What Is Love?
What exactly is love? Of course, the word has come to take on various meanings in our society. The way we, say, "love" hamburgers is not the same way we love our family, not normally anyway. Yet even if we are to strictly single out love as the traditional romantic sense, finding your true love, or love at first sight, even here the term has become muddled.
"Love" has become to widely and casually used, so as to lose its' magnitude or sense of commitment. For instance, if you look at how it is so often used, it is just a guy saying to a girl he has just only recently met, "I love you baby." Of course, in this sense, "love" just signifies a phrase out of simple lust or physical attraction, or you want to gain something from the person. Either sex, or popularity, or confidence, or any number of things. In this sense, you "love" what the person has, and not the person.
And so what is love, in its' true sense? Love, is when you are willing to do anything to let the person you love be who they are, and do what they have to do. Love is also of course, a mutual affection, a mutual commitment to each other, a reciprocity of acts and feelings. It is this mutual affection, AND it is allowing the other to have the freedom of choice and act. Each gives oneself to the other, and accepts the other as they are, wholey and entirely, good and bad. True love is commiting wholeheartedly to the partnership, doign whatever you have to for its' well-being.
That is what I have come to view love as.
This blog was inspired by a discussion in Social Ecology, thanks to Prof. Chuck Stead.
"Love" has become to widely and casually used, so as to lose its' magnitude or sense of commitment. For instance, if you look at how it is so often used, it is just a guy saying to a girl he has just only recently met, "I love you baby." Of course, in this sense, "love" just signifies a phrase out of simple lust or physical attraction, or you want to gain something from the person. Either sex, or popularity, or confidence, or any number of things. In this sense, you "love" what the person has, and not the person.
And so what is love, in its' true sense? Love, is when you are willing to do anything to let the person you love be who they are, and do what they have to do. Love is also of course, a mutual affection, a mutual commitment to each other, a reciprocity of acts and feelings. It is this mutual affection, AND it is allowing the other to have the freedom of choice and act. Each gives oneself to the other, and accepts the other as they are, wholey and entirely, good and bad. True love is commiting wholeheartedly to the partnership, doign whatever you have to for its' well-being.
That is what I have come to view love as.
This blog was inspired by a discussion in Social Ecology, thanks to Prof. Chuck Stead.