Collaborating is Loving

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." - H.L. Mencken

In the days before the ubiquitous "Share" option we see on every digital article we read, video we watch, and thought we express, there was the Chain E-mail. You remember those, don't you? "Forward within the next 60 seconds for success in Life, Love, etc."? It was almost ritualistic for us to click "Forward" as a reflex and send it to all 200 of our contacts lest we end up being less fortunate than the person who sent us that e-mail. 

We may laugh at the silliness of it now, but I think those e-mails were symbolic of something significant: the human need for social interaction. "No man is an island", wrote John Donne. "We are wired to connect", writes Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence. Think of Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away becoming buddies with a volleyball, and his pain when he loses it to the ocean. We depend on human relationships, no matter how superficial, for survival. 

In retrospect, the Chain E-mail was simply a less-than-ideal way of staying in contact with people, staying on their radar. Although no direct correspondence was happening, receiving it from a geographically distant cousin told me he/she was all right, and it told the same about me to whoever I forwarded it to. This indirect method of staying in touch gave its own satisfaction, because whenever I did see that cousin after however many years, it didn't seem as if we had been completely clueless about each other's lives. If he or she is forwarding me e-mails on a regular basis, they can't be doing that bad.

Today, of course, there's the "Share" button. Whether it's this blog entry, a movie trailer on YouTube, or a Harvard Business Review article, anything and everything can be--and is--shared. As you must have already experienced, that is both good and bad. Good because it allows me to include others in the emotion I am feeling upon reading/watching/writing something, and I hope to bond with them over that emotion. And bad because people with too much time don't have my Feed in mind before they start flooding it with minutely updates of their Farmville score. This time last week, for instance, I was following 200-plus Twitter accounts. As of this writing, I'm following 155. To paraphrase one of my favorite quotations, "Share because you have something to share, not because you have to share something."

Again, what the "Share" button symbolizes is our need and desire to connect with our fellow humans; to include and engage with them in the emotional experience we're having. Why does watching a movie, a concert, or a game give us such a high? Because we are sharing a similar emotional experience with our fellow humans, even though it is entirely possible we don't know anybody present there on a personal level. 

In our professional lives, we share experiences by collaborating with our co-workers on projects, assignments, tasks--anything goal-oriented--and then we include (or exclude) them in the emotions we feel about the results. In today's Internet-driven world, everything is about collaboration. This sentiment was initially brought to the general public's attention by Thomas Friedman in his landmark book The World Is Flat. I finished reading it today and couldn't stop marveling at his prescience in describing events which would come true within a decade after the book's publishing (2005). The book's point is technology is empowering people across the world, allowing more people than ever before to have a shot at success, and growth and progress will be achieved through increased collaboration to go along with the ever-present competition.

So did the "Share" button rise out of the zeitgeist of collaboration? Why do we suddenly feel the need to broadcast our thoughts and beliefs and passions and emotions to the world? Because we can? Can it be that simple? Was it only a matter of the convergence of the proper channels for us to unleash our personality on the public? Or was it only a matter of time before the appropriate tools enabled our virtual behavior to become similar to our real-life behavior where we share our feelings with the people we care about? Perhaps it was not a case of a sudden need to broadcast ourselves. Perhaps we were only obeying our natural instinct as humans--to connect--although on a much larger scale. The Internet enabled us to share, to collaborate with people we have never met, to include them in our lives, for better or worse, irrespective of nationality and ideology.

With that in mind, I come to the idea of love. As a ~26.5-year-old, I've had my share of first- and second-hand encounters with love. Or, rather, "love". Because, really, what is love? There's no defining love. We all have a notion of its definition, of its "true meaning", and the sooner we stop kidding ourselves, the better off we'll be. I'm no mathematician, but if there ever was an undefined variable, love is it. I'm no cynic either, but what I know is there's no comprehending love, there's no understanding love, there's no explaining love. Nobody but it decides when it wants to come and go. 

That is the understanding I have come to as of this writing. But, sure enough, in the past, I've tried to straitjacket love into my fantasies and ideals, being too immature to realize what abject failure awaited me. Up until about five years ago, in my quest to discover love's meaning, I arrived at the conclusion that love is friendship. It seems like a no-brainer now, but I had seen both myself and my friends struggle with "loving" someone in the absence of friendship. It's simple, really: friends are people you hang out with, spend time with, have fun with. If you don't feel like doing all that with the person you're dating, how can you "love" them? But gradually, I realized friendship is not all there is to love. Of course, you have to be friends with the person you love, but love cannot be synonymous with friendship; there's a reason why you're friends with more than one person (hopefully) and lovers with only one (hopefully). Anything goes in friendship, it is a laissez-faire economy; love is more formal, more exclusive, which is the way it should be. 

So after discarding the love-is-friendship mantra, I arrived at this understanding: love is comfort. If you're able to feel comfortable in someone's presence, if you have the freedom to be yourself, then you know you love them. Roger Ebert advises, "Never marry anyone without first taking a three-day bus trip with them." I agree. Text messages and FaceTimes and Hangouts are great, but spending time with the person you "love" without any ostensible way out is the real deal. However, my love-is-comfort theory met a surprisingly swift demise. Spending time with my friends made me realize I feel extremely comfortable in their company, which does make sense because I love my friends. But I am referring to the exclusive kind of love, not the distributed kind. Having the freedom to express my feelings, acting like a complete goofball, I could do that with my friends because I was comfortable. But if that's the case, love cannot be defined by comfort, can it? It has to be bigger than that. If I feel the same amount of comfort with one person that I do with my friends, there's not much special about that one person. 

So I scratched the love-is-comfort theory and began my quest once again. For the past few months, this is what I have been thinking: love is sharing. True to the human instinct mentioned earlier in this entry, once we feel compelled to include another person in our life's journey--and be a participant in theirs--that is love. Love is of different kinds: romantic, parental, filial, human, one-sided. Fair enough, we include our parents and friends and family on this journey and share our life's events with them. But the key word is "compelled". When you start feeling an unstoppable urge to share your life with a particular individual almost by default, you know they are exclusively special. No matter how big or small, if you could share something with only one person, they'd be it. When you consistently keep thinking of the same person to share something with, they're the one you love above all else.

It is said people marry because they want a witness to their lives, somebody to mentally and emotionally chronicle their victories, struggles, pleasures, disappointments. That may be true, but if you're famous enough, you can have a biographer do that. The key is to include that one special person in our lives, to give them a chance to affect you and influence you and inspire you from the inside-out. Because when you decide to include someone, that means you are friends with them, are comfortable with them, and want to share your life with them. 

At this point in time, this is my understanding of love. However, true to love's nature, I wouldn't be surprised if I have to write another entry a few years down the road updating the thoughts I have shared in this one!