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Most of us treat love as something that either happens to us or doesn’t — a stroke of luck, a chemistry we either have with someone or don’t. A different way of seeing it is less romantic on the surface but, in practice, far more useful: love is an investment. Not in the cold, transactional sense, but in the sense that anything worth having grows in proportion to how carefully it is tended, understood, and planned for. Whether love ends in happiness or in suffering has less to do with who we happened to meet and more to do with how we invested in them once we did.
There is an old way of looking at this that treats the people closest to us — the ones we married, the ones we’ve loved and lost, the ones still hard to let go of — not as strangers we stumbled into, but as people we spent a long time preparing to meet. The faces change, the circumstances change, but what plays out between two people often reads like the continuation of something already underway. Whatever the origin, the practical instruction that follows is the same one that applies to any serious investment: understand who you love, build an actual plan for winning and keeping their trust, carry the plan out, and then sit down together, honestly, to see whether it’s working. A financial plan. A plan for family life. A plan for weathering the ordinary friction of two people building something together. None of this happens by accident, and love that isn’t invested in — that is left to run on hope alone — is usually the love that quietly fails.
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Romantic love, for all its beauty, is a narrow kind of love. It is love that has to choose one person and exclude everyone else, which is part of what makes it feel so intense — but it also means it can never show its full range of color. There is a wider love available, one that isn’t rationed out based on who has earned it. Loving someone who already loves us back is easy; there’s something coming back in return, the way a parent’s love is repaid by a child’s. It gets much harder once the circle widens to strangers, and harder still when it has to reach people who have actually hurt us.
This is where the practice gets demanding. Consider someone who has been robbed and beaten by a stranger. It’s natural to feel for the victim. It takes something more to feel for the person who did the robbing — and yet, looked at closely, the robber is in worse shape than the victim. The victim, in this view, has simply finished paying off an old debt. The robber has just opened a new one, with no idea yet how heavy the bill will be. Nobody commits harm because they have some surplus of strength or peace to spare; they do it because no one ever taught them another way, because their circumstances gave them no better option, and because they lacked whatever courage it takes to stop themselves. Seen that way, cruelty starts to look less like something to hate and more like something to pity — which doesn’t excuse it, but does make it possible to wish, honestly, that the person causing harm might someday have the conditions to stop.
A flower that carries a hundred colors is loved by everyone and excluded by no one. Getting there takes real investment — asking, on any given day, whether love was added to the world or only withdrawn from it.
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This isn’t only a nice idea. In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had participants practice loving-kindness meditation daily for several weeks — deliberately directing goodwill outward, starting with themselves and gradually widening the circle to others, including people they found difficult. The group that practiced this reported measurable increases in daily positive emotion, and those gains went on to predict real increases in life satisfaction and a drop in depressive symptoms months later. Widening love outward, in other words, isn’t a purely spiritual return — it changes something durable in the person doing the widening.
The same teaching that describes love as an investment also has something to say about why so many people, especially the young, rarely feel settled even when life is going well by every outward measure. In what’s referred to in this teaching as the Sutta on Youth and Happiness, the Buddha points to two things standing in the way: craving that goes unrecognized, and a habit of measuring ourselves against everyone else — feeling better than, worse than, or merely equal to the people around us. The six senses are described as six oceans, each one capable of pulling a person under in pursuit of a sight, a sound, a taste, a touch, a scent, or a thought that promises satisfaction but never quite delivers it. And the comparisons — wanting to be better, fearing we’re worse, resenting having to settle for equal — keep the mind in a state of constant low-grade competition that has nothing to do with actual happiness. None of this is only an ancient problem. It reads, if anything, like an accurate description of a mind pulled in six directions by a phone, and worn down by scrolling past everyone else’s highlight reel.
None of this means retreating from love or numbing desire altogether — the teaching isn’t asking anyone to stop wanting connection. It’s asking for the same thing any good investor already knows: understand what you’re putting your effort into, plan for it honestly, and don’t mistake a quick transaction for something built to last. Give happiness away, and happiness tends to circle back. Give suffering away, and suffering does the same. The love that lasts isn’t the love that arrived with the least effort — it’s the love someone kept choosing to invest in, one ordinary day at a time.
A note on this article: “Love Is a Process of Investment” is inspired by and draws lessons from a chapter in Hạt Mưa Bay Lên (Raindrops Rising) by author TG Minh Thạnh, translated from the original Vietnamese. Among the many themes explored across the book, this chapter looks at romantic love as one color in a much wider spectrum — and at what it takes to grow that love into something boundless.
