Love is not a feeling, but the characteristic of a productive relationship. Failing to understand this is our great error in a time when all of us are chasing love as a goal, but finding only an extraordinary lack of love, for which we then blame ourselves. Our misunderstanding of love continues to make this situation worse. A world in which love exists in fantasies but has no actual potency loses the ability to facilitate fair negotiations, bestow meaning, or produce anything other than purely monetary wealth.
In contrast to an object or a machine, a body regularly splits off a part of itself in order to survive and incorporates a piece of the foreign world into itself. This is precisely why it is wrong to compare a life-form with a machine: A machine does not metabolize. The fuel that I put into the tank burns but does not transform itself into another body.
