¶ … Love)
Defining Love
"Love is not a feeling. It's an ability." -- Peter Hedges
When asked to define "love" in one word, many adjectives come to mind -- wonderful, unconditional, mysterious, and powerful. Love is considered one of the greatest emotions known to human kind and ranges from familial love to romantic devotion to the benign love that exists between good friends (Rosenburg, 2009). Love can be a sentiment or an action; a noun (love is a many splendored thing) or a verb (love like you've never been hurt). Love creates families, motivates acts of kindness, and inspires people to creativity. We view it as a protective force, such as a mother's love for a child. However, it can also move into more dangerous territory. Thousands perish in wars fought for love of God and country. Truly, there are myriad lens through which to examine this complex concept.
Webster's dictionary generally defines love as "the intense emotion that we feel when we are drawn to a person or object we believe has value, worth, or goodness" (Merriam-Webster, 2012). This description allows us to merge our intellectual understanding of love and our shared emotional experience of it as well. Perhaps the best descriptor for love is "complicated." It is an emotion that can mean many different things to different people. Thus, it is helpful to approach defining this multi-faceted concept by noting historical categorizations of love and explaining what love is "not" to get closer to a concrete understanding of what it is.
Historical Definitions
Most cultures and world religions describe love as an affectionate or passionate devotion (Mills, 2011). Plato and Aristotle posited that love is the desire and longing of the...
Love What is love? What is love? Yikes! What a difficult question to answer. Not only because there are many types of love: true love, romantic love, plutonic love, brotherly love, etc., but because love can also be an ineffable emotion, something that defies articulation or delineation. So, to some extent, attempting to define love is an exercise in futility. But that doesn't mean that we don't recognize it when we see
Love Med Love and Loss in Love Medicine The sad narrative of life on an Indian Reservation is one that cannot be told within the scope of a single generation. Instead, it must relayed across multiple interconnected generations persisting within a beleaguered collective culture. In many ways, this is the only way to gain a nuanced understanding of the way tribal life now persists, splintered by the invasion of the European lifestyle
Love What is Love? Love, according to the Holy Bible, is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast and is not proud. Love never fails (NIV 811). This simple term for the most powerful emotion in the world is simply not enough. Love is all these things, it has the ability to empower and increase confidence, to lighten a mood or make the world seem a better place. Yet
Love Is How We Feel Toward Those Who Show Us That Which Is Lovable About Ourselves Love is something that many have defined or rather tried to define in many ways, but Gerry Spence' definition is one of the most accurate ones that we may come across. According to his definition of love, it is truly the quality that others recognize in us that tells us a lot. When we become
.. I grow old...' are the evidence of the impending fear of death. One unusual part of the poem is how Eliot, or Prufrock, puts himself into a role in one of Shakespeare's plays and then admits that he is no Hamlet by saying 'No! I am not the Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.' Although I am guessing, I feel that Eliot was trying to say that Shakespeare's
When they say good night, Dave kisses Stacy on the mouth. The kiss shocks Stacy, who realizes she is playing with fire. The story of Stacy and Brian illustrates some of the core issues at play in a marriage with a potential conflict. Stacy has not yet cheated on Brian, but she seems dangerously close to doing so. The conflict is only shallowly related to sex. Although sex is surely
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now