“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new territories but in having new eyes.”

Years ago, in Chile, a scientist dared to speak of love as part of his scientific argumentation. A beautiful approach, no doubt, but many accused him of that not being science.

I, curious about this debate, approached the work of that scientist, the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana (1), and as a result of this incursion, my vision and understanding of the human condition expanded in ways I could not have even imagined.

In other articles in this blog (3), I talked about how humans, through language, generate the reality each of us lives. Things appear to us based on what we are capable of distinguishing as we observe the world. Therefore, in a way, we are saying that in reality, nothing is “in itself”, but we constitute it by distinguishing it.

From this perspective, it is not appropriate to ask “What is love?” as if searching with that question for a transcendent being, an immutable idea, but that perspective I announced leads us to another type of question that broadens understanding. If nothing is “in itself”, we should be able to reformulate the question:

What is love?

By a question of the type:

What do I distinguish in my everyday life when I use the word love, to love, to want, etc.?

This change of question is not trivial and undoubtedly leads us to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. When I talk about distinguishing in the relational, I am talking about distinguishing behaviors.

And what are, then, those behaviors that evoke that fundamental emotion in me?

I know I am not telling you anything you do not already know, we have all lived and suffered, as human beings that we are, those types of experiences:

From the child who asks his mother not to go to school anymore because the teacher never sees him when he raises his hand to ask a question, or because the other kids do not want to play with him; the wife who tells her husband that he no longer loves her because she changed her hairstyle and the dress is new and he did not even notice; the employee who bitterly frustrates because his boss never thanks him for the extra hours he voluntarily puts into his work, etc.

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Notice that, if you analyze carefully, in all those situations there is a common denominator that has to do with feeling seen or not seen, with having or not having presence for the other.

In summary, what these people are suffering has to do with the following equations:

Does not see me –> Does not love me

Does not listen to me –> Does not love me

Maturana defines love in the following way:

“Love, as a fundamental biological emotion, are those relational behaviors in which the other (or oneself) emerges as a legitimate other in the encounter with one”

Legitimate has to do with not having to apologize for what one is. With not feeling judged, condemned, or denied, but accepted unconditionally.

Therefore, this definition opens our eyes to the understanding of the phenomenon as we realize that love is not something particularly special that has to be placed on a pedestal, but it is something everyday, something that is present (or lacking) at every moment of our daily life:

In a trivial example, when I hold a door so that another person can go through first, What am I doing? Well, first, see her, if I do not see her I cannot do that, and the second is to act in relation to her in such a way that the other feels that not only do I see her but I also legitimize her space of existence, her presence. If I see her and slam the door in her face, that second thing would not exist.

In general, my students, when they hear this, refer to it as good or bad manners without being aware that many of those behaviors we learn as children under the label of “good manners” are founded precisely on this biological emotion: love, and that is so because this emotion, in the words of Matur