I asked the question 'What is love?' recently and got a few interesting answers. Here are the definitions as I received them:
Love is both a noun and verb, both a power and an action. It is the recognition of, and attraction to, and expression of, beauty and kindness and intelligence. I believe it to be the purpose of the universe, the reason we're here. It gives all of creation meaning. And everything else - the mistakes we make, and the struggles we have - if those things lead us to understand love better, and lead us to love more - then I think that's all that matters, really.
Apart from the Biblical explanation in 1 Corinthians 13:4 - 6 verse 7 says it all for me ... Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
LAYMAN TERMS - IF IT DOESN'T EAT AWAY A PART OF YOU THEN TIS SOMETHING ELSE - NOT LOVE
Heinlein said it pretty well: Love is that condition in which the other person's happiness is essential to your own.
Love is the law of attraction.
I would have a response to this question but the only things that come to mind are dry answers about social evolution on the one hand and "baby don't hurt me..." on the other hand. I'm useless to this discussion.
Difficult to define and relatively easy to see/identify.
Love is the word humans use to define the sense of attraction, compassion and attachment we feel towards other members of our species (and occasionally members of other species, like pets) caused by chemical processes in the brain. Sometimes caused and spurred on by arousal, pleasure, intellectual stimulation (also pleasure) and innate altruism.
Love is forgiveness on steroids…
Love is a willingness to sacrifice for something/someone…
Love is openness, or open energy, towards life, yourself, or another person/animal/thing. It can feel like it comes from outside, but it really is an inner thing that is possible to learn, practice and maintain …
...Love like Time is an abstraction... it needs to be viewed in relation to something else. The Mamallian Brain comes equipped with the pleasure centers that facilitate this feeling of love. Is that love? I dont think so... It's far beyond just feeling or expression of feeling.
The intention of such an exercise was not so much to see what people thought about love but whether or not folks think that love has a significant role to play in the advancement of our civilisation. If love is biochemical - can we then synthesise a drug coupled with gene therapy and therefore 'make the world a better place'? Or find the hate/prejudice/idiot gene and remove it from our DNA forever? Certainly genomics is far more complex than I'm making it out to be - but perhaps love is not as complex, or impersonally synthesised through biochemical processes. If it was then there might be a lot more of it demonstrated in more uniform ways.
If love can be learned - what is it that we have to learn in order to effectively and correctly practice love? There seems to be some consensus that sacrifice is involved - that might mean some amount of inconvenience to self for the sake of another and outreach to complete strangers and even those with whom we disagree or have serious conflicts.
It seems to me that whatever love is - it's not easy and it doesn't come naturally, as 'forgiveness on steroids' suggests. We know that sexual attraction is part of love, but attraction certainly doesn't mean love is present, and not all love is about physical attraction. Indeed, many might agree that it is 'beyond just feeling'. But if it is 'innate altruism' what are the characteristics of such?
Love really is hard to define, but it seems we believe it is real nonetheless, and accept that there are elements of instinct and reason that make up love. And times when we must go against our instincts and impulses in order to demonstrate love and times when we must deny reason and rationality. The trick is knowing when and what must be denied.
More questions than answers seem to be arising.
Please...what do you think about this discourse so far?
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