Today, while I was flying, I started listening to a song from my childhood, Humein Tumse Pyaar Kitna. My mother used to play this song a lot, and I remember hearing it many times when I was young. I knew the melody. I knew the sound of her voice when she sang along with it. I knew that there was something emotional about the song, but I never really understood what it meant. As a child, we hear words, but we do not always have the life experience to understand the emotions behind them.
Today was different. As I listened to the words again, something suddenly clicked. I understood what the singer was trying to express. It was not simply love in the way we casually use the word. It was an expression of a depth of love that almost becomes impossible to explain through language. There are feelings so deep that words become inadequate. You can say, “I love you,” but sometimes those three words do not even come close to describing what is happening inside you.
And suddenly I thought about my mother. Why did she love this song so much? Why did she sing it to me? What did those words mean to her when she was singing them? Perhaps I will never completely know. But for the first time, I understood something that I could not understand as a child. Sometimes our parents give us pieces of their emotional world without explaining them. They give us songs, stories, traditions, gestures and words, and years later, when we have lived enough life, we finally understand what they were trying to give us.
That moment made me think deeply about love. What exactly is love? Is love a feeling? Is it an emotion? Is it an attachment? Is it a choice? Is it a biological response? Or is it all of these things at the same time?
From a psychological perspective, love is much more complex than simply saying that we “feel love.” Emotions are generally understood as complex responses involving our body, brain, thoughts, behaviour and interpretation of what is happening around us. Love can involve attraction, attachment, affection, care, longing, safety, desire, connection and belonging. It can also influence our attention, memories, decisions and even the way we see ourselves.
This is what makes love so powerful. We often think emotions are temporary experiences. We feel happy, angry, afraid or sad, and eventually the feeling changes. But love can become something much deeper because it can develop into an attachment. When someone becomes emotionally important to us, our brain begins to associate that person with safety, comfort, reward, belonging and meaning. That person is no longer simply another person in our environment. They become part of our internal world.
This is where attachment becomes so important. Human beings are wired for connection. From the earliest stages of life, we learn about safety and relationships through our interactions with caregivers. We learn whether the world feels safe, whether our needs matter, whether people can be trusted and whether we belong. As we grow, these experiences continue to influence our relationships.
We begin discovering love through our parents, siblings, friendships, romantic relationships, children and even the communities we belong to. We do not learn love from one single experience. We discover different dimensions of it throughout our lives. As a child, love may mean being held when we are frightened. As a teenager, it may feel like being understood by someone who seems to see a part of us that nobody else notices. As an adult, it may become partnership, responsibility, intimacy, friendship, sacrifice, companionship and choosing to remain present even when life becomes difficult.
And as we grow older, perhaps we begin to understand that love is not always about intensity. Sometimes love is quiet. Sometimes it is consistency. Sometimes it is a cup of tea made without being asked. Sometimes it is someone remembering something that you thought nobody noticed. Sometimes it is your mother singing a song to you without ever explaining why. We discover love in layers.
And perhaps that is why we cannot fully understand certain expressions of love when we are young. We simply do not yet have the emotional experiences necessary to decode them.
There is also something fascinating about the way love affects the brain. Romantic and attachment-based love can activate neural systems associated with reward, motivation and bonding. Chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin and other neurobiological systems are involved in different aspects of attachment, attraction and social bonding. This does not reduce love to chemistry. Saying that love has biological components does not make love less meaningful. It simply reminds us that our emotional experiences are embodied experiences. We experience love not only through our thoughts, but through our entire nervous system.
This may also explain why love can make us feel so alive. When we love, we can become more motivated. We can become more hopeful. We may want to grow, achieve, create, care and build. We may become more courageous because we feel that someone believes in us. Feeling connected can provide a sense of belonging and emotional security. Healthy love can create space for an individual to become more fully themselves. It can say, “You are safe enough to grow.” It can give us the courage to take risks because we know that failure does not mean we are alone. It can help us develop empathy because caring deeply about another person requires us to move beyond our own perspective. It can teach patience, communication, forgiveness, boundaries and responsibility. Love can build us.
But the same capacity that allows love to build us is also what makes loss so painful. When we become attached to someone, we do not simply create memories with them. We often create expectations, routines, plans and imagined futures. We begin to organise parts of our life around the relationship. So when that relationship ends, we are not only losing a person. We may be losing a routine, a home, a sense of belonging, a future we imagined or a version of ourselves.
Sometimes we are even grieving a future that never actually happened.
This is why heartbreak can feel so confusing. The person may no longer be physically present, but our brain does not immediately erase the emotional associations built over months or years. A song can suddenly bring them back. A smell can bring back a memory. A place can trigger an emotion. A date on the calendar can suddenly make us feel something we thought we had already moved past. The body remembers what the mind sometimes believes it has already understood.
And this is where love can become painful. Love can make us vulnerable because to love someone is, in some sense, to allow them to matter to us. Their presence can influence our emotional world. Their absence can influence it too.
When love is healthy, this vulnerability can create intimacy. When love becomes controlling, inconsistent, manipulative or unsafe, the same vulnerability can become a source of distress. We can begin questioning ourselves. “Was I enough?” “Why did they change?” “Why did they leave?” “Can I trust anyone again?” “Was the love real?”
Sometimes the deepest wound is not simply losing the person. It is losing our understanding of ourselves within that relationship.
This is why I believe we need to distinguish between love and the behaviours that sometimes surround love. Jealousy is not automatically proof of love. Control is not love. Possessiveness is not love. Fear of losing someone is not necessarily love. Sacrificing yourself completely is not necessarily love. Love can coexist with boundaries. Love can coexist with individuality. Love can allow another person to remain a separate human being rather than becoming something we believe we own.
Healthy love does not require us to disappear.
In fact, healthy love should create enough psychological safety for both people to exist as individuals while still experiencing connection.
And perhaps this is one of the most important things we discover as we grow older: loving someone and losing ourselves in someone are not the same thing. We can love deeply and still have boundaries. We can care deeply and still say no. We can miss someone and still choose ourselves. We can forgive someone and still decide that the relationship is no longer healthy for us. We can love someone and recognise that love alone cannot repair everything.
This is where emotional maturity begins to change our understanding of love. When we are younger, we may think love is about how intensely someone makes us feel. As we grow, perhaps we begin to understand that love is also about how we experience ourselves in the relationship. Do I feel safe? Can I be myself? Can I communicate honestly? Can we disagree without destroying each other? Can we respect each other's boundaries? Can we grow without one person becoming smaller? Can we care for each other without becoming responsible for each other's entire emotional world?
These questions do not make love less romantic. They make love more conscious.
And then there is another kind of love that we sometimes overlook: the love we receive before we are even capable of understanding it. The love of a mother singing a song. The love of a father quietly providing. The love of a grandmother making food. The friend who stays when everyone else leaves. The person who believes in us before we believe in ourselves.
As children, we may not recognise the magnitude of these things. We simply receive them. It is often later in life that we realise what they meant.
That is what happened to me today.
I was thousands of feet above the ground, listening to a song my mother used to play when I was a child, and suddenly I understood something I had not understood then. I understood the language of the song. But more importantly, I understood something about the language of love.
Maybe she was not simply playing a song. Maybe she was expressing something she did not need to explain. Maybe she simply loved the song. Maybe she was sharing a feeling that she could not put into her own words. I will never know exactly what was in her heart at those moments. But I know what happened in mine today. A childhood memory became an adult realization. And that made me think about how much of our emotional life is discovered retrospectively. We experience something first, and only years later do we understand its meaning.
Perhaps that is one of the beautiful things about being human. We are constantly discovering emotions we have already experienced. We don't necessarily feel them for the first time. We understand them for the first time.
Love may be one of the greatest examples of this.
We think we know what love means, and then life teaches us another layer. We love our parents differently when we become adults. We understand friendship differently after experiencing loneliness. We understand trust differently after betrayal. We understand companionship differently after being alone. We understand self-love differently after losing ourselves. And perhaps we understand romantic love differently after heartbreak.
Every experience expands our emotional vocabulary. So, is love a feeling or an emotion? Maybe asking that question is too small for something as complex as love. Love can begin as a feeling. It can develop into an emotion. It can become an attachment. It can influence our behaviour. It can shape our identity. It can become a memory. It can become a source of safety. It can become a source of pain. And sometimes, it can become wisdom.
That is the strange paradox of love. The very thing that gives us the capacity to experience profound joy also gives us the capacity to experience profound grief. The same capacity that allows us to experience profound love also gives us the capacity to experience profound loss.
The answer is not to stop loving because love can hurt. The answer is to understand love more deeply. To understand attachment. To understand boundaries. To understand ourselves. To understand that another person's love does not determine our worth. And perhaps most importantly, to understand that losing someone's love does not mean losing our capacity to love.
We carry what we have learned. We grow. We heal. We love again—in different ways, with different people, and sometimes most importantly, with ourselves.
Today, that old song reminded me of something I had forgotten. My mother was once a young woman with her own emotions, dreams, experiences and understanding of love. I was simply her child, listening to a song I did not understand. Years later, I am sitting on an airplane, hearing those same words differently.
And suddenly, the song is no longer just a childhood memory. It has become a lesson. Sometimes we spend years trying to understand what love is. And then, unexpectedly, somewhere between a song, a memory and a moment of silence, we realize that perhaps love was teaching us all.
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