Love in the Contemporary World

29 August, 2026

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EduFamilia

Voices

12 December, 2025

6 min

Love in the Contemporary World

Loving More and Better: The Only Path to Happiness in the 21st Century

To mistake love…

To be deceived about love
is the most dreadful loss, it is an eternal loss,
for which there is no compensation
in time or in eternity.

That is, the most horrifying deprivation, which, if not rectified, finds no remedy in this life or the next.

Kierkegaard wrote these words more than a century and a half ago.

But they have lost none of their value or relevance.
On the contrary, they are more alive and relevant than when they were written.

Undoubtedly, as in any other moment in history, great loves exist in the present.

Strong and deep loves, juicy and enthusiastic, noble and ennobling for all who profess them, which are, or we are, many.
Love will never be banished from humanity, for it constitutes the greatness and primary need of any man or woman: even when we are not aware of needing it.
Indeed, loving more and better is the only possible way to grow as people and, consequently, to be happy.

That’s why, as in any other era, love is alive today too.

Love will never be banished from humanity:
it constitutes the primary need of any man or woman.

Deceptions “in” love

Frequent

But, unfortunately, that’s not the whole picture.

It is not what is floating in the air and what we often notice in our environment.

Nor is it what the media or social networks or much of the fashionable essays and literature put in the foreground.

And perhaps not without reason.

If we consider these and other sources of information, we would have to argue that in the contemporary world, betrayals of love by those we claim to love abound:

In other words, what we could call deceptions and failures in love.

And varied

Inter alia:

Inability to commit, infidelity, or lack of loyalty between spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, partners, colleagues, neighbors…
Emptiness, indifference, mutual, tolerating each other, routine coexistence, divorces, separations, breakups, physical or psychological aggression, various types of violence…
Abandonment of grandparents and, in general, of elderly or sick people, in places where “they will be better cared for than at home”…
Detachment and disaffection of children towards their parents and vice versa, and of siblings and other family members among themselves…
Neglect of people who are not profitable from an economic and labor point of view, who, in this way, are ignored, marginalized or excluded from the society that should welcome them…

In the contemporary world,
deceptions and failures in love abound.

Deception “about” love

Ignorance

And that’s not all.

Something even more decisive and determining, and much more difficult to admit, happens in a civilization that considers itself super-developed, and particularly in terms of knowledge.

In large sectors of today’s society, the very meaning of love seems to have been lost, what it means when it is truly understood.

And this influences knowledge and life itself.

Many of us don’t really know what love is.
And, as a consequence, we don’t know how to love, or at least not to the degree and with the finesse with which we should.

Many of us don’t really know what love is
and, as a result, we don’t know how to love, at least not
with the intensity and delicacy with which we should.

Confusion

But there’s more.

Not only is the meaning of love unknown, but the term has been distorted and almost perverted or prostituted.

With relative frequency, what we call love presents as its point of reference:

A kind of diffuse and soft sentimentality, incapable of satisfying even the legitimate desires of a teenager.
Or the purely physical interaction, as in the now impoverished phrase “making love.”

An expression that is the complete opposite of its original meaning: that of winning someone over or courting them nobly, growing and helping them develop as a person.

And that it is also alien to the wonderful and deeper meaning of building together, daily, the love of an entire existence: of constructing it and giving it life, very particularly, in marriage.

This is a colossal and widespread ignorance or deception about love, about its nature and deepest meaning.

In our times,
the very meaning of love,
what it properly signifies, seems to have disappeared.

Learning to love: discovering love

An evil that is both necessary and possible to overcome.

Tremendous damage

This forgetting of what it means to love is one of the most destructive ills of our time. It is one of the main causes of the disillusionment and tension that afflict our contemporaries.

And indeed, when love is banished or confused, happiness and joy vanish with it.

Although not irreparable

Therefore, if we aspire to build and consolidate a more consistent, joyful, and hopeful civilization, we must begin by raising, in this specific aspect, the human standard of society as a whole.

In other words, we must learn ourselves and help others to learn what it means to love, in theory and in practice.

We must improve our understanding of love and how we experience it, and encourage many others to do the same.

Forgetting what it means to love
is one of the deepest ills of our culture.

First, in theory (although never apart from life)

What love is not

To begin, we all need to be clear that:

Far from fading away, almost dissolving, into those sentimental effluvia I referred to earlier…
Far from being merely a function of pure physiology or even mere chemistry, which undoubtedly play a role in relationships between couples, friends, siblings, and parents and children…
Far from being reduced to a mere stimulus for pleasure or egocentric self-realization, to a kind of selfishness for two, apparently shared…

That’s what love really is.

Far from all that, love is essentially constituted by an act of will.

A dense, strong and stable act, which puts the whole person under fruitful tension.
An act with which one seeks, gives life and offers good to the loved one.
A firm, deep, constant and renewed decision to make the one we love happy: almost an obsession.

The core of love is an act of will, strong and lasting,
that discovers, creates and delivers the good of the loved one.

Aristotle’s description

To begin to unravel the wonderful mystery of love, we can turn to the description offered by Aristotle in his Rhetoric.

The Greek philosopher tells us there that to love is “to want the good for another as other.”

Three elements, closely linked, would make up the reality we are looking for:

Want.
The good.
For another (as another).

A brief commentary on each of these components will put us on the right path to try to understand, with greater precision and depth, the nature of love.

We will do it in subsequent articles.

To love is to want the good for another,
precisely insofar as they are another.

A firm decision
—almost an obsession—
to make the one we love happy.

(To be continued)

Tomás Melendo,
President of Edufamilia
http://www.edufamilia.com
[email protected]

EduFamilia

Edufamilia es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro, nacida en el año 2005. Su fundador, Tomás Melendo, advirtió que una mejora en la calidad de las familias facilitaría la resolución de bastantes de los problemas que aquejan a la sociedad de hoy. Y, apoyado siempre por su mujer, decidió lanzarse a esta aventura que cuenta con casi veinte años de vida y con múltiples ediciones de los distintos cursos formativos: Másteres y Maestrías, Expertos, cursos más breves, conferencias, ciclos culturales, seminarios y otros programas educativos. Aunque las primeras ediciones tuvieron carácter presencial, actualmente se ha hecho un gran esfuerzo por promover la infraestructura virtual para adaptarse a los nuevos tiempos y que la formación en torno a la familia alcance al mundo entero.