In couple therapy I never use the word love.

The word has become a bucket term that means very different things to different people. Asking questions like “do you still love me?”, “how could you do this if you love me?”, and “I don’t love you anymore” are, in many ways, meaningless. Leave the word for Valentine’s Day.

There is, however, one definition of love that I find useful, and it comes from Humberto Maturana. He described love as seeing the other as a legitimate other and making space for coexistence (Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).

This is not sentimental. It is about recognising another person as different and still wanting to be with them. Love, in this sense, is being drawn to the complexity of the other without needing to judge it, reduce it, or change it. Not being repelled by it.

Love means making space for difference and tolerating the tension that difference inevitably brings. Different values. Different meanings. Different ways of experiencing the same event. It is allowing that difference to remain without immediately trying to correct it, reshape it, or pull it into alignment with our own way of seeing things. It is about whether we are willing to allow the other to exist as they are and to recognise their experience of the world as legitimate.

This definition moves the idea of love away from sentiment and emotion. Love is not about whether the other person makes us feel good, meets our needs, or showers us with affection. It is not about sexual chemistry or attraction. It is about being able to tolerate and engage the individuality of the other without experiencing it as a threat.

Seen this way, love gives rise to cooperation rather than competition.

Where the other cannot be tolerated as different, the interaction shifts. Partners begin to compete over meaning, over whose interpretation is right, over whose experience should define the relationship. They compete over values, over how things should be. Conversations become oppositional, defensive, and combative.

So instead of cooperation, we see competition. And competition easily becomes corrosive: protecting ourselves at any cost, displacing everything bad onto the other, pathologising them. The trend of spotting narcissists around every corner is just one expression of this.

Cooperation becomes possible when the other is recognised as legitimate, not because they are the same as us, but precisely because they are different.

In couple therapy, this is not approached as an idea, but as something that has to be made possible in the interaction itself.

Because love is not an emotion.

Love is a way of living together. It is a way of relating to difference.

And even though I never use the word love in therapy, this is ultimately what the work is about: shifting relationships from competition to cooperation. From trying to win, to becoming curious about the experiential world of the other.

This requires tolerating the tension that comes with two people existing together. That tension is not something to remove. It is the condition of the relationship itself. When it is treated as a threat, the relationship contracts. When it is engaged, it becomes the source of flexibility, movement, and continued connection.