# Progressive Summary # Rough Notes # Structured Notes # Quotes > 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 life 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.  > > Love is not a pleasant feeling, but the practical principle of creative enlivenment. This principle describes the way in which living communities on this planet—groups of cells, organisms, ecosystems, tribes, families—find their own identities while also fostering the relationships that they have with others and with the rest of the system surrounding them. Finding an equilibrium between one’s own interests and those of others is the heart of love. In the experience of love, when my deepest desire is that my partner enjoy the greatest happiness, something more universal than a private feeling emerges. In that moment, love becomes a fundamental aspect of being alive. It is the sense of achievement in enlivened systems, where the freedom of the individual must always be harmonized with the whole. > Our stubborn insistence on the private enjoyment of a fulfilling relationship is, deep down, an ecological tragedy. For the idea of love as a resource that I need other people to give me reflects the view that the whole living world is a battleground of bounded estates and that evolution is the story of victors in a race toward optimization. This fits together with the idea that nothing is given—which is why you have to increase your market value (usually by increasing your physical attractiveness) in order to be lovable. On the other hand, an ecological view of love centers on other observations. It does not start with the idea that happiness can only be won in a fight and that to be clever, one should never give anything away. On the contrary, it believes that all essential things have already been given but can only be enjoyed if they are shared by all. > Putting the cascade of matter and existence into operation first requires a gift that asks for nothing in return: the sunlight given from the sky. The stability of a habitat is not guaranteed by the efforts of species and individuals to surpass one another. The logic of the living world relies much more on the fact that every species is dependent on another, that every act of taking is balanced by an act of giving. We have only just begun to understand how deeply this principle of the gift influences the world of organisms. > Since all contact between bodies in this world calls forth new possibilities of meaning, the complexity of the world can increase even though energy in the universe constantly seeks equilibrium. The Eros of matter counterbalances the physicists’ basic assumption that “entropy” in the universe is constantly increasing, meaning that everything in the cosmos is trending toward a uniform condition of the lowest thinkable level of energy. Fires burn out. Life-forms die. Our bodies break down. Even the sun will collapse someday.