What is Love?

Everybody loves love. We sing about it, chase it, and long for it. As a College theme for 2026, ‘love’ is easy to rally behind. But if our whole community already agrees that love matters, why make it our focus?

I wonder if you remember your first heartbreak, the moment when what you believed was ‘real’ love revealed itself to be something shallower, fickle, and temporary. Moments like these stay with us. They plant a quiet cynicism that whispers into future friendships and relationships: Will this love last? Will this love let me down? Will this love hurt?

John Bowlby’s attachment theory helps explain why such moments linger. It has long been a foundational idea in developmental psychology, describing how secure or insecure attachments in infancy shape our inner model for relationships throughout life. Critics note this can be an overly deterministic explanation and that these models aren’t fixed; we continue learning, growing, and reshaping them. Yet the core insight remains: the security of our early relationships forms the pattern we often bring into later ones.

So why focus on love?

Because we want our students to know a deeper, more secure love than what is commonly sung about, experienced, or lost in everyday life.

Where can we show them this deeper, secure love?

• In God: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 4:16) tells us that love is not just something God does - it is who He is. Our children don’t have to play the old flower petal game of ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ They can simply say with confidence, ‘He loves me.’ In God, our students can encounter a love that is constant, steady, and secure.

• In Jesus: 1 John 4:10 reminds us: ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Jesus’ love is not theoretical, it is demonstrated. His love is the classic Kindergarten definition of a verb - love is a doing word, not just a feeling. In Jesus, our students can know a love that is proven by action.

• In Us: Dr Justin Coulson, a leading Australian parenting expert, author, and researcher, emphasise that there are three words our children need to hear from us more than any others. Given the theme of this article, you might assume (as I did) that those words are ‘I love you.’ But he suggests a deeper, more formative phrase: ‘no matter what’. Through all the ups and downs of young people’s lives, we want them to know through parents and teachers that we love them and are for them, no matter what. That is the kind of secure relational foundation that can sustain them through whatever friendship or relationship challenges they encounter.

At the heart of our Building Purposeful Lives framework is our College verse, Matthew 22:37–39, summarised as: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind… and love your neighbour as yourself.’ One of our students told me, ‘That’s a lot of love to give’. And it is. But imagine this: what if our young people were so deeply convinced that they are loved - by God, by Jesus, and by us - that loving God and others that much, became the natural overflow of their hearts?

Julian Elton
Chaplain