What is love and why is so essential for growth, development and happiness? This is tied in with love’s polar opposite – hatred, rejection and abuse, which are so destructive and damaging. There is something here that cannot be explained in physical or biological terms. What? It can be discussed at an empirical level as sociologists like Bowlby and Goffman, and psychologists like Fromm and Maslow have done, but this only provides a description, not an explanation. I suspect the importance of love has to do with the fact that it transcends the limits of individuality. The process of individuation helps us to become relatively free and autonomous individuals – seen by some as the goal of human development. But there is more. There is a yawning emptiness within the individual. Many try to fill it by seeking the physical intimacy of sex, but sex without love is empty, or by seeking power, or wealth. These too are empty. Like sex without love they touch only the exterior of the individual. Love is a reciprocal relationship involving openness and commitment. There is a tension between the desire to be an individual, in control and able to manipulate people, situations and events to one’s personal advantage (but always conscious of something lacking, of being empty), and being open and loving, surrendering control for negotiation, power for fulfilment. We are social beings but, unlike ants and termites whose society is determined by purely biological and environmental factors, we are not determined wholly by our biology. Our sociality depends on openness and voluntary co-operation – on love.
Another characteristic is openness to religious experience and the transcendent. The work of Alister Hardy and Will Hay are relevant here, as is the study of comparative mysticism. Our sociality extends beyond human interaction to include – what? Nature? The cosmos? God? Each of these has been put forward as the key to what it means to be human.