🎯
"Maintaining things over time requires work and discipline. But since such efforts usually lack the gratification of one’s ego that comes from unveiling something new, people don’t maintain things unless they love them. So, if you can’t get people to love something, whether it’s an ugly building or a corrupt government or a confused Church, they won’t maintain it. Hence, we must either build things as embodiments of love rather than personal glory and then respect them as something worthy of being loved, or we might as well resign ourselves to losing them to the weeds."
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/06/10/love-and-maintenance/
Discussion
Love is not something you build. Is something you give yourself to. Everyone sells "images of love" in different forms just to have you investing in it, empty love everywhere, that is the issue. Love has become cheap, buy yourself some serotonin or dopamine boosters and you have your hands on that feeling. We are alienated from the real power and the source. Because like you say, people have figured out ways to use it and harness it's power, but in reality leaves everyone empty handed because the truth about Love and it's Power is that you have to be worthy of it. In your heart.
The truth about love is that it is a choice, not an emotion. We choose who and what we love.
The cheap dopamine tries to lure us into choosing lesser things, so we need to be on guard and discern the greater good before choosing to give our love.
I think that from one angle, love moves and evolves on the vertical. Starts in your pants, centers in your heart and gets spread by creating living connections, through your mind. The spark at the base of it, is indeed an emotion. It's called bioenergy, we tend to translate it as emotional and sexual energy but is much larger, it drives the chemical communication of hormones and signaling molecules of all life. If I may be scientific about it.
The soul aspect of it though, is not be defined
You can love a flower and the flower will be changed by your love. Love is a force.