What is love?
The question has been asked by nearly everyone alive at one point or another. Haddaway wrote a song asking it. Artist Howard Jones asks the questions in a bit deeper way: "What is love anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?" Millions quite possibly billions of songs have been written about love from rap to ballads to religious songs. But just what is it?
Douglas Adams writes in one of his books: "The Encyclopedia Galactica, in its chapter on Love states that it is far too complicated to define. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: Avoid, if at all possible"
This is what Wikipedia says about love:
Love is any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my wife"). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.
As an abstract concept, love usually refers to a deep, ineffable feeling of tenderly caring for another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual emotional closeness of familial and platonic love to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
On the website 'Love Lessons' (a site which I do not frequent, only discovered in my research) I read this: "Psychology portrays love as a cognitive phenomenon with a social cause. It is said to have three components in the book of psychology: Intimacy, Commitment, and Passion," (read the rest of the excerpt here: http://www.love-sessions.com/whatislove.htm).
Very possibly the best work on the subject of love that I have ever read was by the author C.S. Lewis entitled 'The Four Loves'. I would type it up here in its entirety if that were legal. I encourage all of you my dear readers to acquire that book and read it many times.
My own thoughts on love have been greatly influenced by Lewis' but some of the thoughts are my own.
Here is what I think about love:
I think that there are at least two kinds of love that ought to be called love (at least as the word is commonly used today).
The first love is an emotion. It is something that we cannot fully (or even partially) control. I do not pretend to have even the slightest grasp of its intricacies. It is a pull from one person to another that leads to a desire for closeness. This is a VERY broad umbrella. It could include physical attraction, emotional attraction (some call it a ‘need’), or many other sorts. I am not going to try and sift through all of these. However, these are what someone might mean when they use the phrase ‘I am in love’.
Now, I believe, there is another aspect to love. In many instances it goes hand-in-hand with the romantic love. In fact, I do not believe that the romantic love can last without this sort of love. This is where I draw from my hero because it was from his work that I first read this thought: the opposite of love is not hate (as many people assume) but it is selfishness. So let us assume for a moment that the opposite of love is selfishness (and you may disagree with me here and disregard the rest of this argument if you like). So let us work back from that to what love is.
I think that we can all agree that selfishness is a form of taking. It is taking for yourself and denying to others. I think it is also entangled with pride, a putting others underneath yourself. A man cannot change his own standing in his own eyes only of those who are around him. So, to make himself seem higher and exalted, he does his best to place others underneath him. This leads to things like children keeping toys from their playmates or men hogging the remote (not to have power over his wife but because has lowered his wife’s preference of television show below his own).
So let us flip that on its head. That would mean love is a lifting of others above oneself, using your own abilities for the good of others rather than for yourself. Some people might call this ‘unselfishness’, but that is the negative of the concept. By definition ‘unselfishness’ would be not selfish (which would be the lack of selfish actions). Love is then the act which is the polar opposite of selfishness. C.S. Lewis (and many older people of the church) used the word ‘charity’ synonymously with love. I think this is very apt (I am not speaking of a condescending form of charity that springs from pity but from am honest desire to see another prosper).
This sort of love can be seen in many different ways. In a family, a father might work very hard to provide enough for his family to live well (harder than we must have worked for himself alone). A mother will spank her child when he is naughty even though she abhors the idea of causing him pain because she desires him to be raised well. On the battlefield a soldier might jump in front of a bullet for another infantryman. A man walking along the street might buy a beggar a sandwich. These would be displayed of love. The Christian Bible says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (KJV). If laying down your life for someone is the greatest love, then laying down lesser things would same also to be love of lesser degrees.
This is seen in marriage most clearly I believe, where love of this sort is essential because two people are living in such closeness that if there is not love, there must be something else and anything besides love between two married people is disastrous. The man and the woman both must love the other, putting the other first and working for the good of the other (and the family as a whole if there are children). Marriages that are built on love of this sort, I have seen last for decades and beyond, “Till death do us part” was said and accomplished. I have observed many relationships and marriages and the ones that I have seen that were good and healthy were built on this sort of love.
So this is love, according to a Humble Writer.
P.S. I understand that is is a small bit of knowledge/opinion on a small portion of a much greater topic. Please take from it what you can and forgive my lack of further insight.
What do you think love is and how do you go about it?
