What is love?
What Is Love?
Personal Wellness Solutions| Tampa, FL
“What is love?” is one of the oldest questions we ask, and one of the easiest to answer badly. We tend to describe love by the way it feels: the rush, the comfort, the sense that someone finally gets us. But feelings come and go. If love were only a feeling, it would disappear the moment the feeling faded. So what is love, really?
One of the clearest answers comes from the late Dr. Leo Buscaglia, a professor who spent much of his life studying love as a serious subject. His definition reframes love from something that happens to us into something we choose to do. And once you understand love that way, almost everything about your relationships starts to make more sense.
Who Was Leo Buscaglia?
Leo Buscaglia was a professor at the University of Southern California who became known, somewhat affectionately, as “Dr. Love.” After one of his brightest students died by suicide, he began wrestling with human disconnection and started a non-credit class he simply called Love 1A. It became one of the most popular courses on campus and grew into his bestselling book, Love: What Life Is All About. His work matters here because he treated love not as a mystery to wait around for, but as a skill we can learn and keep getting better at.
Leo Buscaglia’s Definition of Love
Buscaglia’s central idea is that love is learned, not something we are simply born knowing. We are not finished lovers waiting for the right person to switch us on; we develop the capacity over a lifetime. As he put it, “One does not fall in or out of love. One grows in love.”
That single shift changes everything. If love is learned, then it can be practiced, deepened, and repaired. It also means love has to be lived in action rather than just felt in private. Buscaglia argued that love can never be forced or bought; it can only be freely given. And, crucially, that you cannot give away something you do not actually have.
True Love Is the Willingness to Give of Yourself
If love is something we do, then at its core it is a willingness to give of yourself: your time, your attention, your patience, your honesty, and sometimes your comfort. Love asks us to show up for another person’s wellbeing even when it costs us something — a hard conversation we’d rather avoid, a Saturday spent helping instead of resting, the humility it takes to apologize first.
This is the opposite of love as pure convenience. Anyone can stay when it’s easy. True love reveals itself in the moments that ask something of us and we choose to give anyway, not out of obligation, but because we genuinely want the other person to flourish.
Love Is Not Just How Someone Makes You Feel
Notice how often we describe love in terms of ourselves: “I love how I feel when I’m with them.” That’s a real and lovely experience, but on its own it isn’t love — it’s the benefit of being loved. When the central question is “How does this person make me feel?” the relationship quietly becomes about what we receive.
Mature love can hold both. It enjoys the warmth and chooses the other person’s growth at the same time. Infatuation asks, “What am I getting?” Love asks, “What are we becoming?”
Why Reciprocity Still Matters
Giving of yourself is not the same as giving yourself away. Healthy love flows in both directions. Two people are each willing to give, and each is willing to receive. When only one person carries the relationship — always accommodating, always sacrificing, always the one who repairs — that isn’t deep love so much as depletion, and over time it breeds resentment, burnout, and sometimes the patterns we’d call codependency.
So reciprocity isn’t selfish to expect; it’s a sign the relationship is actually mutual. The goal isn’t to keep score. It’s to make sure both people are tending the relationship and tending each other.
True Love Helps Both People Grow
A good relationship doesn’t shrink the people in it. Buscaglia described loving relationships in terms of open arms — freedom rather than possession. When you love someone well, you give them room to become more fully themselves, not a smaller, more manageable version that fits your needs.
That means true love is mutual development. Both people are challenged and supported. Both get to pursue their goals, keep their friendships, and change over time. If a relationship requires one person to disappear so the other can feel secure, it has stopped being love and started being control.
Sacrifice vs. Self-Abandonment: An Important Clinical Note
When we say true love involves sacrifice, it’s worth being precise, because this idea gets misused to keep people in unhealthy situations. Buscaglia’s own principle protects against that: you cannot give what you do not have. Self-respect and self-care aren’t the enemies of love — they’re the source of it.
Here’s the difference I often share with clients:
•Healthy sacrifice is choosing to give from a place of fullness, with your sense of self intact. You can give, and you can also say no.
•Self-abandonment is erasing your needs, values, or safety to keep someone’s approval. You give because you’re afraid of what happens if you don’t.
Love asks for the first and never requires the second. If “sacrifice” consistently means silencing yourself, tolerating disrespect, or losing who you are, that’s not the cost of love — it’s a warning sign worth paying attention to.
How to Practice True Love Every Day
Because love is learned, it can be practiced. A few ways to make it a verb:
•Listen to understand, not just to respond — attention is one of the most generous gifts you can give.
•Repair after conflict instead of waiting to win it; the willingness to come back is itself an act of love.
•Keep your own identity — your interests, friendships, and values — so you bring a whole person to the relationship.
•Name your needs honestly, and make room for the other person’s needs too.
•Notice and protect the other person’s growth, even when it stretches you.
Frequently Asked Questions About Love
What is the difference between love and infatuation?
Infatuation centers on how someone makes you feel and tends to fade as the novelty does. Love is an ongoing choice to support another person’s wellbeing and growth, and it deepens with effort over time.
Is love a feeling or a choice?
Both, but the choice is what sustains it. Feelings rise and fall; the decision to keep showing up, giving, and repairing is what turns a feeling into lasting love.
Can you love someone and still set boundaries?
Yes — boundaries are part of healthy love. Because you can’t give what you don’t have, protecting your wellbeing keeps you able to love generously rather than from depletion.
What did Leo Buscaglia say love is?
He described love as a learned, active response that we grow into rather than fall into — something freely given, lived in action, and never quite finished, because there’s always room to mature in it.
Love Is the Answer We’ve Been Looking For
Step back from any single relationship and the same truth scales up. So much of our culture runs on division — we lead with our differences and treat them as the whole story. But strip away the labels and we’re far more alike than not: people trying to live, to be understood, to experience something good while we’re here. A lot of us are simply trying to survive the day.
I talk with people all day long, and I can tell you there is far more turmoil than love moving through our ordinary interactions — the curt reply, the assumption of bad intent, the reflex to defend instead of understand. None of that is making our lives better. Love is the answer we keep searching for everywhere else. When we lead with kindness and generosity — offering attention, extending patience, assuming the best in someone — we don’t just improve one relationship. We build a better life, and a better culture, one interaction at a time.
So let’s choose to do better. We can get better at this — all of us — and it starts with the very next conversation we walk into. If you want support building healthier, more reciprocal relationships, or untangling the patterns that keep getting in the way, that’s the work we do at Personal Wellness Solutions. Reach out to learn more about virtual and in-person counseling.
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