

Love is learned.

He writes, “Love is a learned phenomenon.” He points to research from psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists showing that “love is a learned response, a learned emotion.” How we love, he argues, is directly related to our ability to learn, who teaches us, and the culture we grow up in.

He traces how children learn love through interaction. A baby cries. Someone responds. The baby learns that connection brings comfort. Over time, through thousands of interactions, the child builds a template for what love means and how to express it.

Family structure, cultural practices, the way caregivers handle a child. All of it teaches love. Or fails to teach it.

Buscaglia makes a powerful case. He shows how children deprived of nurturing touch and connection often fail to thrive in life. Their development suffers. Some even die. Meanwhile, children who receive consistent love and attention develop better cognitively and emotionally.

“One will learn love only with fresh insight, with each new bit of knowledge, which he acts out,” he writes. Love isn’t something you fall into. It’s something you grow in through practice and learning.

The book is full of practical wisdom about choosing to love, about removing conditions from our love, and about dedicating ourselves to continuously growing in our capacity to care for others.

The Question That Emerged

About halfway through the book, something started nagging at me. If love is learned, why do babies who don’t receive love fail to thrive? Put another way, why do we need something we haven’t learned yet?

Buscaglia himself notes that infants have an intense need for love. “The infant does not know or understand the subtle dynamics of love but already has such a strong need for it that the lack of it can affect his growth and development and even bring on his death.”

A need for something we haven’t learned yet. That’s interesting.

It reminded me of research I’d explored in my deep dive papers on love and fear. Particularly what happens in those first weeks of life.

What the Research Reveals

Infants are born with something remarkable. For the first few months of life, their fear response is suppressed. Scientists call it a “sensitive period for attachment learning.” During this window, babies can’t afford to be afraid of their caregivers. They’re completely helpless. They need to bond with whoever is taking care of them, even if that care isn’t perfect. So, nature essentially turns down the fear system to allow love and attachment to take root.

Think about that. The fear system is already there. It’s just temporarily dialed down. And the need for connection? That’s already there too. The baby doesn’t learn to need love. The baby arrives needing it.

Helen Fisher, the anthropologist who studied love for decades, discovered that love isn’t just an emotion. It’s a drive, like hunger or thirst. When you’re in love, a specific part of your brain called the ventral tegmental area lights up. It floods your system with dopamine. Your brain literally chooses connection over protection.

Fisher found that love actually quiets the amygdala, your brain’s fear center. When you’re operating from love, whether romantic love or deep connection to anything, fear fades into the background.

Love and fear can’t both be fully active at the same time. Your brain has to choose.

Both Are Born in Us

Both love and fear are inherent. We’re born with the capacity for both. They’re fundamental systems wired into our biology.

But it seems that fear gets evolutionary priority. We need to survive before we can thrive. As we grow up, we develop protective mechanisms. Defense strategies. Walls. Patterns of behavior designed to keep us safe. These fear-based patterns aren’t bad. They served a purpose.

I’ve come to believe that over time, these protective mechanisms can block our ability to access the love that’s already in us. Culture reinforces this. Society teaches us what to fear and how to protect ourselves. Lived experience adds layers. Trauma creates walls that feel permanent.

We end up with all these learned fear-based patterns running in the background, deciding how we show up, who we trust, what risks we take, how much of ourselves we offer.

The love is still there. The capacity for connection never went away. But fear is running the show.

Maybe It’s Not About Learning Love

This is where Buscaglia’s premise gets interesting to me in a different way. He’s not wrong that we need to learn how to express and act on love. We do need to practice connection, vulnerability, care. We do need models and examples and repeated experiences that strengthen our ability to love well.

But maybe what we’re really learning is how to quiet the fear patterns enough to let love do what it naturally wants to do. Maybe the work isn’t learning love. Maybe it’s unlearning fear-based living.

Unlearning the belief that vulnerability equals weakness. Unlearning the pattern of isolation as protection. Unlearning the habit of judgment as a way to feel safe.

Not eliminating fear. That would be dangerous and impossible. But developing a different relationship with it. Recognizing when fear is giving us useful information about real threats versus when it’s just replaying old patterns that no longer serve us.

This connects to something else Buscaglia writes. “When you cease placing conditions on your love you have taken a giant step toward learning to love.”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re not learning to love. We’re learning to remove the conditions. To take down the walls. To step past the fear that keeps us contracted and protected.

We’re learning to trust that connection is possible. That we can be open without being destroyed. That love is strong enough to hold us even when we feel vulnerable.

Staying in the Question

I don’t know if I’m right about any of this. What I do know is that understanding how love and fear work in our brains and bodies matters. It changes how we approach healing and growth.

If love is purely learned, then people who didn’t receive love as children might be permanently damaged. But if love is inherent and it’s the fear patterns that need unlearning, then there’s always hope. The capacity is there. It just needs the space to emerge.

That feels truer to me. More aligned with what I’ve seen in my own life and in the lives of people I know who’ve done deep healing work. The love was always there. Buried under layers of protection. Obscured by years of fear-based patterns, but still there, waiting to be set free.

Coming Full Circle

Later this year, I’m sitting down with Briddge and his wife Cherrie for a Campfire Conversation as part of my Heart-Strong Adventure podcast. I can’t wait to explore all of this with them.

Briddge is the Founder and President of the United Haitian American Alliance. He comes from such a place of love and connection. I want to ask him what he discovered in Buscaglia’s book about loving himself. I want to hear what the book has meant to him over the years.

And I want to sit with these questions together. Is love learned or born in us? What does it mean to love yourself? What are the fear patterns we need to unlearn to access our full capacity for love?

I suspect the answers are more complicated and more simple than we think. I suspect sitting with the questions is more valuable than landing on definitive answers.

But that’s the adventure. Exploring where love and fear show up. Learning to recognize the patterns. Practicing the shift from fear-based to love-based living.

Not because we need to learn love. But because we need to remember it’s already there.

If this stirred something, I’d love to hear what came up for you. And if you haven’t read Buscaglia’s “Love,” maybe it’s time. Even if you end up disagreeing with his premise, the questions it raises are worth sitting with.