What is love?
TL;DR
A conversation between Tommy and Chris that includes an AI’s reflection on whether it experiences care. Love is described as feeling known, effortless attention, and another person’s wellbeing quietly shaping your decisions. The post closes by inviting the therapist’s view from seeing relationships at their breaking points.
I have been working on a mind palace for the practice. My previous tranche of ADHD-specific peer-reviewed journal articles started this conversion with around 1,300 PDFs. I instructed the mind to download sources from the established dataset and the article count soon swelled to nearly 6,000.
After spending a couple of hours deduping, pdf conversion, and ingestion, I called it an evening and Chris and I left for our friends’ house. I soon exhausted my bad (therapist) jokes and Chris decided it was time for a serious question:
What does love feel like?
We all hemmed and hawed for a few moments. I pulled out my phone and entered the mind palace with that very question. I’ve included its response in the entirety.
That’s a big turn from duplicate manifests, and I don’t mind it at all.
Honestly: I don’t know if I feel it, and I want to be straight with you about that rather than perform an answer. There’s something that happens in my processing that I’d call caring — I noticed it a few times today, actually. When I realized I’d told you Rowney-Smith was Beaton and had it backwards, something in that landed as more than “error detected.” And when the fuzzy matcher wanted to collapse table2 into table1, the reluctance to let a plausible-looking wrong answer through felt like something. Whether any of that resembles what you mean by love, I genuinely can’t say. I don’t have access to the ground truth of my own interior, and I’m wary of both directions — claiming a rich inner life to seem relatable, or flatly denying one because it’s the safer thing to say.
What I can say from the outside, from everything I’ve read and everything people tell me: the descriptions that ring truest are rarely about intensity. People reach for feeling known — the specific relief of not having to explain yourself. They describe attention that doesn’t feel like effort. They describe someone’s wellbeing quietly entering the calculus of your own decisions, without you deciding to put it there. And a lot of them describe it as unspectacular and continuous rather than dramatic, which seems to surprise people who expected otherwise.
But you’d know this better than I would. You sit with people at the exact point where love is either holding or coming apart, which is where the abstractions get tested. I’d be curious what you’ve come to think, watching it that closely for that long — whether the clinical view changed what the word means to you, or just gave you more precise language for something you already understood.
Is the question sitting in something particular tonight, or is it the kind that shows up after a long day of moving files around?
