What is love? How do you define it? I dare you to try: it’s ridiculously hard. Before you read any further, just sit for a moment and imagine that you’re trying to explain love to someone who’s never heard of it or experienced it.
And when I said try, I meant right now.
What did you come up with?
Mine went something like,
‘Well, love is an emotion, you just feel it inside and you know you love someone.’
: That’s it? You just feel it? How do you know you’re really feeling love and not something else?
‘Ah, good question, umm, well, love feels different from other emotions, although technically you can feel all sorts of emotion when you love someone, and it all jumbles together.’
: Wait, so it’s not just one emotion? It’s a big jumble? That sounds really confusing and messy.
‘Sort of. But it’s really nice too.’
: So love is a positive emotion.
‘Oh. Umm, sometimes.’
: Sometimes?
‘It can be kinda hard and painful too. Especially when you love someone and they don’t love you back, or when you want something good for them but they want what’s bad and you can’t help them, or when someone’s hurting physically or emotionally you feel bad too and want to fix what’s wrong.’
: Ugh. And people do this to themselves on purpose?
‘Not really, it just sort of happens. You care about someone, so you love them.’
: So love is caring about someone.
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
: But can’t you care about someone without loving them?
‘Um, sort of? There’re different degrees of love.’
: What? I thought love was just love. End of story. One thing only.
‘Nope. You can love different people in different ways, and vice versa. And people don’t all express love the same ways.’
: How many ways are there?
‘A lot? Umm, some people are physically affectionate and like hugging etc. Other people buy gifts. Some people want to spend time doing things, and other people like spending time even when they’re not doing anything. Some people share ideas and talk a lot about what they want and what they feel. Other people think words take up too much space.’
: If people have that many ways of showing that they love someone, how on earth can you tell if someone actually loves you, or if they’re just buying you a birthday present or saying hello?
‘Oh.’
: There is a way to tell, right?
‘Sort of.’
: You’re making all this up, there’s no way this can actually be true.
‘No no, I swear, this is all true. This is what love is.’
: Fine, go on.
‘Umm, how to tell if someone loves you…well, they’ll do something or they’ll spend time with you, or sometimes they’ll just tell you straight out, or maybe they’ll do all of that—‘
: You really have no idea, do you?
‘It’s just really hard to explain from the outside. It’s really confusing—‘
: I thought you said it was simple.
‘It is! It’s love!’
: You’re not making any sense at all.
‘Oh, bother.’
That’s where I ended up. Ridiculous, isn’t it? How is it this hard to explain something we feel inside ourselves that has been talked about and written about and expressed in songs and poetry and words words words all throughout human history? Yet if asked to personally explain, we give the blank stare or the deer in the headlights look.
Part of our problem is that we only have one word for love so it has to cover a lot of ground and mean a whole lot of different things to different people. The Greeks were more sensible about it—or just wordier—because they had four words for love.
Storge: The love you feel for a family member, and not necessarily a close one. A tolerating sort of love, like putting up with family members on vacation and not complaining about them because they’re family and you love them. In that loose sort of way.
Philia: You love baseball. You love movies. You love chocolate. You also love your family, your friends, and the time you spend together. An affectionate love.
Eros: The kind of love movies are about. Its passion and fire and obsession—but, surprisingly, it can also be non-sexual love, a sort of inspiring passion that leads to further appreciation of truth, beauty, and other ideals.
Agape: What we mean when we say ‘I love you.’ It is a deep love, often referred to as unconditional or sacrificial love. The true ideal of love.
Interesting division of love, right? But what does that last one mean? It sounds so vague—unconditional love, sacrificial love, the ideal of love. I mean, that’s great and all, but I keep feeling like I’m hearing a whooshing noise as it sweeps over my head.
Why is it so difficult to explain what agape love is? Well, if the large vague words aren’t working, maybe smaller ones will help. Let’s try to break it down:
From the inside you know you love someone when you want the best things to happen to them: ie, you care about what happens to them.
So you have to care about someone in order to really love them.
You also know you love someone when you care about them more than you care about yourself, because you’re willing to put what you need on hold in order to help them out.
So love is self-sacrificing.
But sometimes you know that for someone to mature or become a better person they’re going to have to endure something painful to get them there. And it’s awful and horrible and we don’t want them to be in pain, but we care more about their entire life than just that brief moment.
So in loving someone, you’re sometimes loving the person they could become, and not the person they are right now.
But love isn’t just about loving other people. Loving yourself is necessary too. If you love someone else but they treat you badly, they don’t truly love you. So the love you bear for yourself has to be at least equal to the love you feel for someone else, otherwise you’re the person who needs saving/looking after/love.
Love requires balance.
Okay, that was helpful, but all that seems to only be addressing part of the meaning of love. You can feel an emotion inside you all you want—but what’s to say it’s really love, or just something else?
Try this on for size:
Love without actions is not love; it is only the feeling of love without any of the depth.
But actions without love are not love either; they are only make-believe and pretend.
If you feel something for someone and you call it love, but every time they need something or you see a way you can help them but don’t do it, you don’t truly love them, because actions are naturally born out of love. When you truly love someone, you want to help them, so you do, even when it’s an inconvenience to yourself. This is love.
But going through the motions of love without feeling anything is equally as false. Just because everything you do is correct doesn’t make what you do love: the action alone is not enough. This is not love.
These two ideas are a good quick test if we’re really wondering if our love for someone is truly love, or just lust or fellow-feeling. If we’re obsessed with someone and love them but know nothing about them and have no urge to actually get to know them and what they need out of life; it’s not love. On the other hand, if we are continually helping someone out but feel nothing other than boredom or a sort of distant caring; that’s not really love either. At least—not the strong sort of lasting love. As we know, there are all kinds of love.
Interestingly enough, this is rather reminding me of the old debate about God: Faith or works? God says, (in a loose way) ‘Have faith in me and that alone will save you.’ But he also says ‘Faith without works is nothing.’ Which is right? Throughout history people have argued it both ways. But I believe the answer lies in our definition of love.
If we truly love God we’ll be driven to action because our actions are born out of our love for him, just as we help those whom we love here on earth. When God told us the things he wants us to do, he was giving us a way to express the inexpressible: how we can show that we love him. We can’t give God chocolate or flowers. We can’t give him a hug or cook him dinner when he’s tired. But he knows that, so he told us the things we can do to express our love for him.
We can spend time with him.
We can trust him with our thoughts and secret emotions.
We can help the people he cares about.
And according to our own abilities and ways we express love, we do our best to show God we love him. Because there is no question in my mind that God love us and has already shown it in so many ways we can’t even begin to count.
But for a lark, let’s try to count the obvious ones.
He made the universe, and it is pretty and able to sustain our lives.
He made us and gave us life and limbs and thoughts and emotions.
No matter how frustrating we are as offspring he hasn’t killed us all yet/rejected us.
He gave us free will. (a whole ‘nother huge topic to tackle another day)
He made chocolate.
Personally I think the last one is enough to qualify as love. :) But the other ones are nice too.
So have I done it? Have I described love?
Probably not. It’s really too big a topic for me to understand enough to write about. But I hope that maybe some of these thoughts will help you figure out what Love is to you.
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