What's your definition of love?

Have you been in love? Are you in love?

Tell us your stories on how love has treated you and what you've been through for the person you love.

 

Love is an illusion.
It was a system invented by bank managers to make you spend lots of money.

 

Depends on what kind of love you're talking about, although most of them can be summarised under the banner of instinctive reaction.

Love between couples is an instinctive reaction to the urge to reproduce. It's the mixing of hormones in our brain. Anyone who thinks of "the heart" as an intangible source of emotion is kidding themselves.

 

Love is a thing of two.

 

My definition of love is the ability to co-exist for any given amount of time. Family love allows brothers and sisters to live together even though often they can't stand each other. New love allows people to bravely dive into marriages or to move in with each other because they think it'll last for ever. Old love are people lucky enough or passive enough to find someone they can tolerate for 20-50 years or whatever. It's neither permanent nor metaphysical. It's simply compatibility and your tolerance of someone else.


In another situation, love of a nation keeps people content to live or settle in said nation. When that love runs thin, people complain. When it's depleted, they move. If its worn out among a group, they secede. Kosovo and Serbia, Quebec and Canada (though they haven't official seceded yet as far as I know) etc.



Mistreat a person or a group, and the love runs thinner, faster. If you mistreat your girlfriend or wife (or male counterpart) then they come to resent your closeness that much faster. Mistreat a people and they no longer associate themselves with you.

 

In my opinion:

Love is purely a chemical reaction in the brain.
Love is irrational, we can not control it.
Love is controlled by the subconcious/primitive part of the brain.

Anyone thinking love is more than this doesn't understand chemistry
Anyone thinking they can control what they truely love, or that they can stop loving something they truely love (e.g. a parent rationally making the decision to stop loving his kid) has never truely loved something/someone

The stronger the love for something/someone the less rational you can think about him/her/it.

Love is the instinctive part of the brain taking over the rational part.

Though the only concern of the instinctive part is survival, in todays society where people become more concious and rational about their decisions, it ussually leads to someone getting hurt/dissappointed.

nonetheless love is important for our survival, it helps us tolerate others around us whome we would rationally resent.

 

I used to be in love, now I only love her.

To me, loving someone is when you do the unthinkable for them.
Loving someone is when you're able to be happy for them, even if you do not benefit from it.

 

Love is an annoyingly advanced form of infatuation which lasts over extended period of time.

 

Family love I believe is based on instinct. If you didn't "feel" it was necessary to love you parents, would you?

Relationship love I find to be very special. It is a feeling. A feeling that you cannot live without another person. Not an infatuation. If it was, it wouldnt last forever. If you love someone and lose them, and 70 years later you can honestly say "I love so and so" then it really was love. if you dont love someone maybe a year or 2 after you lose them, it was an infatuation. Infatuation do not last. Love is forever.

I can honestly say without my wife I would be lost. If she left me, yeah, after awhile I'd start sleeping with people and such, but I can honestly say that I would not enter another serious relationship for the rest of my life.

Love is not "magic" its not "instinct" its a feeling. Such as you feel happiness or sadness you can also feel love. And when the love is real, it's a feeling that will never completely leave you.

 

love is when u are ready to do anything to the person that u love
or even getting urself for the sake of the person u love

 

I think we need to make an important distinction between love and infatuation here.

 

I've already done this, read my post, its only 2 up

 

Love is when your brain makes you think that an imperfect person is perfect.

Infatuation is when it isn't reciprocal.

 

Love is a Beatles album.
~
no, but really you can't define love.