Love By Barbara Fredrickson

Love. The one word everyone craves to hear or feel at least once in their life. As a young girl I was brought up to believe I would one day find my prince charming who I would end marrying and that was love. I could love my family…I could love my friends…I could love my significant other. All different types of love, but only three choices. However, as I went through high school I began to realize that love did not have to be “the end all see all” for me. I fell in and out of love for many things. I even loved multiple things at once. I loved sports, I loved nature, I loved food, I loved justice, I loved my country, I loved many things around me that I was brought up to think didn’t warrant love. I realized what I truly treasured about my

Love to me is not something that has to be a big deal…it is merely anything at all that makes you smile and feel reflective and thankful for the life you are living. Social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson argues in her book “Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and become” that we have mistaken “love” with a phenomenon that she describes as “positivity resonance”. We are introduced to a new understanding of the very loose term “love”, by relating it to our body’s biological systems. It starts as a physical response from the body to positive interactions with others and makes us connect with our partner. Changing our perception of love can make our life simpler, as we realize that we have more control over it than we thought. By adapting to a new definition it will change the way people perceive relationships. When compared to the readings of “The Mind’s Eye” by Oliver Sacks and Andrew Solomon’s “Son”, we are able to identify how the concept of “Love 2.0” (your body’s perspective on love) can be witnessed in our everyday lives. Love is not a word with a single definition, in fact it is similar to the Schrodinger’s cat experiment in that there is no wrong perception but just a very broad

The shift from the “regular’ definition of love is that it is always a work in progress that requires effort to keep it going. But in fact it should be the opposite. Love should never be forced nor is it a feeling of just settling for what you “think” you should be feeling. Many take love for granted, but positivity resonance describes it like a short spark and in order to “keep the light” it needs to constantly have another spark. But, this small ignition can be something as simple as a smile or holding the door for someone or saying “thank you”. This concept of love also proves that love at first sight exists. Fredrickson writes that “positivity resonance between brains, as it turns out, requires only connection, not the intimacy or shared history that comes with a special bond” (114) Love at first sight is nothing more than just one of the micro-moments that builds up. It is not as unique and passion-driven as someone might have thought before, but it is a bond that can evolve into something bigger. All it takes is a spark and that spark can be identified as love. Love is not a one-time thing that stays forever, rather it is a long chain of renewed interactions and new experiences that acts as a key to forming more lasting relationships. According to the traditional love definition we expect more that we naturally become closer and if something