Think of the evolutionary miracle that is love. There was a time before love existed. 

Then, somehow, some critter was born with a love gene. Some wild mutation invented love where it had never existed before. Its loved-on offspring did better, and survived longer, and carried the love gene forward into future generations. From egg-laying reptiles that walked away from their eggs, we evolved into mammals and birds that care for their young and raise them from helpless newborns to functional adulthood. And it was so manifestly a better way to raise babies that soon the entire Earth was crawling with birds and mammals and marsupials that loved their babies. When mammals returned to the ocean, they took love with them. 

What animals feel is love. We know what love is because we see them feel it the same way we do.

And then it extended to relationships outside of mothers and babies. Fathers got in on the act. Adults of the same species found that love within groups helped the whole group survive. Animals from different species discovered that interspecies love could bring benefits. Of course, they didn’t actually decide, their genes expressed what made sense. But love as an evolutionary advantage spread everywhere. 

And now love is all around us. Aggression, anger and intergroup hostility are all around us too, and have their own evolutionary advantages. But love keeps us alive more than anger. It all started with mothers loving babies, and without it, we wouldn’t even be able to kick off our big-brained mammalian lives with such a long adolescence.  

We are surrounded by love so much that we sometimes barely notice it. Anger is much more dramatic when it arises, but for most well-adjusted people, it’s a far less common emotion.

We’ve all heard of fight-or-flight, the body’s crisis response system. When I learned in a support group that the body also has a safety-and-contentment system – that factoid blew my freaking mind. We aren’t just wired to react to the negative, we have whole systems in the body to dial us into positive emotions too, to help us understand that we are safe and can be happy. Except for those of us living very tough lives, we experience the safety-and-contentment system far more frequently and for longer than any fight-or-flight system.

And it all started with a genetic mistake. A gene expressed itself in a surprising way, and it didn’t kill the critter – it made it better. And love makes us better too. If, like me, you can’t imagine a world without love, let’s share a moment of gratitude that the mistake went better than the original plan.