I've been exploring where love and fear show up in our world, especially in men's lives. But as I started this adventure, something hit me. If I'm going to explore what it means to be pulled by love instead of controlled by fear, I should probably have a deeper understanding of what love actually is.
So, I looked it up. Merriam-Webster defines love as "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties." That's it? For me, that definition misses so much like how love changes over time. It ignores different types of relationships. And it says nothing about the spiritual and biological forces that make love so powerful.
I decided to dive deep into this question, exploring neuroscience, psychology, ancient wisdom, and cultural research. What I discovered changed a lot about how I think about love. If you find this interesting, there's a much deeper exploration with all the research and discoveries waiting for you at the end of this shorter piece.
What I Explored
The Brain Science of Love: Helen Fisher's research revealed that love isn't just an emotion. It's a drive, like hunger or thirst. When you're in love, your brain's reward center floods with dopamine. And here’s one of the things I found most interesting: love literally turns off your fear centers. The amygdala, always scanning for threats, gets quieted by love. This means love and fear operate through completely opposite brain systems, and they can't both be fully active at the same time. Your brain has to choose.
How Your First Love Shapes Everything: Attachment theory shows that the way you were loved as a baby creates a template in your brain for all future relationships. If you had consistent, safe caregivers, your brain developed secure attachment patterns with better connections between emotional and thinking centers. But if love was inconsistent or scary, your brain adapted with anxious or avoidant patterns. The hopeful part? Neuroplasticity means these patterns can be rewired through new relationships, therapy, and healing experiences.
What Ancient Cultures Understood: The Greeks had eight different words for love because they knew it comes in different forms. Modern neuroscience proves they were right. Each type activates different brain regions. Sanskrit traditions saw love as a journey from desire to universal connection. Ubuntu from southern Africa teaches "I am because we are" emphasizing that we are all connected. And Buddhist practices of loving-kindness literally change brain structure, growing areas responsible for empathy and emotional regulation.
The Nature Connection: Here's something that surprised me and lit me up because I am certainly a nature boy. Being in nature activates the exact same brain circuits as romantic love and bonding. Forest bathing triggers the same dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin as falling in love. We're hardwired to love nature through millions of years of evolution. When we don't get enough natural connection, our brains suffer the same way they do from relationship problems.
Indigenous Wisdom About Healing: Indigenous cultures have understood the connection between love, land, and healing for thousands of years. Recent research on land-based healing programs shows actual changes in stress hormones, immune function, and neurotransmitters. We see the same changes in secure, loving relationships. When Indigenous peoples say, "the land is a healer," they're describing measurable neurological reality.
What Love Actually Is
After all this research, I’ve come to really understand that love isn't just strong affection based on personal ties. Love is our brain's core system for connection and thriving. It's what happens when your brain chooses connection over protection, when it quiets fear to make room for something deeper.
Being pulled by love means choosing connection even when isolation feels safer. It means approaching differences with curiosity instead of judgment. It means having courage to face what scares you rather than avoiding it. Love often asks us to do the harder thing. Not for suffering's sake, but because it requires stretching beyond our fear-based reflexes.
This isn't about being soft. Being pulled by love includes strength, but it's strength in service of connection rather than domination. It's power used to protect and nurture rather than control.
To better gauge whether I am being pulled by love or controlled by fear, I've started checking in with myself using these questions:
Am I moving toward connection or away from it?
Am I acting out of curiosity or out of judgment?
Am I choosing courage or comfort?
Am I aligned with my purpose or getting distracted from it?
Am I working toward contribution or chasing recognition?
What This Might Mean
Love is a capacity we can strengthen. The neural circuits for connection and thriving are always there, waiting to be activated through relationships, nature, spiritual practice, and community. No matter how much fear we've experienced or how disconnected we've become, we can reawaken our capacity to love.
What would change in your life if you saw love not as something you fall into or out of, but as something you can develop? What would change in our world if more of us were operating from love instead of fear?
These feel like the most important questions we can ask. And the research suggests the answers might be a doorway to healing ourselves and our world.
Want to explore all the neuroscience, cultural wisdom, and research behind these insights?
Read the full paper here. It's a deep dive into what science and ancient wisdom can teach us about love, fear, and what it means to be human.
What Is Love? A Journey Through Science, Culture, and Psychology (Deep Dive)
The Question That Started Everything