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I’ve never made a conscious decision to love anyone. Somehow, my heart has always known — in ways beyond my rational understanding — who it wanted to love.

I just know that on the few occasions when real love has happened for me, I experienced two things at once. I needed to express boundless, unconditional love for that person — and I craved that person’s love and adoration more than I needed air and water.

We talk about love a lot in our culture — both in traditional folk culture and in modern pop culture — but I’ve never found anyone who can give me a satisfying definition. I’m not just talking about the various kinds of love — romantic, family, friendship, spiritual. I mean something far more basic. Is love an emotion? Or does it have a more powerful “life force” of its own?

I read a few days ago that new brain studies show love and hate are very similar in the ways they affect the mind, which might explain why it’s so easy to go from loving a person to hating the person.

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When I was a little boy, my mother told me a story about what happened when she almost died as a child — and that story has remained vivid in my memory.

I don’t recall what illness she had or exactly how old she was, but she was in a hospital and was near death. Doctors and her family were gathered around her in that hospital room, where she was covered with an oxygen tent.

As she lay there dying, Mother experienced something that might be called a dream. It might be called an out-of-body experience. Maybe it was a near-death experience. Whatever it was, she remembered it clearly and told the story with conviction.

She was riding in a small boat across a river. Ahead of her, Jesus was waiting for her on the riverbank. He was dressed in a sailor suit. As her boat approached the bank, she reached out to take his hand. She said that even in her child mind, she knew that when she took his hand, she would be dead to this world.

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Being vulnerable about my feelings scared me when I was young. I decided early in life that if people knew my fears and vulnerabilities, they could use them against me. I don’t know how I came to that conclusion, but I learned to hide my emotions and wear an impassive mask.

By the time I was in the ninth grade, in fact, kids at school had tagged me with the nickname “Spockelroy,” which was a combination of my last name and the name of Star Trek’s half-Vulcan Mr. Spock, who was brilliant and logical, but never showed the emotions from his human half. The name stuck for a couple of years.

Learning to get in touch with my emotions — well into adulthood — saved me from an empty life. Learning to feel and learning to be vulnerable saved me from continuing down a road of dysfunction toward something ugly that would have been a natural destination for me. Today, I’m very open about my feelings and vulnerabilities, because I know that going back into hiding would kill my heart and destroy any possibility of receiving the love I so desperately need.

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