What is love?
Another xkcd!
Perhaps the fact that countless artists and lyricists and poets and philosophers and the like have tried to tell us what love is and all with different meanings means that the definition of love is hard to find.
I suppose as we get older our concepts of love change too. Experiences shape us, scar us, leave us more cynical (me, cynical?). Perhaps they also make us more idealistic. For me, it scares. The hurt of past relationships, the baggage make me wonder if I do know what love is at all.
There are countless lyrics that spring to mind. Perhaps John Denver had it right. Perhaps it is different for everyone. The Beatles seem to think that “All you need is love” to make us special. Of course there is so much schmaltz too. I think just typing Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross will trigger some repressed memories…
Love poems and quotations and philosophies abound. There are wikipedia pages on love and if you were to google ‘love’ you would get over 2.5 billion hits! To think this blog post just adds to them. I’m sure we all have plenty of quotations and lyrics we can reel off the top of our heads. But it still doesn’t help me define what love is.
Psychologically speaking Sternberg decreed the ‘triangle theory’ that love is made up of passion, intimacy and commitment. This is detailed rather nicely by Alex Gunz.
What do you think love is? Is it ‘Friendship set on fire’ or is it more Woody Allen: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.” Did Elizabeth Browning get it right when she noted that “Love doesn’t make the world go around, but it makes the ride worthwhile?” Comments on what you think love is would be appreciated.
And so you ask where this thought process of mine has come from. It actually springs from the fish fingers! Both of them keep telling me that I love MIML™. MIML™ asked Imogen what love meant and what being in love meant. She couldn’t tell him. Later on she told me that it meant using Huggies Nappies as that is what the advertising guru had portrayed on a TV advert she had seen.
To the kids it seems so simple. Yet I suppose I am just scared. I got it wrong before and don’t want to again. So to MIML™ Immy and Japs are convinced that we love each other. I love spending time with you and we are a great couple and I don’t not love you. Hope that makes a little sense!
Tags: love, MIML™, questioning
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
There were times I wrote password protected posts too - but it’s no fun writing for yourself - so thanks for sharing dear
Love is …. blah.
I think that life and love are not true and complete until you have experienced setbacks, heartbreak and failure. You learn from mistakes, you understand what things really mean. Early high school I thought I was in love!
I don’t think people can tell you what love is, or if you’re in love. If you’re in love, you will know. You will reach a level of comfort and longing for your significant other that you don’t have for anyone else - even when you’ve been together a while.
Ok, I’m going to stop rambling now! Fi, this guy sounds great. If your kids think you’re in love, let go of your fears and let yourself fall
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Love may be many a splendid thing, but it’s almost impossible to easily define or categorise. Perhaps that’s the beauty and pain of it.
Whether with or without a partner it is possible to feel loved and to love. Despite the fact that I’ve been single quite a while, I just about always feel loved, be it from family and friends both near and distant. However it is worth nothing that feeling loved is separate to feeling or not feeling lonely, which is something I do feel often. When it comes to identifying what you feel towards another it gets tricky because it’s never easy to identify when one type of love morphs into another.
For example, how do you separate lust from love? Are they really that separate or mere slightly different expressions of a feeling. Perhaps it comes down to intention, or anticipated longevity.
Fear regarding love is the great muddler of an already confusing situation. I’ve found that to love truly I need to let go of fear. Charge forward and hope for the best, not always so literally but metaphorically. Being the romantic and optimist at heart that I am, I go full-heartedly into things. Admittedly, this has left me hurt, bruised, even scarred sometimes, but always I stay true to myself and anybody that I love knows that they’re getting the real, full, no-holds-barred version.
If you feel loved, secure and confident then there’s no need to use fear as your ’safety net’ because you’re already saved. Learn from the past, but don’t let it overpower your future. <3
June 4th, 2008 at 12:14 am
From my point of view, you’ve researched wayyyy to much into what love is. But then again I can’t provide an answer that defines what love is. I warn you now that this is just going to be a ramble… a brain spasm of what I think.
I don’t know what to define as Love. I can say that I thought that I knew. I thought I knew enough to get engaged for 16 months. I knew in my heart that I loved this girl. But now that it’s over my feelings have changed into heartbreak-loss-failure-acceptance-avoidance-healing-friendship. I wouldn’t have asked her to marry my if I didn’t believe that it was love.
But then there is more to love than attraction, friendship… I know I Love my Mum, my Sister, my Brother and God… But that’s also different. I can’t explain this either, I know that I hurt when they hurt, I feel joy when they feel joy; and that fits in with some the stuff that Alan Gunz said in http://www.in-mind.org/issue-6/the-anatomy-of-love.html . He talked about “inclusion of self in the other.”… I know that bit is in the section on Intimacy, but I don’t believe that intimacy just refers to “Getting it on”, but there is also the getting to know… the joining, growing closer together over time…
But then I also look at my Grandparents. Their love isn’t what I’d call the traditional rock song love either. They’ve been married since the end of WWII, and are both alive. They are now at the stage of life where they are frail and elderly, my Granny more-so than Pa. Pa does everything for Granny, shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc, and yet he still gets aggravated by things like Granny not hearing things properly (cos she’s going deaf), or retelling the same stories over and over again (because she forgets what’s been previously said), but he really does love her.
Another fresh example for me is my brother and his new fiancé. The have been inseparable for the last few months, and I’d been wondering for the last month or so if my brother was going to pop the question. But then is that love…
At the moment for me, Love seems like a thing that’s out there beyond my grasp. I don’t know where it is. It makes me think of the song “Love rears it’s ugly head” by Living Color… I don’t know when it’s coming for me.
That didn’t help at all did it. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.
June 4th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Thanks Monnie, ALi and Griff for your comments. I’m not closer to defining it myself but perhaps it doesn’ need to be defined. Love just is.
Had a good chat with MIML™ about it last night. We are just going to keep chilling and see where things lead. There is no rush and the ride is enjoyable!
June 4th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hi there Fiona
Great poets have written about love and songsters have crooned, screamed, bellowed and sobbed over it. I prefer a quote from Red Dwarf : Rimmer “love is a hormonal imbalance invented by bank managers to make you lose your mind and spend your money” ( I have it wrong but you get the drift)
In short dear lady… enjoy the time you have with the ones you care for…. The world is a much better place for having your caring soul in it.
Mel
June 4th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Personally? I think love is what you make it. It differs from person to person.. for me, its that thing that makes you want to run across rooftops and jump through puddles, all the while you refuse to glance sideways as you dance along the road.
But I am admittedly a hopeless romantic, and I refuse to change, no matter how many times I’ve had my heart broken (and its been a few!)
Love is all about taking a risk, and the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing. After all, although some things can fool a fool, nothing can fool your heart.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Great post, Fi, thanks for sharing - another hopeless romantic in the comments! I want to pick up on what you said in one of your comment responses, namely:
“Love just is.”
I prefer “love just *does*.” I think griff summed it up well - in all of his examples, love is active, and it involves putting the other ahead of oneself.
To paraphrase one of the Bible’s most quoted passages on love along those lines:
To love means:
Be patient,
Be kind.
Don’t be envious,
Don’t be boastful,
Don’t be proud.
Don’t be rude,
Don’t be self-seeking,
Don’t get angry easily,
Don’t keep a record of wrongs
To always protect
To always trust,
To always hope,
And always persevere.
(1 Corinthians 13:4-5,7)
If both parties are doing that out of a desire for what’s best for each other, it’s a beautiful thing
In short: Love someone? Show it…
June 8th, 2008 at 12:19 am
Disclaimer: the above comment does *not* mean I am against flowers, soppy poems (or even unsoppy poems), chocolates, late night phone calls, long letters / 140 character tweets, pina coladas, getting caught in the rain, etc.