Why You’ve Been Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

1. Introduction: The Bus Stop Test

Imagine you are waiting for a bus. You are physically drained, and you find yourself surrounded by people who strike you as an obstacle course of irritations, the loud, the loitering, and the oblivious. This friction wears you down, depleting your emotional reserves before your day has even truly begun. Now, consider a shift in perception: you look at that same group of people and, rather than seeing obstacles, you see a concert.

The source suggests a profound cognitive reset: “When you see a human being, see music.” This isn’t mere poetic sentiment; it is the technical application of Ohev et habriyot —the love of creation. In Jewish thought, the human being is the ontological center of the universe. To love creation is to take active pleasure in humanity. Most of us suffer from a form of emotional poverty; we believe love is a scarce resource reserved for a few, when in reality, we simply lack the technical definition and the disciplined practice required to experience it as a constant, energizing force.

2. Takeaway #1: You Can’t “Fall Out” of Love We frequently speak of “falling” in or out of love, as if love were a topographical hazard. From the perspective of a technical ethicist, this is a category error. We must distinguish between love—an emotion of pleasure derived from identifying and appreciating actual virtue—and infatuation, which is an “illusion of virtue” driven by subjective desire.

Because genuine love is rooted in the recognition of objective virtue, it is fundamentally enduring. You can fall out of infatuation when the illusion dissolves, but you cannot “fall out” of the appreciation of a virtue once it has been truly witnessed.

“Do you think your parents someday might fall out of love with you? Inconceivable, right? When you love, it’s forever. You fall out of infatuation, out of comfortable situation.”

However, a vital caveat exists: we must not confuse love with “sentimentalizing.” Consider the case of Ma Barker, who viewed her sons’ criminal violence as “courage.” This is not love; it is a “hysterical” delusion. To love is to see the truth. If we glamorize vice as virtue, we aren’t loving the person; we are sentimentalizing a reckless idiocy that deep down, we know is destructive.

3. Takeaway #2: The Pleasure Paradox (Why Giving Trumps Receiving)

Suppose Harvard University offered two concurrent seminars: “How to Love” and “How to be Loved.” The vast majority would flock to the latter. This illustrates the “Body vs. Soul” paradox. The body seeks the “objective, passive comfort” of being the object of love—it wants to be protected and reassured. The soul, however, seeks the “subjective, active expansion” of being the subject.

Choosing to love—to be the one who observes and appreciates—is the superior pleasure because it facilitates internal growth. When you love, you are no longer a passive object; you are an active participant in the vitality of the world.

The Soul’s Growth Through Active Love:

• Participatory Beauty: When you identify courage or integrity in another, you “get” that vitality; you partake in the virtue you admire.
• Vitality vs. Stagnation: Recognizing the “ballet” of human existence energizes the observer, whereas waiting to be loved leaves one in a state of dependent stagnation.

4. Takeaway #3: The 12-Child Secret and the Laboratory of the Self

There is a counter-intuitive logic in large families: a parent of twelve children often possesses a far more refined capacity for love than a parent of an only child. This is because love is a skill honed through necessity. Each child is a new laboratory for stepping outside the ego.

Love requires “articulated security.” When you can name exactly why you love someone—identifying specific virtues like superior intelligence or a hardworking nature—the relationship gains solidity. When that person inevitably irritates you, your love remains stable because you have articulated the “beautiful person” existing beneath the momentary friction.

Crucially, this work begins with the self. The strategist’s rule is: “If you don’t love yourself, don’t love me.” If you are an enemy to your own soul, your “love” for others will eventually become a vehicle for self-aggression and projection. Self-love is the discipline of recognizing your own longing for truth and goodness; once you appreciate these virtues in yourself, you realize they are the “basic thrust” of every other human being.

5. Takeaway #4: Winning the “Love Game” Through the Hierarchy of Virtues

To transition from loving a few to loving humanity, you must become a disciplined philosopher of virtue. This is practiced through the “Love Game”: defining virtues, finding them in loved ones, and then transferring that sensitivity to strangers.

However, not all virtues are equal. A technical ethicist recognizes a hierarchy: Wisdom, Good, and Holy. While being “Holy” (connected to the infinite) is a lift, and being “Good” is essential, Wisdom is the “heaviest” and greatest virtue. Without wisdom, even those who want to be “good” can cause catastrophe—as seen in the Cambodian genocide, where an undisciplined desire to “remove evil” led to the slaughter of millions.

The ultimate shortcut to loving every human being is identifying the Tzelem Elohim —the Image of God. This is the ontological dignity found in the “divine spark” of free will and the power to create. We often ignore this in the “herd,” but as the source notes, if you discovered a stranger was “Woody Allen in disguise,” you would immediately focus on his every word. We must learn to grant that same level of attention to the “Divine Spark” in every person, regardless of their fame or wealth.

6. Takeaway #5: Love as a High-Stakes Business Tool

Love is a practical tool for “greasing” high-stakes interactions. In business, focusing on the virtues of a boss or an employee isn’t just “nice”—it gets the job done. If you want an employee to be punctual, don’t just “knock his head”; tell him how much you value his specific contributions. People react to how they are viewed.

We fail to do this because we become desensitized. If we saw a robot in a shop window tie a necktie, we would stare for hours at the technical marvel. Yet, we ignore the “ballet” of a human doing the same because there are “too many of them.” This is the New York vs. Romania analogy: in New York, millions are ignored as part of the herd. In a remote corner of Romania, a single person who speaks your language is a “fantabulous” miracle. To love humanity is to choose to be “sensitized” to the common miracle of human communication and grace, everywhere, all the time.

7. The Foundation: The Two Silos and the Temple Mount

The spiritual frequency of love is best captured by the Midrash of the two brothers who shared a farm. One had a large family; the other was alone.

The brother who was alone secretly moved wheat to his brother’s silo at night, thinking, “He has twelve mouths to feed; I only have myself.” Simultaneously, the brother with the family moved wheat to the lone brother’s silo, thinking, “I have a family to care for me; he has only his wheat.” When they finally met in the middle of the night and realized their mutual sacrifice, they embraced.

It was on that exact spot of selfless, articulated love that the Temple Mount was established. The site was not chosen for its geography, but for its emotional resonance. As the source concludes: “When a human being loves another human being, the Almighty is with us wherever we are.”

8. Conclusion: A Challenge for the Soul Love is not a passive accident; it is an active, disciplined, philosophical choice. It requires the courage to look past irritation and the wisdom to identify actual virtue.

As a life strategist, I leave you with this diagnostic question: What have you done in the last six months to work on liking people, rather than just trying to be liked? We spend our lives trying to be the “object” of love for comfort’s sake. The path to true vitality is to become the “subject”—to train your eyes to see the music in the crowd.