Simple kindness toward another person is an important act of love. Kindness is a form of love because it includes the desire for good and positive consequences for the loved person. These kinds of motivations and actions strengthen love as the positive interpersonal connection between one who loves and another who is loved. Love kindness promotes connections to others. This good will and doing of love are beneficial to the one who loves.
Why Kindness Is Love?
There is a great diversity of cultural and individual understanding of what love is. The languages across cultures vary in the words they use for love (Karandashev, 2019). Despite this diversity, the most basic and important thing about any kind of love is that it brings and does something good for another person (Wirzbicka, 1992, 1999). In other words, love is an investment in the other’s well-being for the sake of the other (Hegi & Bergner, 2010). See more about this in Cultural Typologies of Love (Karandashev, 2022). So, to love someone means wanting the best for them and acting in their best interests. This is exactly what kindness does.
Kindness Strengthens Positive Social Connection in Love
The kindness of love is thought to be a form of positive social connection. When you do things that help other people, like saying good words or giving personal support, you make positive connections with another person. Love as kindness can also be described by words like compassion, generosity, and care, among other similar words. All these kind things make another person feel good.
When Kindness Makes People Feel Good
The study of Rowland and Curry (2019), for instance, has shown a range of kindness activities that boost people’s positive moods and feelings of happiness. Researchers investigated the effects of a seven-day kindness activity on changes in subjective happiness. Their study was based on an earlier systematic review and meta-analysis of the psychological effects of kindness, which showed that performing these acts of kindness increases people’s happiness and overall well-being.
The specific purpose of this study was to see how different manifestations of kindness, as narrated by the type of activity prescribed, have different effects on happiness. Researchers compared acts of kindness to strong social ties, novel acts of self-kindness, weak social ties, and observed kindness. The study compared experimental groups to a control group that was not assigned to do any acts of kindness.
Overall, the results showed that participating in kindness activities for a week increased happiness. Also, researchers found a strong link between the number of acts of kindness and an increase in happiness. Interestingly, the effect did not differ across the various types of experimental groups and conditions. This means that being kind to others in both strong and weak relationships, being kind to oneself, and just seeing other people be kind all make people happier.
Why Love and Kindness Make You Feel Good According to studies, kindness elicits an elevated mood and increases altruism. Moreover, by doing good things for another person, you can make yourself feel good and even happy. Such prosocial behavior as doing good things for another person makes you feel what’s called “other-praising moral emotion.” This is a term for the good feelings you get when you see other people doing good things like being generous, selfless, loving, and kind. Some of the physical sensations of being uplifted are warmth and tears (see for review, Aliouche, The Science of Kindness).