Why We Need to Take Love Seriously |
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Using “love” for everything blurs its meaning and weakens its force.
Inflated love language shifts focus from relationships and commitment to personal satisfaction.
Misusing “love” can deepen loneliness by weakening meaningful connection.
We live in a time of contradiction. We have the technology to allow for extraordinary connection, yet people feel incredibly alone and isolated. We could have almost anything at our fingertips, yet we find ourselves frustrated or bored. We are living in the information age, yet our world is marked by mistrust and apathy. We use the word “love” all the time, yet the way we use it increasingly blurs what it actually means.
Part of the problem in how we use the word “love” is due to semantic inflation and a broader shift in our culture towards hyperbolic language, whereby stronger and stronger expressions are used to convey the same feeling because our everyday language has lost precision and weight.
For example, when asked how something was, “good” is no longer enough. We say it was “amazing!” At the end of every interview, people no longer say “thank you,” they say, “thank you so much!” Similarly, instead of just liking something, we say we “love” it. Today, if we don’t use the most intense form of description, we risk coming across as giving a slight critique.
However, when we use stronger and stronger expressions to convey the same sentiment, we flatten distinctions between........