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The Psycholinguistics of Love
Language emerged about 150,000 years ago as a tool to formulate our mindscapes and converse them with the world, before we had grammatical structure for the process. Grammar came much later to establish rules for what already had felt meaning and function. Children learn language without any knowledge of grammatical rules. But when we violate the psycholinguistic function of language, we create mindbody dissonance by misusing what took millennia to establish rules of agreement between thoughts and actions.
Now, let’s examine what we do to disrupt the ancestral meaning and function of love. Grammatically, love is a transitive verb. This means that the verb conveys meaning to a condition or person who receives the action. Conversely, an intransitive verb does not have an object to receive the action. For example, when we say, “I love you,” there’s a recipient of our love, whereas an intransitive verb like to die, only has a subject, but not object. Thus, you can say I love you, but you cannot die for anyone. Imagine saying, “I die you.” It is important to recognize that before there were grammatical rules for language, words were created to maximize meaning in a symbol with their corresponding mindbody objectives.
In the case of love, the symbol represents the felt meaning (experience of deep caring) and the implicit value of expressing it to others with the beneficial…
