There is an opinion piece from the New York Times that has been sitting in my files for the better part of a year, just waiting for a good opportunity to be shared.  It is Jonathan Franzen's piece, "Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts."  An excerpt:

Liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.) 

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are.

You owe it to yourself to click the link above and to read the whole thing.  Because even if the first chunk of this opinion piece focuses on technology and our technology-centered culture, Franzen goes on to make deep, scathing, beautiful comments about our culture's tendency to go for "like" instead of "love," and how we might consider reclaiming love as a posture and practice in our lives, even if it is the harder of the two.  Love, Franzen implies, takes some guts.  But love, he would agree, is totally worth it in the end.