What is love?

A couple years ago I was in a communications course, which was basically just writing. We usually got to pick our own topics, and me being me chose to write about love. I just found the essay when I was cleaning and thought it might be an interesting post, my view of love haven't changed much in the last 4 years. That's the one thing that is constant with me I think. So here is it.

What is love?

According to the dictionary love is, “A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude towards a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.” Hmm, that does not sound familiar. Like the Black Eyed Peas said, “Where is the love?” Today love seems like something short of impossible. Whatever happened to romance? Is love at first sight dead? Love today seems so lost, is that the love should really be? Many people have said many great things about love; perhaps their words can show us the true meaning of love.
As young girls, many of us cannot wait to gaze into the eyes of the man of our dreams and instantly fall in love. Is that not the way it is suppose to be? “Who has ever loved that loved not at first sight?” (Christopher Marlowe) Who has? Can you imagine meeting someone and telling your best friend that you are in love with that person? They would tell you that you are crazy, and that you do not even know that person. Do we have to travel back to the days of Shakespeare and Marlowe in order for love at first sight to be appropriate? Perhaps falling in love was so easy back then because they died so young and had nothing to lose. However, it would be nice to look at someone and it felt like,
“This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected – in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness, it took enter possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement that this was life.” (Thomas Mann)
Perhaps being a hopeless romantic in a time where is seems we have nothing but a cynical attitude towards love is pointless. It would be fabulous to shout out “You call it madness, but I call it love!” (Don Byas) But then again, a thousand people would look at you as if you were crazy. Is a person not allowed to be crazy in love in this society?
When it comes to love today, it feels like a war. Even if you find it, it seems you are eventually going to lose it. “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”(Lord Tennyson) That could be true, everyone says that you learn from lost love, that you have experienced it and it makes you a better person. Nevertheless, would you not be a better person if you had never dated the loser in the first place? Did Lord Tennyson have a lost love ever hook up with one of his loved ones? Charles Caleb Colton said “Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship – never.” Does your circle of friends include your past lovers? Or the bigger question, did you actually share love? Perhaps people just throw the term around too loosely, not meaning love, but lust. Still, people fall for it, and people get hurt. It seems our society has given up on love, obviously not everyone, there are those lucky few, but then again so many people get divorced. It also seems like people care more about sex than making love. Everyone today is out to get what they want and not what they need, after all love and belonging is a basic human need according to Maslow. However, in our society it seems like “true love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about, and few have seen.” (La Rouchfoucauld)
If our view of love is so wrong, what should it be like? Perhaps like this, “I am looking for love. Real love, ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-love-without-each-other love.” (Carrie Bradshaw, Sex & the City) But where can someone find that kind of love? Perhaps we are not looking hard enough. Maybe when you stop looking love will find you. That is a nice thought. Aristotle had said, “Love is composed of a single soul inhibiting two bodies.” Perhaps on those nights when we feel lonely it is because we are longing for the other half of our soul, the other person who makes us complete. How do we know when we will find the piece that completes our puzzle? “We believe our first love is our last, and our last love is our first.” (Anonymous) Perhaps all people who are against love are people who have not found their last love. Maybe all the first and second loves and so on who ripped out your heart, or turned out to be nothing like what you imagined, were just practice for the real thing. In which case maybe the good old word of God is right,
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered; it keeps no record of wrongs.... It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (Corinthians 13: 4-8)
Perhaps our last love will be all of the above.
Regardless of what love is, or what we think it should be in comes in many forms and faces. Maybe we will find it where we least expect it, or maybe it will find us. But what is most important is “don’t forget to love yourself.” (Soren Kierkegaard) If you do not love yourself how can you expect someone else to? If you believe in yourself, you can do anything, so we are told, so why not believe in love? Give it a chance and maybe it will give something back, something “ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming.” (Carrie Bradshaw) After all, “love never fails.” (Corinthians 13: 8)