Love is an act of will to promote another's good, not a feeling. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas, Averroes, and Maimonides, the speaker argues that feeling is evidence of love but not love itself. His 34-year marriage would be impossible if love were only fleeting emotion.
What is love? It gets back to good old Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Averroes and Maimonides, and a lot of people in between would have defined love as to will the good of the other. That is actually the definition of what it means to be pair bonded with somebody. Feeling is evidence of love. It isn't love itself. The love is an act of will and a commitment toward another person's good. Their good as them is the way that that turns out. If love were just a feeling man, I wouldn't have been married 34 years. I wouldn't have been married 34 minutes. Because that's probably when he had our first big argument. So what is it is to will the good of the other? The trouble is that we don't have good vocabulary for it, especially in English. I mean, the fact that we got one word for love is pathetic. You can love your wife, you can love your husband, you can love your dog, you can love your job, you can love the Red Sox, you can love Chicago deep dish pizza. But if you're loving all those things in the same way, well, there's some problems here. Obviously you don't love everything in the same way. And we have a diminished vocabulary for the thing that we most want.
