Rick Rawes

What is Love?

What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me, no mo’ – sorry, couldn’t help myself). It is a fundamental question of human existence, and not one that anyone really knows. As abstract a concept as disappointment, and as real as the wind. And I’m not about to go all religious here either and argue that ‘God is love’ or any such thing. Instead, in honour of Valentine’s Day – which really exists only as an excuse to love – I’m going to talk through some thoughts about love that I’ve discovered myself having, while on these journeys to other worlds.

Writing is itself an exercise in reflective exposure. You start with an idea that might sound cool – what if dragons were hot guys? As an example. Or, why does the Egyptian God Bastet never get any real acknowledgement in the world, when she’s a complete badass? As another example. Or even what happened if a sentient hamper took on killer alien wasps? Yes, that actually happened. I was like ten.

But then you begin the process of writing, of imagining and creating worlds in which people walk that were nothing but smoke in the ether until you gave them life. And then they do things, and they meet people, and they go on great and grand adventures.

Then you sit back, look at the worlds you’ve created and the stories you’ve told and you’ve realised what you have created reflects your inner truth. There are mirrors in what we write, the way we expose ourselves in the clothes we wear or the music we sing. The way we tell people who we are with gesture and spoken words, we do the same thing as writers. We say ‘this is me’, ugly and raw and beautiful like life itself.

When you reach that realisation as an author, it can be quite jarring. Illuminating, painful, messy and truthful all in one. What my writing has revealed I believe about love is darker than what I would have said in my idealistic youth, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

Love is pain. Love is imperfect. Love is action. Love is choice.

Love is Pain

This is probably the most obvious and literature-ly well documented thesis on love. Love is pain. Whether you’re discussing Kate Bush’s Victorian sister running around the frigid moors in her nightie with what for all intents and purposes is a poor-Twilight-fan’s Edward the abuser; or crying along with good ol’ Buff when boffing her boyfriend turns into brutal slaughter; love is pain.

This doesn’t mean that love automatically equals pain, I’m not advocating that all forms of love need to hurt for the sake of it – violence and abuse and love should not go hand in hand at all. Instead, love hurts simply because it does. Because it is vulnerability wrapped up in cotton wool and glass, being banged around in your satchel as you navigate the world.

Love will include loss. To love something or someone, means to care – and caring in an indifferent world means to run the risk of losing it. To lose a lover to a wandering eye or a rapidly cooling bed, to lose a friend to an argument or disagreement, to lose a family member to the rampant march of time. And in end? When you reach the finish line hand in hand with the ones you’ve chosen to love? Either you have to leave, go through death’s door first, or they do.

There is no escaping it, to love is to know one day it will be lost. And that hurts.

And, of course, it’s also painful when you open the fridge to discover they ate the last pudding cup without telling you. There’s that too.

Love is Imperfect

Regardless of what anyone says, love of any kind is not perfect. It supersedes the self, because love is in part a connection. And while we can influence others, we can never truly control them. They are perfectly able to not love us back. They are absolutely able to hurt us, while claiming to love. They have their own mind and beautiful, wonderful soul and make their own decisions which often can disregard you or your feelings.

And that’s okay.

After all, if love is something that hurts, it is going to be imperfect. It is going to be waking up in the morning to a grumpy sod, when all you’ve done is be yourself. It is going to be the person who doesn’t choose you or doesn’t love you in the same way. Love can be in isolation, unrequited. Just ask any young gay or queer person, who falls deeply in love with someone they know they can’t have. Not because that love is not real, but because it is a type of love that won’t be returned.

And that’s okay.

When love is placed up on a pedestal, as some grand thing which cannot be anything but pure – it is false. Love itself can and should be broken, it should reflect us. After all, how can love redeem us, or give meaning to our lives, if it does not reflect us back to ourselves? If it is not as flawed and messy and contradictory as we are? I’m asking not because I have the answer, but because it’s what I believe.

Love is Action

We discuss love often as a feeling, an emotion. Neuroscientists would tell you, however, that love is a hormone storm. A flood of neurotransmitters and other chemicals that overwhelm our system. Attraction, dopamine-driven hard and fast. Cortisol, drops in serotonin, a shifting maelstrom that yanks us towards someone, and leads to craving harder than any drug. This settles, down into a long-term bonding, a love settled and re-enforced by endorphins, oxytocin, vasopressin, which keeps us cemented with someone who makes us feel safe.

It’s amazing how that is both concrete and abstract. When we love, romantic or otherwise, we don’t stand there and think ‘Oooh, what a lovely bit of dopamine’ or ‘look at the endorphins on him’. I mean, most of us don’t, I may know a few fellow psychologists who are a different kettle of fish. So how do we know love’s presence?

Through action.

It is the holding of a hand through a scary medical procedure. It is the handing over of the last KitKat. It is the silence, rather than retort. And it is not always sacrifice or selfless. It is also in the inability to be there, to watch your heart break. It is in walking away, when hurt is all there is. It’s in the actions, small and large, grand sweeping gestures and soft touches that drive the connection. Without action, there is no motion, no change. Without motion there is no meaning – and you all know my thoughts on meaning.

Love is Choice

This is perhaps the most important one for me personally. Love is a force, as natural as the tides, which sweeps away all reason and leaves us a deeply fulfilled and broken shell. We are buffeted, repeatedly through our life, by the emotion and the action of love – chipping away at us. And we are well within our rights to walk away from it, or to sit down and refuse to move as love rolls over us. Because love ultimately is a decision.

Whatever else you can say about it, and whatever your views on time and destiny, we have to treat our lives with the illusion of free will. We have to accept that to take any kind of responsibility or enjoyment in our life, that we must have agency over it. Love is the expression of that agency made manifest, choice and meaning given an emotional and neurological form.

You may not make a conscious decision to choose to react chemically in the way you do. A parent bonded with a child is hormonal, an attraction instantaneous like a lightning strike, a heartbeat driven by fluttering desperate need. But you do choose the next step. The every day.

Love is a choice you make every day. On the good days, when the world seems bright and beautiful. When sunshine and birds sing. On your wedding day, on every date night, in the times you laugh and think you’re the luckiest person in the world. You choose to enjoy these moments, to be present and to remember them. And the others.

You choose to stay when things get hard. You choose to love when crying and heartbroken on the bathroom floor. You choose to let go when it destroys you both. You choose to defend someone when you know they are wrong. You choose to act or not act on desire as appropriate. You choose to be there at the end.

And because you choose that, it is meaning. Sweet, and true, and perhaps the only real meaning there is.

Don’t Hurt Me, No Mo’

I get this is a bit of a departure and not exactly the puppy dogs and rainbows (or should I say mildly sarcastic and irreverent rants) that I usually do. I guess it’s because for me, I’ve realised love is less frivolous and more fundamental than I ever imagined. I’ve read back over my books one by one, and I’m amazed at what seeps through the pages.

And if you’ve read all this with me and see love as something negative and to be feared, then I guess I haven’t made my point. This post has been serious, yes. Because love is serious. It is important. It deserves a perspective that is not sugar coated with chocolate covered strawberries but exposed for the necessary hurt that it is.

I’ve said before, life’s only meaning is in the living of it. Meaning is motion, is change – another philosophy that smacked me in the face when looking back at the stories and worlds I’ve been inhabiting in this mad ol’ brain of mine. Love is motion, it is change. It transcends the self, and drives the world forward.

And it can save it.

If we choose pain. If we choose imperfection. If we choose to act. If we choose.

Rick Rawes
Thursday 19th February, 2026
Leeds, West Yorkshire