"The Science of Love: How Positivity Resonance Shapes the Way We Connect"

"far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see  them, wholeheartedly — springs open... The new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually anytime two or more people — even strangers — connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong...

Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. you locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin... Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily. … More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/28/love-2-0-barbara-fredrickson/

I kind of really want to read this book... I was honestly thinking about this this morning, how I would love to ask everyone I meet: when was the last time you felt a random moment of love for a stranger or distant aquisntance? Just that second where you feel like you are in something with someone, even someone walking past you on the street who you will never interact with again.

I feel like this totally describes that thing where some people really just bring love into the room with them, sort of launching this emotional interconnectedness.

And it really is a remarkable thing with people you love, even when they are far away, experiencing their emotions vicariously when you hear their news.

(Also, I totally recommend the book linked to at the end of this article, A General Theory of Love; I lent it to a friend, but when I get it back I might write up a review, it made me think differently about human connection)