What is love?
You can define it biochemically—oxytocin and dopamine dancing in your brain. You can explain it evolutionarily—pair bonding for survival and reproduction. You can describe it poetically—the merging of two souls into one. But none of these explanations capture what you feel when your child takes their first breath, or when you hold someone as they take their last. The definitions exist, precise and scientific and literary, but they all somehow miss the thing itself, like trying to explain the ocean to someone who has never seen water.
I remember the moment Arash was born, how Happy’s hand gripped mine so hard I thought bones would break, how the midwife placed this tiny, furious creature on her chest, how he opened his eyes and looked at nothing and everything simultaneously. In that moment, I felt something that all the neuroscience in the world couldn’t explain. Was it hormones? Probably. Evolutionary programming? Almost certainly. But reducing it to chemistry felt like calling a symphony “organized air vibrations”—technically accurate and completely inadequate.
The questions that matter most resist answers because they’re not asking for information—they’re reaching toward mystery. They’re not problems to be solved but depths to be experienced. When I ask “What is love?” I’m not really seeking a definition. I’m trying to understand why this particular arrangement of atoms—Happy, Arash, my mother before she died—can make me feel like I’m connected to something infinite. I’m asking why meaning exists in a universe that seems indifferent to meaning.
Why do we suffer? What happens after death? What’s the meaning of existence? These questions have launched a million philosophies, a thousand religions, countless late-night conversations that end with more confusion than clarity. Buddhism says suffering comes from attachment. Christianity says it’s the consequence of fallen nature. Existentialism says it’s inherent to consciousness. Neuroscience says it’s just neurons firing in particular patterns. All of these answers feel true and none of them feel sufficient.
Yet we keep asking them, keep circling back to them, keep hoping this time we’ll crack the code. Karim and I have been having the same argument about free will for fifteen years. He’s a determinist—believes everything is causally determined by prior events, that our sense of choice is an illusion. I can’t accept this, even though his logic is sound, even though I can’t actually refute his arguments. We keep returning to the question, both of us slightly modifying our positions, neither of us changing our fundamental stance, both of us enjoying the argument more than we’d enjoy a resolution.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the questions aren’t meant to be answered but lived with, like difficult relatives who teach us something about ourselves precisely because they challenge us.
The unanswerable questions are the ones that make us human. Animals don’t lie awake wondering about the nature of consciousness or the purpose of their existence. They simply exist. My cat doesn’t have an existential crisis about being a cat. He’s perfectly content to be a small creature who wants food and warmth and the occasional affection. But we’re cursed and blessed with the ability to question everything, including our own questioning. We can’t just live—we have to wonder what living means, why we’re living, whether we’re living correctly.
This self-awareness creates a particular kind of suffering that only humans seem to experience. We’re not just hungry—we wonder why we feel hungry, whether we should be hungry, what hunger means about our character. We’re not just afraid—we analyze our fear, judge ourselves for feeling it, worry about whether we’re worrying too much. We turn every experience into a question about the experience, every feeling into a meta-feeling about the feeling.
Consider this: if someone could definitively answer “What is the meaning of life?” would that be liberating or devastating? Would knowing the cosmic purpose of existence inspire us or rob us of the beautiful struggle to create our own meaning? I think about this sometimes during Fajr prayer, when I’m supposed to be focused on Allah but instead I’m wondering what it would mean if God appeared and explained everything—the purpose of creation, the reason for suffering, the nature of reality. Would I be grateful? Or would I feel cheated, like someone had spoiled the ending of a mystery I was enjoying unraveling?
There’s something precious about not knowing, something valuable in the uncertainty. If someone handed me a document titled “The Definitive Meaning of Life” I think I’d be terrified to read it. Not because I don’t want to know, but because knowing would change everything. The question “Why am I here?” drives so much of what makes life rich—the searching, the wondering, the creating of provisional meanings that we live by until we outgrow them. If I knew the answer, would I still write? Would I still pray? Would I still stay up late talking to Happy about what we think happens after death?
The questions without answers are invitations, not destinations. They’re doorways that keep opening onto more doorways. They’re the reason we write poetry instead of just speaking plainly, why we create art instead of just documenting reality, why we fall in love instead of just reproducing. If love were just biochemistry, we could take a pill. If meaning were just survival, we wouldn’t need philosophy. If consciousness were just computation, we wouldn’t feel this strange, inexplicable sense that there’s something more, something that can’t be reduced to its components.
Think about the questions that have shaped you most. Probably not “What’s the capital of France?” but “Am I a good person?” Not “How does photosynthesis work?” but “Why do I feel so alone sometimes?” The factual questions get answered and forgotten. I learned photosynthesis in school, passed the exam, promptly forgot the details. But the question “Am I a good person?” has been with me since childhood, changing shape as I age, becoming more complex rather than simpler.
When I was young, being good meant obeying my parents and sharing my toys. In adolescence, it meant not lying and being kind to unpopular classmates. Now it means something more complicated—being present for Arash even when I’m tired, supporting Happy’s career even when it inconveniences mine, calling my aging aunts even when I don’t feel like talking, giving money to beggars even when I’m not sure they need it. The question keeps evolving because there’s no final answer, just an ongoing negotiation between who I am and who I want to be.
What if the absence of answers isn’t a bug but a feature? What if mystery isn’t humanity’s limitation but our greatest gift? Every advance in science reveals new mysteries beneath the ones we solved. We understand the mechanics of evolution but can’t explain consciousness. We can map the human genome but can’t define what makes someone human. We land robots on Mars but can’t answer why we’re compelled to explore places we’ll never inhabit.
The questions that can be answered close conversations. The questions that can’t be answered open worlds. When Happy asks me “Do you love me?” I could say yes or no and end the conversation. But the real answer is more complicated—yes, but not in the same way I did fifteen years ago, yes but also I sometimes feel frustrated with you, yes but I’m not sure what love means after years of shared routines have replaced the intensity we started with. The unanswerable complexity of the question is what keeps us talking, keeps us curious about each other, keeps the relationship alive.
They force us to sit with uncertainty, to embrace not-knowing, to find comfort in the uncomfortable space between wondering and understanding. This might be the hardest lesson of being human—that not everything resolves, that some tensions are meant to be held rather than released, that living well means accepting that you’ll die without knowing most of what you wanted to know.
My mother died with questions. I know she did because I was there, holding her hand, and in one of her last conscious moments she looked at me with such confusion, such questioning, as if to say “Is this really how it ends? Is this all?” I wanted to tell her yes, to give her certainty, but I had no certainty to give. We sat together in the mystery, her dying with questions and me watching with questions, neither of us able to offer the other what we most needed.
Maybe wisdom isn’t having all the answers but learning to love the questions themselves. Maybe the goal isn’t to solve the mystery of existence but to participate in it more fully, more consciously, more courageously. The mystics understood this—they didn’t seek to explain God but to experience God, didn’t try to solve the paradoxes of faith but to live inside them. The poets understood this—they didn’t try to define beauty but to create it, didn’t explain meaning but embodied it.
I think about teaching Arash this, somehow. Not the specific questions but the capacity to hold them gently, to live with uncertainty without needing to collapse it into false certainty. To let him know that “I don’t know” is sometimes the most honest and courageous answer, that wondering is a form of wisdom, that the questions he’s asking about why the sky is blue and whether his goldfish has feelings are practice for the deeper questions he’ll ask later about why people die and what makes life worth living.
The most important questions don’t have answers because they don’t need them. They have something better: endless possibility. Every person who asks “What is love?” discovers their own answer through living. Every person who asks “What is the meaning of life?” creates meaning through their choices. Every person who asks “Why do we suffer?” learns something about resilience and compassion that can’t be taught through explanation.
Tonight, after Arash is asleep and the house is quiet, I’ll sit with my questions instead of trying to answer them. I’ll wonder about consciousness without needing to define it. I’ll think about death without needing to know what comes after. I’ll feel love without needing to explain why I feel it. The mystery isn’t a problem to solve but a gift to receive, and maybe receiving it means accepting that some questions are more beautiful unanswered, more alive in their asking than they could ever be in their answering.
What is love? I still don’t know. And I’m grateful for that.