"Love"
Can somebody please explain to me what exactly "love" is? I want a definition that encompasses all of the various ways we use the word. Good luck with that.
I think the word 'love' is overused to the point of being meaningless. At best, it it indicates a fairly strong emotional attachment. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the strong emotional attachment I have to, say, a piece of pottery I've invested a lot of time in is different from the strong emotional attachment my parents have for each other. Yet I could use the word 'love' for both and nobody would criticise me on it.
So I think 'love' is dead. For me, it makes me cringe when I hear someone say "I love you". I've heard far too many stories of people who said it over and over right up until the day the day their SO found out they were cheating. Heck, there's even a Blue October song that goes "It's getting more impossible to keep a straight face and be trusted with 'I love you'". You get the idea. It's dead.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that the concept of romantic love itself is becoming meaningless. (I may just be cynical because I've never experienced it, but bear with me here.) Anyone who's ever watched a movie knows how to do romantic love 'right'. You bring the girl flowers and chocolate, do random nice things that sweep her off her feet, look into her eyes at the right moment, she kisses you and... well, you know the rest of the story. You have sex as soon as you can find a horizontal surface, or in a pinch, a wall. Either that, or you make a noble, self-sacrificing pledge to wait until marriage because God says so. (I'll save the premaritial sex rant for another day.)
Romantic love is not for Relationship building. At best, it's a series of steps a person follows to get another person to notice them long enough to talk to them... but usually, it's just a complex mating dance. Real Relationships are not about a system of punishment and rewards, where if a person screws up they are 'cut off' or 'given the silent treatment' and if a person gets something right, well, time for sex! Real Relationships are about communication, discussion, and compromise. That means that if something is bothering one person, they in some way tell the other, and the two work out a solution that fits BOTH parties, together.
Real Relationships have equal power distribution. That means that there's not one person making the decisions all the time and controlling everything. I can tell a lot about couples just by the way they walk together; if I see a couple where the guy holds the girl with his arm around her waist as if she were just some person he'd pulled for a picture, I can probably guess that that Relationship isn't really healthy. The best couples I've seen generally walk holding hands, and the person with longer legs slows down so that the other is not being dragged along. It's about compromise, and sometimes giving up what you would prefer so that things are not difficult for the other person - but also about knowing what you need, and not giving that up.
I had a conversation with a friend a month or so about this, and he commented that he'd only know about 7 people, ever, that thought about Relationships this way and acted accordingly. I think the number is about the same for me. But I've known plenty of people who have been 'in love' right up until the moment that relationship fell apart, and even after would insist that it was 'real'. Something was real, yes. Attraction, or lust, or a mutual agreement to use each other for different purposes, or whatever. And there was certainly a strong emotional attachment. But I've seen very few real Relationships.
*EDIT* I don't mean to say that the 'love' (whatever it is) in relationships I see is not real - whatever people feel for each other, those feelings are real. But strong feelings do not necessarily equal strong Relationships.
* I use "Relationship" to denote a significant other type thing, as opposed to 'relationship' which could just be a friendship, etc.
I think the word 'love' is overused to the point of being meaningless. At best, it it indicates a fairly strong emotional attachment. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the strong emotional attachment I have to, say, a piece of pottery I've invested a lot of time in is different from the strong emotional attachment my parents have for each other. Yet I could use the word 'love' for both and nobody would criticise me on it.
So I think 'love' is dead. For me, it makes me cringe when I hear someone say "I love you". I've heard far too many stories of people who said it over and over right up until the day the day their SO found out they were cheating. Heck, there's even a Blue October song that goes "It's getting more impossible to keep a straight face and be trusted with 'I love you'". You get the idea. It's dead.
In fact, I'm beginning to think that the concept of romantic love itself is becoming meaningless. (I may just be cynical because I've never experienced it, but bear with me here.) Anyone who's ever watched a movie knows how to do romantic love 'right'. You bring the girl flowers and chocolate, do random nice things that sweep her off her feet, look into her eyes at the right moment, she kisses you and... well, you know the rest of the story. You have sex as soon as you can find a horizontal surface, or in a pinch, a wall. Either that, or you make a noble, self-sacrificing pledge to wait until marriage because God says so. (I'll save the premaritial sex rant for another day.)
Romantic love is not for Relationship building. At best, it's a series of steps a person follows to get another person to notice them long enough to talk to them... but usually, it's just a complex mating dance. Real Relationships are not about a system of punishment and rewards, where if a person screws up they are 'cut off' or 'given the silent treatment' and if a person gets something right, well, time for sex! Real Relationships are about communication, discussion, and compromise. That means that if something is bothering one person, they in some way tell the other, and the two work out a solution that fits BOTH parties, together.
Real Relationships have equal power distribution. That means that there's not one person making the decisions all the time and controlling everything. I can tell a lot about couples just by the way they walk together; if I see a couple where the guy holds the girl with his arm around her waist as if she were just some person he'd pulled for a picture, I can probably guess that that Relationship isn't really healthy. The best couples I've seen generally walk holding hands, and the person with longer legs slows down so that the other is not being dragged along. It's about compromise, and sometimes giving up what you would prefer so that things are not difficult for the other person - but also about knowing what you need, and not giving that up.
I had a conversation with a friend a month or so about this, and he commented that he'd only know about 7 people, ever, that thought about Relationships this way and acted accordingly. I think the number is about the same for me. But I've known plenty of people who have been 'in love' right up until the moment that relationship fell apart, and even after would insist that it was 'real'. Something was real, yes. Attraction, or lust, or a mutual agreement to use each other for different purposes, or whatever. And there was certainly a strong emotional attachment. But I've seen very few real Relationships.
*EDIT* I don't mean to say that the 'love' (whatever it is) in relationships I see is not real - whatever people feel for each other, those feelings are real. But strong feelings do not necessarily equal strong Relationships.
* I use "Relationship" to denote a significant other type thing, as opposed to 'relationship' which could just be a friendship, etc.