What is Love
What is Love? Since the time the English word came into being to this day, there have been many explanations about this elusive concept called love. Questions about love and its definitions abound in articles about human emotions and brain biochemistry that tell something about love and the happiness and sadness that it brings . The human emotion that is called love has also inspired writers to write stories of human success and tragedies caused by love. Stories that would combine love with other human emotions such as hatred, jealousy and loneliness and even greed, have now become the standard and make a book or movie worth exploring.
But, how do we define love? Experts would say that love encompasses a wide range of human emotions, attitude and experiences that would be relevant to the human sense of caring and even sexual stimulation. In this regard, the word love can thus mean something related to happiness, pleasure and can cover anything from spiritual, maternal and even physical attraction to another person. This wide and prevalent coverage of human tendency towards love as an emotion has resulted in various suggestions and explanation as to the meaning of love.
Attempts at defining love in its concrete and abstract forms can be insufficient though. What seems to be more important is how we perceive this seemingly indescribable emotion that is love. The simplicity and intricacy of various meanings plus the complexity of varied human emotions simply make it too difficult to give an appropriate meaning for the word love. It may be better to just forget about looking for the most appropriate description about the meaning of love and just accept that it exists and is important to God and man alike. The best meaning of love is not how others explain it, but how you feel it. In other words, each one of us has his own interior meaning of love.
The many forms of love would include paternal love, sexual love, material love, spiritual love, platonic love and others. Paternal love is of course the most basic kind of love as it involves our love between parent and child. Sexual love would be the affection between couples for the creation of their child. Material and spiritual love can include our inherent love for material possession and spiritual fulfillment. As there are varied kinds of love, so too are the explanations for them. Aside from the fact that there are many kinds of love, people sometimes try to give some more meaning to a particular kind of love. Like for example your love for your wife. We can say that since you love your wife, the feelings that you have for her would be affectionate and sexual love. And once you do not want your wife to mingle with other people since she is already your wife, then it would be termed as a possessive kind of love. Under healthier situations, it may be a kind of passionate love. But still, this does not define love.
Perhaps love is gift from God and can’t be boxed into a clear definition. Maybe God is love (as some philosophers and theologians claim). In this case, we possibly out to pray for love and not even try to define it. Possibly love is one of the larger mysteries of life.
Love they say is what makes the world go round. And if you are in love, you will surely feel the happiness all around you especially when the person you love is near besides you.
“Don’t say you love me unless you really mean it, because I might do something crazy like believe it.”– Anonymous