Are We Born With The Capacity to Love?

Or do we need to learn how to do it?

Photo by Bruce Hong on Unsplash

By Dr T J Jordan

The answer is probably yes to both questions: we are born with the capacity to love, but we need to learn how to love well.

When we think about how important our earliest caregivers are in setting our expectations for love, we might make the mistake of thinking that our childhoods put permanent limits on our later relationships. But the expectations we learn early on don’t necessarily form boundaries for our adult lives.

While the capacity to love is our inborn legacy, giving and receiving love are learned behaviors — and that’s good because what we learn we can unlearn as well as improve upon.

Capacity

The capacity to love is programmed into the subcortical circuitry of our brains, along with the ability to have a broad range of other emotional experiences. And we are built to produce the biochemicals that are associated with love. Without love, we don’t flourish.

But capacities speak to the issue of potentials rather than outcomes.